Current Mood

The end of October signals the beginning of the busiest time of the year! From Halloween through New Year’s, there’s one occasion after another to eat, drink, and be merry. As they say, it’s the “most wonderful time of the year”, but it can also be pretty stressful and exhausting. Sometimes at the end of the day, I just want to curl up with a warm, cozy, alcohol-free nightcap. I want something calming and soothing to help lull me to sleep, and for me that’s moon milk!

The Vodka Soda is pretty much the un-cocktail. It’s typically meant to be as tasteless and chuggable (is that a word?) as possible. Admittedly, most of the time when I thought of a Vodka Soda, I thought of a drink meant to induce drunkenness with as few calories as possible. And that’s about it. I definitely dismissed it altogether for a while there. But it was actually my aversion to it made me want to do some tweaking and throw a few back in the name of R&D. After trying a bunch of easy variations, I’m ready to stand behind the Vodka Soda as a really fun and delicious cocktail template.

Summer time around here typically means one cocktail above all else – the beloved gin and tonic. But this year, my husband (finally) really fell in love with gin, and when he ran out (read: drank all) of my fancy tonic water while I was away visiting family, he tried substituting seltzer water instead. He didn’t know it then, but what he was drinking is also known as a Gin Rickey. This simple combination of gin, half a lime’s juice, and carbonated water is as easy-going and fresh as it gets. Pretty soon, my husband told me he actually enjoyed his gin more this way, and after a bit of coaxing, I’m finally swapping out my G&T for a Rickey now and then too!

Today I’m sharing a wine and hors d’oeuvres pairing that’s perfect for warm summer evenings! Although I don’t write a lot about wine, I love it just as much as cocktails, and thanks to my wine-loving family, I’ve been enjoying it and learning about it for years.

It’s almost officially summer, and wild cocktail ingredients are flourishing all around yards, fields, and forests in the northeast. June is a fantastic month for foraging in New Hampshire, and it seems that every day a new plant is popping up around my backyard. Dandelions, violets, plantain, daisies, yarrow, milkweed, wood sorrel, and many more wild edibles are easy to find this time of year, and growing in abundance.

One of things I get questions about all the time is how to take better cocktail photos for Instagram. Being a photographer and having studied fine art photography in college, it’s something I’m always excited to help people with! The following photography crash course is an excerpt from my new Ultimate Guide to Instagram Growth.