The Frezier Affair
1.5 oz white rum .5 oz yellow Chartreuse or Verviene du Velay 3-5 alpine strawberries 3-4 lemon verbena leaves 1 lemon wedge Reserve one small strawberry or a slice for garnish. Squeeze lemon wedge into a cocktail shaker and add the other ingredients. Gently crush the berries and herbs with a muddler. Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a strawberry. This is a twist on a recipe from The Drunken Botanist that celebrates the contributions of Amédée-François Frézier, who introduced Chilean strawberries to Europe. Crosses between the Chilean strawberries...
Read MoreGrow Your Own: The Old Havana Rum Garden Collection
Is it summer yet? My friends at Log House Plants have put together a collection of plants based around the flavors in rum. They’re a wholesale nursery, so they’re growing the plants for sale at retail garden centers and gourmet grocery stores on the West Coast. Look for them in your local indie garden center/grocery store, or order them online from the Territorial Seed Company, who has joined in this effort and put together a great collection of cocktail-friendly plants and seeds. Here’s what’s in our Old Havana Rum Garden collection: Alpine strawberry ‘Golden...
Read MoreLemon Verbena
Not lemon balm or lemon mint. Lemon verbena. This is a little woody shrub that only barely tolerates our chilly maritime winter, but if you can nurse it through one winter, you’re set. I love lemon verbena because it adds a bright citrus sparkle to drinks without making it overly acidic the way lemon juice does. You’re looking for Aloysia citrodora, and you can probably find a small one in a four-inch pot at the garden center or farmer’s market. If you live inland and get warm summers, it’ll reach 6-8 feet after a couple of years. Give it some room or be prepared to cut it...
Read MoreHerbs. Now.
Buying herbs at the grocery store is a sign of defeat. Not defeat, even, because defeat would suggest that you tried and failed. It’s more like inertia. Because really, if you can’t grow a few herbs, you have just given up on having any kind of interaction with the plant kingdom or the parcel of soil around your home. This is the year to change that, and the reason to make that change is because there are so many very nice cocktails that just require a pinch of some herb or another. A cocktail should be an impulsive decision, one that doesn’t require a trip to the grocery store. If...
Read MoreGardeners Who Drink, Drinkers Who Garden
Turns out Martha loves them both. Two of my favorite gardeners-who-drink are featured in Martha Stewart’s March issue: the brilliant Ivette Soler of Germinatrix (also author of a very hot book, The Edible Front Yard), and Marie Viljoen of 66 Square Feet, the Manhattan garden blog through which I live out my New York fantasies. New to me in this issue are Lee Clippard and John Stott of The Grackle. They all offer up their garden-inspired drinks–serviceberry! Lemon verbena! Heirloom tomatoes! –and by the time the issue hits the stands, I will be ready to plant all of...
Read MoreBooks by Amy Stewart
The Drunken Botanist
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