Rosemary Gimlets by the Dozen!

Party time! What makes a book discussion engaging and guaranteed to stimulate good conversation? Three things that work for me are, of course, a good book, with a selection of great snacks and delicious libations!

A GOOD BOOK
My garden club selects a book for discussion at our February meeting every other year. Not much gardening happening here in the Midwest this time of year! The chosen book usually has a garden, flowers or general nature theme. This year we read The Comfort of Crows, a Backyard Year, by Margaret Renkl. It was the inspiration for my last post, “Storm Warning! Helping my Feathered Friends.”

GREAT SNACKS
Club members Pam, who would host the meeting in her beautiful home, along with Sandy, Tom and Dee pulled out all the stops in the snacks department – a wonderful charcuterie board, four sweet quick breads, several soft cheeses, crackers, nuts, fruits, and an assortment of dessert bars. The biggest challenge was not speaking with your mouth full!

DELICIOUS LIBATIONS
I’m on the club’s Program Committee, and had suggested last spring that we might try something new this year with the refreshments for the February book discussion meeting – adding botanical cocktails! That landed me on the Hostess Committee for that meeting, and I volunteered my friend & member Tom to help select and create the concoctions.

The inspiration was my book, Cocktail Botanical, by Elouise Anders, with beautiful illustrations by Annabelle Lambie. Tom and I met one evening at Vintage Lanes wine bar to discuss and select our drink recipes. I chose the book’s Rosemary Gimlet cocktail, but modified it to use vodka instead of gin and calculated the ingredients based on one liter of alcohol. Tom chose a Lavender Lemonade Cocktail with tequila and edible lavender that he found online. We needed something non-alcoholic in addition to bottled water, so I chose to make lemonade with blackberry mint lemonade ice cubes for the mocktail.

There are only three ingredients to my Rosemary Gimlet – rosemary simple syrup, freshly squeezed lime juice, and vodka (recipe below). I chose vodka rather than the more typical gin cocktail because I wanted a more lime-forward drink rather than a gin-forward one. I squeezed the juice a week ahead (bags of limes were on sale!) and froze the juice in silicone ice cube trays, the large cubes for the drink recipe and small ones to have on hand. I made the rosemary simple syrup a couple of days before the meeting and just kept it in a container in the frig.

The day of the meeting, I thawed my giant lime juice ice cubes, measured out the syrup and the vodka, and added everything to an empty clean water jug for easy transport and chilled until meeting time. Grabbing some plastic cocktail glasses, cocktail napkins and my small rosemary plant for garnish, I was good to go!

Luckily for me, hostess Pam had a drink dispenser and a bag of ice ready for me. All I had to do was pour the chilled Rosemary Gimlet concoction into the dispenser and I was ready to serve.

Then, do you serve with or without ice? Either way! Served on the rocks, it provides a refreshing and chilled experience, enhancing the citrusy flavor. Served without the ice, the flavor really shines through, but it is a stronger taste. Know your audience. And mine definitely prefered their cocktails on ice for our late afternoon gathering! It’s always a good idea to be ready with both options.

“Rosemary Gimlets by the Dozen” is definitely going into my summer-cocktails-on-the-breezeway rotation. One of the beauties of the batch cocktail is that leftover amounts keeps marvelously well in the refrigerator. Cocktails at the ready – perfect for a hot summer day after a round of golf! Enjoy this recipe and let me know how you like it. CHEERS!