Monthly Archives: December 2011

Drink of the Week: Lisa’s Perfect Margarita

Posted on December 9, 2011 | 1 comment

I have been known to enjoy a margarita from time to time.

Margarita in Puerto Nuevo Lobster Village, Rosarito Beach, Baja, Circa 2001 (seriously what's up with the zigzag part?).

I used to drink them slushie-style, the jumbo kind you get at Senor Frog’s (and as pictured, above), but on a recent trip to Puerto Vallarta I discovered the merits of an on-the-rocks margarita. I fell in love with the sublime combo of lime juice, tequila and Controy (a made-in-Mexico orange liqueur), and even wrote about the cocktail in one of my Calgary Herald columns.

Since then, however, I have spent some time playing around with the recipe, increasing the amount of tequila, substituting Cointreau for Controy and decreasing its amount, and adding agave nectar as a sweetener. It’s an ideal balance of tart and sweet and you can still taste the tequila. As the crushed ice melts it dilutes the potency and enhances the flavour. I’m calling it Lisa’s Perfect Margarita.

Behold! Lisa's Perfect Margarita.

Lisa’s Perfect Margarita

1.5 oz tequila

1/2 oz Cointreau

1 oz fresh-squeezed lime juice

3/4 oz agave nectar

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker. Shake with ice, then strain into a rocks glass filled with crushed ice.

I use the below ingredients, but feel free to substitute your own. Also, depending how sweet you like your marg, you might want to play around with the amount of agave syrup. I hope you like it. Ole!

Lime juice, Herradura tequila, Cointreau and agave syrup are a margarita's four key ingredients.

1 Comment

Posted in Cocktails

Tagged cocktail, Drink of the Week, perfect margarita, tequila

Parenting is a pain in the back

Posted on December 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

Today, as I hobbled into school to pick up my daughter, people asked me how my weekend was. It really sucked. Well, sort of. Why, you wonder? Follow:

My husband left Saturday morning for a week in Cuba with his brother and dad, leaving me alone with the two children. This wouldn’t have been a problem except that 15 minutes after he left for the airport, as I was bending over to help my son on the potty, my SI joint went out. I felt a twinge of sudden pain in my pelvis and the next thing I knew, I couldn’t stand up straight, walk without pain, or sit comfortably. Basically, the muscles all around the joint seized up to prevent further damage. The result: extreme pain and severely limited mobility.

This happens to me about twice a year and usually occurs because of something ridiculous. Last April it happened when I was bending over to pick up a bar of soap, a year ago it happened when I was bending over to grab a diaper, two years ago the pain hit while bending over gardening and three years ago it went out when I was bending over to put my son in his crib.

Clearly, I should find a way to live without bending over. The problem is that back pain and parenting go hand-in-hand as parenting is nothing if not a never-ending schedule of bending over. Get them out of bed (bend over), change a diaper (bend over), get them dressed (bend over), play horsie (bend over), pick them up (bend over), help them put on their shoes (bend over), cater to their every whim throughout the day (bend over backwards). It’s times like these when I wish all those predictions about life in the 21st century had come to pass: the hover cars, the metallic jumpsuits, the robots. This weekend I could have really used a robot to do all the heavy parenting lifting.

In the end I did what any modern gal in my situation would do: I hired the nanny from two houses down to deal with the rugrats in my feeble state. She played with them; I read. She fed them lunch; I napped. She took them over to play with her regular charges; I got through that stack of magazines. Except for the excruciating back pain, it wasn’t a half bad way to spend a weekend.

I learned that, in the next couple weeks, should I ever want some time to myself — and fob off the children on my relaxed, newly-tanned hubby — I need only bend over to grab a diaper, and fake the SI thing. Bet I’d be pretty good at it.

Get “Sledgehammered” with this wine for men

Posted on December 2, 2011 | 1 comment

With a motto of “No Sipping. No Swirling.” a new Canadian red wine by Treasury Wine Estates called Sledgehammer is hoping to win over the scores of Canadian men out there who like wine but worry about its reputation as a “woman’s drink.” Earnest about cementing its reputation as a manly wine, the wine label even had Leger Marketing conduct a survey to find out about perceptions surrounding men and wine.

First, it helps if the wine label is manly. No pictures of chatueax or cute Aussie animals, please.

The bottle means business. Courtesy, Sledgehammer.

But the real meat of the survey revealed that 76 per cent of Canadian men like drinking wine, as compared with 73 per cent of women. Also, nearly four in 10 men agree there is a stereotype that wine is a woman’s drink. What’s more, 76 per cent of men believe that “some men fake their wine knowledge” (you know who you are), and nearly 60 per cent of men admit to feeling pressure to drink a “manly” drink when they “come of age.”

The arrival of Sledgehammer on the Canadian wine scene is also welcome news for fledling bromances as the survey found men would be more likely to give a “fella” a bottle of wine if they knew it was “made for guys” (no more awkward moments when your pal removes the bottle from the gift bag because — finally! — something other than pink Zinfandel).

As interesting as all this may be, I have some alternate solutions. First, you could just show up with a six-pack of Guinness. Most people agree that’s a beer for dudes. Second, try ordering an Old Fashioned or a Manhattan, two very masculine classic cocktails (the Don Draper character from Mad Men prefers an Old Fashioned, if that helps). Finally, if it must be wine, check out Sinister Hand, a red blend from the Owen Roe Winery in Oregon. No one would dispute its label is “manly.”