Categories
raves

Okay now. How many times have you seen High School Musical 2?

Not High School Musical; High School Musical 2. It premiered yesterday on Disney Channel.

On it’s third viewing in our household now. There can be no escape.

Sharpay and Ryan and sooo cool and FUNNY. They are the Team Rocket of High School Musical.

Troy and Gabriela, however, are just so saccharine sweet.
By tomorrow I’ll be expected to harmonise on the best numbers so that my daughter can feel suitably fabulous when she sings along.

If you don’t watch HSM then clearly, you have a deficit in the tween/teen girls in your household. Them as don’t, like me, don’t get much choice in this. High School Musical rules!

Categories
raves

Difford rules! More mixology…

cocktails1.jpg

Noam and Patrick, two young student lads came round for cocktails last night. I’ve known them both since they were little boys aged 9. It was great to have some guests who could go through lots of cocktails without passing out, like our usual crowd of friends (and me), who stop at two. Gave me a chance to try out some more recipes.

Last night’s discoveries of yumminess included:

Pineapple Daiquiri (cold and refreshing)

2 shots light rum, 1/2 shot gomme, 3/4 shot fresh lime juice, 1 shot pressed pineapple juice.

Shake with ice and then pour over ice-filled old-fashioned glass.

Havanatheone (Rose variant improvised by me)

10 mint leaves, 2 shots light rum, 2 spoonfuls rose-infused syrup, 1 shot pressed apple juice

Muddle mint leaves just enough to bruise, add other ingredients and stir until syrup dissolves, then shake with ice and fine strain into chilled martini glass.

(NB the original recipe calls for runny clear honey)

We also tried old classics like Mint Julep, Caipiroska, Mojito, Cosmopolitan, Gimlet and some of Difford’s own recipes. All fantastically good.

I felt fine until they left. I’d had two-and-a-half, including a Grand Margarita which has 3 shots of alcohol. But I’d also had a sip of every other cocktail I’d made. The room began to swim. I just managed to force a large glass of water down before I collapsed onto my bed.

I wasn’t drunk! Just sleepy.

Categories
raves

Cocktail Memories


Tired of the substandard cocktails on sale at most of the bars we frequent – which are admittedly not known for their cocktails, but are in walking distance of the house and have a happy hour – I asked my husband to do something about it.

So for my recent birthday I received a collection of professional cocktail-making equipment; proper Boston Shakers, ice strainers, muddler, ice-crusher, shot measure, fine strainer and most of the main spirits and some of the syrups necessary for a nice repertoire and most importantly, a copy of the latest Diffords. (Diffords is the definitive guide to cocktails. Every recipe will make the BEST version of that cocktail that you’ve ever had.)

My baby brother lives in a tiny village in the mountains Switzerland, not far from fancy-schmancy Gstaad, but not within walking distance. When he moved out there, he decided that the posh cocktails of his native London would be too hard to miss, so he decided to learn the art himself. And boy does he make a mean cocktail! (But don’t help yourself to the pineapple juice from his fridge or you’ll get yelled at for using a cocktail ingredient!). He acted as the authoritative consultant on what to buy, strictly advising the proper equipment, even if it takes a bit of practice to use a Boston Shaker.

For my birthday party we invited a select group of four people (I didn’t want to spend the entire evening mixing cocktails after all), I made a menu of about 20 cocktails I was prepared to make, and we went for it.

And Diffords came up with the goods! Simply by exactly following the instructions I was able to make amazing, yummy cocktails including Daiquiri, Pina Colada, Ron Collins, Cosmopolitan, Maple Leaf (bourbon, triple sec, maple syrup), Dry Martini, Coolman Martini (vodka, triple sec, lime juice, apple juice).

It turns out not to be so hard. Like all cooking, the secret is to use top notch, fresh ingredients, have great recipes and follow them.

One of my friends offered to hire me for her birthday party. Yay! A backup career!

Anyway…I was swapping cocktail reminisences with my agent recently and thought it would be a fun thing to blog.

Here are my top five cocktails ever tasted (not counting the ones I made t’other day…) Please let me know yours!

1. Daiquiri in Floridita London.
Straight-up, not frozen. Dizzyingly strong and refreshing. I made a mistake on the second and went for the Hemingway. Stick to the Classic.

