The day after perfect Margaritas

By Papa in response to When the barflies dropped.

In the beginning there was a near-empty liquor cabinet that housed a few stray bottles of red wine in varying degrees of emptiness, my emergency half-gallon bottle of vodka and a couple of cans of Zorro brew—6-year-old cheap-ass beer we use to drown garden slugs.  When Zorro is in town, we take bets on how long it will take her to get desperate enough drink this shit—usually about a week depending how generous Mimi is with the good stuff.

“Jenny, I’m making an emergency trip to All Liquors and Wine.  You need anything?”

The girl handed me a list.  You know you might have a LITTLE problem if you carry a type-written sheet of paper around in your purse listing all your favorite beers, liquors and wines with a blank to write in desired quantities.  I scratched out all that high priced stuff and wrote “cheap-ass red wine” across the bottom.

“But Papa, I told Bliss we were going to be making Margaritas this weekend.”

“OKAY, OKAY. I’ll buy the Cuervo, and you buy the limes?” 

“Deal.  But buy Patron, not Cuervo.”

“Yeah, right.”

I left the house with a smile.  What Jenny didn’t know is that we would need about a 100 of the crappy-ass limes they sell this time of year for 95 cents a piece to get this project off the ground.  In a perfect world I could get a video of her face when reality hit home.

For my trip that day I selected my Bike Friday with the two-inch wide city slicker tires (part of the route is on the local greenway) along with my trusty BOB—Beast of Burden—bicycle trailer.  This rig is good to carry up to 100 pounds.  For anything more than that I take the trike which has carried over 700 pounds (no shit). It was a nice wind-assisted five-mile ride to All Liquors.  I made an average buy.  You know, case of beer, some mid priced vodka, Jose Cuervo, triple sec and a gross or so of cheap-ass wine off the pay-whatever-you-can table.  Everything stored perfectly in my BOB black bag.

About half way home, the BOB trailer had a flat.  I had to stack the beer, 10 to 12 bottles of wine and four bottles of liquor on the sidewalk to fix the tire.  Luckily, the cop—there is always one around when you least need or expect him—had a sense of humor.   He mumbled something about liquor out in the open on a public street, but he couldn’t keep his face straight long enough for me to take him seriously.  He even helped me pack the booze back in the BOB bag.  As I left the crime scene, I heard him say into his radio, “You’re not going to believe this shit.”

Beans are traditional people.  One of our traditions is homemade Margaritas.  None of that crappy store bought mix shit for us.  After all, Margaritas are a simple brew—limes, tequila, triple sec, sugar and egg whites.  Since the media in this country has made it their goal to scare the hell out of everyone by reporting every little potential problem, we no longer use fresh egg whites cause Jenny is chicken.  We now use powered egg whites.   

I also subscribe to the Why Write It Down theory of cooking and bartending.  Any recipe that hasn’t been tested in awhile tends to be adventurous. Plus, I can’t be bothered with measuring devices, so no matter what, it’s a crap shoot.  To complicate matters, Jenny wouldn’t take out a second mortgage for the limes, so we were working with lemons and lime concentrate.  It was either the third or fourth batch before we got it right.  That was a great batch of lemon-lime margaritas. 

The next morning we started the newest Bean tradition.  It’s a floating holiday I’m calling The Day After Making Perfect Margaritas.

Note from Jenny:  It’s Moose Week.  In honor of the baby Bean’s birthday, I’m going to post on Thursday, instead of Wednesday.