Hey AR,

First of all, I have to say, those mango lavendar cocktails sound delightful. Secondly, I am glad you have your gloves to help with your dirty dishes. I am not sure if the gloves you mentioned at the end of your letter were meant to be metaphorical but that was my interpretation. Or maybe I am giving you too much credit.

Talking about doing the dishes, I have discovered something new about myself. I enjoy cleaning. But there are caveats to this. I don’t enjoy doing dishes when the sun is up. It’s a sun down activity. I enjoy only cleaning the living room and the kitchen. I don’t like cleaning bedrooms. I have somehow convinced myself that doing the dishes, and cleaning is quite meditative. I usually listen to some Fred Again and do the dishes. I make the lighting kind of moody. It’s enjoyable. Who’d have thunk.

Also, on the topic of mango lavendar cocktails – I am the resident cocktail maker of the house. This one time, AG, LN and NV decided it was time for a girls night out. It was the first time they decided to have a girls night out. I was hired by them to do the cocktails before they went out. I like doing thematic cocktails. During the morning of the girls night out, I played a word association game with the three of them to understand the “vibe” of the cocktails. Somehow we landed on words like “health”, “organic” and the like. I understood my assignment then and there. Me, and my old roommate AS went out to buy some ingredients to prepare. Here were my biggest hits for the night in no order (names invetned by me ofcourse):

1. The Ginger Turmeric Shot: Ginger juice, turmeric, everclear, lemon juice
2. Cocktail of the earth: Beetroot juice, some star anise(?), everclear, and something else
3. Eno bomb: Simple syrup, soda, everclear and eno.

Other ingredients I played with involved a mushroom elixir, kombucha, and a few more healthy sounding drinks.

Number 3 was a crowd pleaser. It involved two glasses, a large round glass that contained the liquor. And a tiny shot glass that contained about a few pinches of eno. To drink it, you had to drop the shot glass upside down into the big glass, and had to chug the cocktail before the eno foam overflowed. Everyone loved it.

Honestly, I made many more cocktails that night, but things got a blurry pretty fast. All the cocktails tasted fabulous. Dangerously fabulous. It’s worth noting, Everclear is 95% alcohol and needs to be handled carefully. Fortunately, I spent my time at Cornell exculsuively using Everclear as my liquor of choice. It is a blank canvas that can be used to make so many things, from cocktails, to fancy steeped liquors. I am such a fan, I have been contemplating writing a book on everclear recipes. It could be an encyclopedia. By the way, the only cocktail that didn’t land on that night was was a spicy jaljeera cocktail that I didn’t quite get right. It had a weird aftertaste. On paper it felt like a great idea.

I really enjoy making cocktails. I also think I am really good at it. It’s part culinary performance, part old school crowd work performance. And it gets more fun as the crowd gets tipsier. Let’s just say, the girls didn’t need to have any more drinks during their night out.

Best,
A