2. Margarita in San Angel Inn, Mexico City
Straight-up, not frozen. We visited this restaurant, once one of Mexico City’s most elegant and expensive, during a big local recession which made it very cheap for us. The place was almost empty. The margaritas were served inside metal cups containing dry ice to keep the glasses cold. Ahhh…

3. Dry Martini in Japp’s Martini & Cigar Bar in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I was there on a business trip and I SWEAR the guys from that software company were trying to see how drunk they could get me! But what a martini. Later we went dancing to a swing club. Dancing the Lindy Hop, a guy tried to do an air-step with me and I ended up flat on my back. I DON’T DO AIR-STEPS AND YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO ASK! Luckily I was so drunk that I was very relaxed.

4. Frozen Daiquiri in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba
Like smooth, lime+rum flavoured, cool silk.

5. Pina Colada at the poolside bar of the Acapulco Princess, Mexico
Made with fresh pineapples and fresh coconut cream, the fruit all piled up at the bar. I read “The Da Vinci Code” whilst addled by a long afternoon drinking these.

Categories
movies salsa

Mi Swing Es Tropical

Watching the latest Jason Bourne movie last night, I was delighted to see the new ad for iTunes+iPod. It’s a little salsa song, with terrific dancing.

Re the Bourne: I enjoyed it but later realised that I’d never once really felt as though Jason was in any real peril. He’s just so ruthlessly efficient that instead of worrying about him I was admiringly thinking…no problem, Jason can handle anything.

There’s a lesson there…

Categories
fangirling writing

Gabo vs Haruki Part 1: The Genius of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I don’t see why one has to have a favourite writer. If I’m ever asked, how could I choose between Haruki Murakami and Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Nope, it’s not a fair question. I cannot choose.

However, I can differentiate. Haruki moves me and Gabo astounds me.

(And Haruki also astounds and Gabo also moves, but each marginally less than the other…)

Garcia Marquez has these unforgettable openings, like the famous one in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

The power of that ending can only be appreciated much later in the book, when the reader realises (in my case with a shout of joy) that the Colonel, presumed dead (by the reader), only takes his full place in the story later on…And the way that the novel’s ending resolves the opening section with the gypsy’s manuscript is beyond genius, one of the few times in my life I remember being left literally breathless with admiration for a writer as I read him.

And that’s not the only time he uses the ‘Many years later’ formula. In his novels, linear time and cyclical time coexist; the stories are often simultaneously related at two levels.

I read recently probably the most influential Mexican novel of the last century, Juan Rulfo’s ‘Pedro Paramo’, a book allegedly adored by Gabo. Not only is Pedro Paramo an early example in Latin American literature of a novel told in two different time streams (the narrative alternates between a first-person narrator who visits the town where his father had lived, and a first-person narrator from the town’s past), but it includes this passage, which strikes a chord with any aficionado of Garcia Marquez:

“Years later Father Renteria would remember the night his hard bed had kept him awake and driven him outside. It was the night Miguel Paramo died.”

Rulfo’s ‘Pedro Paramo’ is brief yet dazzling. I myself have written whilst under its spell and can attest to its mesmeric hold.

I am reading the first volume of Gabo’s autobiography, ‘Living To Tell The Tale’. The opening, as ever, is delicious:

“My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house. She had come that morning from the distant town where the family lived and she had no idea how to find me.”

What follows is an account, related with the characteristic shifting time streams, of young Gabriel’s visit to the old house of his grandparents in the distant town of Aracataca, from where his early childhood experiences were to inform the creation of his fictional town of Macondo and all its inhabitants. And the older Gabo now recognises with the trained eyes of the writer he has become (not yet a successful novelist, but definitely on the path), the material which has lain dormant within him all these years. It’s a moment of thunderous import and it shakes him to the core. The past, present and future collide during that visit. When finally he returns (some 100 pages later) to his cosy literary hangouts in Baranquilla with Colombia’s literati, he knows, even at 23, where this can take him.

I just read this great passage where Gabo relates showing a rough draft of his manuscript to a man highly respected within his writers’ circle: Don Ramon. Don Ramon reads two pages without change of expression, then makes one or two incisive technical comments. But as Gabo leaves him that day, Don Ramon adds:

“I thank you for your courtesy and I’m going to reciprocate with a piece of advice: never show anybody the rough draft of anything you’re writing.”

So, so, SO true. And Gabo followed that advice TO THE LETTER.