Welcome (back) to Ideas Over Drinks!
So, yesterday, in the middle of our homeschool lesson, my daughters and I watched the inauguration. And as our new Poet Laureate, 22-year-old Amanda Gorman, neared the end of the poem she wrote for the occasion, I cried. Her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” was breathtaking. It unlocked something in me. It wasn’t until dinnertime, when EJ, Juni, and I were going about our regular practice of sharing our highs for the day with Jenny, that I realized: that something, the thing that had been unlocked, was hope.
What is hope? I could give you a dictionary definition, such as, “grounds for believing that something good may happen (n),” or, “to desire with expectation of obtainment or fulfillment (v),” but these feel a bit clinical to me. I prefer the notion of hope offered by another female poet, one who was also pushing against gender barriers 150 years ago, and yet did not have to surmount the same intersectional challenges as Amanda Gorman on account of the color of her skin: Emily Dickinson. Hope, she said, “is the thing with feathers.”
However you choose to define hope, I think you know it when you feel it. And I felt it yesterday. I felt it in President Biden’s speech, which I heard as a repeated call for unity that didn’t shy away from calling out the plague of white supremacy and untruth that drove much of the actions of January 6. I felt it when Kamala Harris became the first Black and South Asian woman to be elected as Vice President. I felt it when my 2-year-old was sitting in my lap, watching Ms. Gorman recite her poem, then saying, “she has brown skin, like Mia” (one of our daughters’ best friends), before proceeding to draw a picture of herself climbing a mountain, just like her big sister. I felt it in Donald Trump’s absence, which I also know is far from complete.
I don’t know what your political leanings are. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance, because of the way friend circles form and social media networks operate, that you share some of my values. If you’re American, maybe you too believe, like Ms. Gorman, that “we are striving to forge a union with purpose / to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and / conditions of man.” And yet maybe you also don’t like to talk much about politics. Maybe you too received the coded or overt message from whoever raised you: that the dinner table (or in this case, the virtual “bar”) is no place for religion or politics.
As I alluded to in the manifesto I wrote when I first started this newsletter two months ago, I’m trying to complicate some of those received messages with Ideas Over Drinks. I think we can and should talk about big ideas in communal spaces. You may disagree. What’s interesting, and what my wife pointed out to me one day when I was all worried about this entire project, feeling like it was a fool’s errand soon after starting it, is that we—the people who don’t want to talk about contentious topics and the people who do—probably want the same thing. We want harmony. We want unity, not unlike President Biden. We just have different ways of getting there.
In any event, I’m glad you’re here, and in the interest of sharing something more tangible that you can hold onto while working along with me to grasp all these floating (yet crucial!) ideas, let’s make a drink. And in part as a nod to both Biden and Trump (with some shade for the latter), let’s make something nonalcoholic. Because something that these Presidents have in common—maybe one of the few things, aside from them both being Old White Dudes—is that they have never had a drop of booze in their lives. For real.
First, we need to make a shrub. A what?
A shrub. A shrub is a drinking vinegar. If you don’t know shrubs, don’t be scared. The vinegar’s acidity makes the drink refreshing and crisp, and yet it also makes you want to come back for another sip.
Imbibe Magazine defines a shrub as “a sharp, tangy infusion of fruit, vinegar, and sugar.” This link has a recipe for making a shrub as a cold infusion over a week’s time, but you can also do it a little more quickly, with the following method adopted from Jeff Morgenthaler’s The Bar Book. (If you haven’t yet noticed, I love this book. My copy is starting to get worn from use; otherwise I’d consider loaning it out to you :) I really like the combo of pineapple and rosemary. Depending on what you have on hand and what you like, you can use almost any type of fruit, with or without herbs.
Pineapple Rosemary Shrub
Ingredients
2 cups of chopped pineapple (fresh or frozen)
Leaves from 2-3 sprigs of rosemary
2 cups of coconut sugar
½ tbsp of kosher salt
2 cups of apple cider vinegar
Directions
Combine the pineapple, rosemary, sugar, and salt in a bowl. Stir, cover, and let sit at room temperature for a few hours.
Refrigerate overnight, stirring every now and then if you can.
Add the vinegar. Stir. If the sugar hasn’t yet dissolved, you can simmer it for 10 minutes to speed it along.
Filter through a fine mesh strainer and cheesecloth. Bottle, date, and store.
(Yields approximately 25 ounces.)
One of the beauties of a shrub is that it will last for 4-6 months. The vinegar and the salt keep the fruit from spoiling. Before the era of refrigeration, shrubs were developed out of a need to preserve fruit. (The origin of shrubs can be traced back to the Middle East, likely Iran. The word actually comes from the Arabic word sharãb, meaning “drink.”)
Now, here’s a recipe that will help you put that shrub to use.
EJ and Juni’s Favorite Mocktail
Ingredients
¾ oz. lime juice
½ oz. pineapple rosemary shrub
1 tsp. simple syrup or agave syrup (optional)
2-3 oz. soda water
rosemary for garnish
Directions
Combine everything except the soda and rosemary in a shaker tin.
Fill halfway with ice, close the tin and shake for 10-12 seconds.
Add the soda. Strain slowly over a glass filled with ice. (Or maybe a plastic cup :)
Garnish with the rosemary and serve.
And there you have it, a tasty NA beverage. If you want it boozy, you can just add in 1 ½ oz. of your favorite spirit before the shake. I love this mix in particular with tequila or rum. Cheers!
Finally, I’m excited to share some news from a locally-owned business. Bull In China, a bar tools and glassware company out of Portland, Oregon, just agreed to offer a 15% discount to subscribers of Ideas Over Drinks! To take advantage of the discount, go to www.bullinchinapdx.com and enter the code IDEASOVERDRINKS at checkout. I’ll do a more detailed review of their gear next month; for now I’ll just say that their Hawthorne strainer is fantastic, their shaker tins are well-balanced and durable, and their peeler is sharp and tough, much like many of my favorite humans.
Thank you, as always, for reading. I know you’ve heard this from me before, but if you like Ideas Over Drinks, please do me a huge favor and share this newsletter with at least one person you think might like it too. They can sign up for 2 newsletters a month for free. Subscriptions are available for $5 a month; this not only gets you twice as much content (weekly emails instead of every 2 weeks), it also helps keep Ideas Over Drinks free for everyone. Plus, 20% of the profits from subscriptions in January are going to Radical Xchange, who is partnering with Another Round Another Rally to provide mental health relief to Black hospitality workers in need.
Until next time, here’s to hope. Here’s to whatever helps you achieve something great in the future. Here’s to my daughters’ shared dream, something they’ve both told me they want to do one day: to fly, without me carrying them.
J.
Love this for so many reasons. I think that physically relieving feeing I felt on Inauguration Day was perhaps hope too. It has been so long since I felt it that I’m not sure I recognized it. I am so inspired by Amanda Gorman and love the idea of Mia creating a visual from the words. That may well be on our list today!
Another great one, J! I'm not even an American citizen but I cried watching the inauguration yesterday. Since the publication of my book, I've met many young people (much younger than me) who are doing amazing work to make a brighter future. They inspire me and give me hope for the future. The US inauguration yesterday gave me the same feeling about hope.