Welcome to 2018.*

So on New Years Eve our plan was to keep it low-key: To stay in and have some food, some drinks, maybe play some games and then at midnight check out the fireworks which are INSANE in our neighbourhood. Like if you suffer from PTSD that’s the LAST place you wanna be at midnight. It’ll take you right back to Nam for sure. (Yes, yes, I know that’s an insensitive thing to say, but so are most of the things I say, so why start taking offence now? Besides, I don’t really mean these things so get over yourself or get lost.)

Anyway, I thought why not try some new Thug Kitchen cocktails to spice the night up a little. To make a low-key NYE a bit more memorable… Nay, to make it LEGEND….wait for it….DARY!

So I grabbed all three cookbooks and made a shopping list for ingredients. Liqueur, fresh fruit, hot sauce, mixers, snacks. All the good shit. This is what resulted.

Drink 1: Instant Oatmeal Smoothie

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I thought, let’s be wise. Let’s start non-alcoholic, because it’s morning and there are many hours ahead of us. So we started with a smoothie, to smooth the way for future drinks. To lay down a solid foundation to pour copious amounts of alcohol onto.

It was delicious and filling, and made some big ass glasses. With a twist of cinnamon it was goooood. I paired it with some Danish brown cookies and voila! Breakfast was served.

Drink 2: Special Saucey

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Since it was still pre-noon and the Special Saucey had coffee liqueur in it I thought that’d be the perfect place to go next. A good cocktail for morning drinking, to ease ourselves in with. Turns out I was wrong. It’s fucking strong. And rather than use the 3/4 cups of vodka it called for, I’d only used 1/2 a cup because, well, it was morning and I’m a precaution-taking light-weight.

Fuck, I felt like I was breathing aviation fuel each time I exhaled after a sip. In a good way. It tasted damn good and while I was making it, one of the songs from the movie ‘The Big Lebowsky’ came on the radio, which I took as a sign from the Universe. I thought about that for a moment, and then I drank some more.

The drink clearly ‘floored me’ so I had a little lie down on my rug. I dozed for a sec and had a weird dream about some dudes chasing me with giant scissors.

Drink 3: Michelada

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After prepping some snacks and the lemon juice-sugar-vodka-mixture for the High School-Style Hard Lemonade we made the next drink. I thought it might be a good idea to make the snacks now, because wielding a knife when you’re sloshed is not clever. I need severed fingers like I need herpes right now, you know what I’m saying?

The next drink on the menu was the Michelada, which I suspected I probably wouldn’t like because it’s beer based. I’m not a beer drinker for after-taste reasons, but my husband loves the stuff more than life itself, so he was happy when I passed him mine after I giving it a taste. I know the fancy rim job was optional, but we tried it and it took things to another level. (You’ve got such a perverted mind.) He really liked it and was trying to guess all the ingredients (to the drink, not the salad tossing.) This was a mild drink, and because I skipped mine altogether we were still keeping our shit together.

Drink 4: Apollo’s Fury

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Now this was an interesting drink. I was really into it. It had subtle lime flavours and the heat from the hot sauce was spellbinding. My lips were burning in such a delicious way. It was a fucking addictive merciless cycle though, because the more my lips burnt the more I’d want to drink, and the more I’d drink, the hotter my mouth would become. I could gladly have drunk these all night, they tasted so good. (Not sure if my asshole would’ve thanked me the next day if I’d done that though.)

Did I mention that I’m sipping an Apollo’s Fury right now? This fucker is hotter than Apollo 13’s launch pad after take-off. Just the way we like it. (If you wanna take it further -and darker-you can add an extra tsp of hot sauce and it’ll be known as The Challenger’s Fury.)

Drink 5: Strawberry-Cucumber Smash

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By the time it was this drink’s turn I was feeling a nice buzz from the previous cocktails. I started to make this drink and then couldn’t find the gin anywhere. I thought my senses had been compromised but then I realised that we’d fucking forgot to buy gin at the store. I was totally bummed because two of the TK drinks I was looking forward to trying the most had gin in them. In a last-ditch attempt to avert drink-disaster I hopped in some shoes and legged it to the petrol station on the corner of my street. They were closed. I should’ve known they would’ve been but my naive senses had been compromised.(In the best way possible.)

I decided rather than bail all together we’d substitute gin for rum and see what happened. This was a fun drink to make, with lots of fresh fruit, mad jar shaking and ice. The strawberries were built like invincible fuckers on steroids, so shaking them wasn’t enough to fuck them up. I ended up mashing the crap out of them with a rolling-pin. The good news is it helped take out my frustrations about the missing gin, and the end result was a lovely, fruity drink. I’m gonna try this with gin for sure.

  

Drink 6: Malhotra Muddle

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In the cookbook this is such a sexy looking drink. The photography is amazing. This was something I’d really been looking forward to trying so I was a bit pissed that we’d forgot the gin at the store, but fuck it. We had rum. So rum it was. This was another in the jar creation which made me feel like a fabulous bartender who knew exactly what they were doing (aside from forgetting key ingredients like gin). I took the rolling-pin to the ginger, and garnished the drink with a sprig of mint with such a flourish that I seriously thought about a career change. I wanted to make drinks with absinthe, and fire!

  

 

By now we were three sheets to the wind and it was getting harder to play the dice game we had on the go. I kept wanting to throw the dice into my drink. I figured now was a damn good time for snacks. Food was necessary.

Drink 7: Spiked Ginger-Lime Sparkler

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This refreshing, stimulating son-of-a-bitch is actually non-alcoholic. We just spiked it, spiked it real good. I would’ve used gin because with the lime and the tonic that just sorta seemed like the natural choice, but we didn’t have any and by now I didn’t care. To be honest, I can’t even remember if it was vodka or rum that we used for this one. All I really remember was throwing a whole lime in the blender and pressing the on switch while laughing maniacally. Don’t worry, that’s part of it. I can see you wondering, but it is. Turn to page 134 and see for yourself. Let’s get our drink on!

Drink 8: Dirty Dianne

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20 minutes till midnight. Not long to go. This drink was tart citrus-loaded spectacular. It was a little too strong for me, alcohol wise, but I’d make it again with less vodka in for sure. If you’re looking to get trolleyed, then this drink is good for you. Unfortunately, I hadn’t checked the fresh Rosemary situation before we went shopping so I’d not noticed that the Rosemary I have at home is suffering a neglectful fate. Just look at that poor withered bastard. There’s not a lot of Rosemary oil in those dried up sprigs. I drunkenly reassured it that I’d water it more regularly, ‘I promise’ I whispered, and then yanked out its unsuspecting leaves. It was a pretty low move, but mama needed her cocktail.

Drink 9: High School-Style Hard Lemonade

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It was 3 minutes till midnight and we were grabbing our shoes to go outside to see the fireworks (by the way, standing on one leg is haaard when you’re not sober) when it suddenly occurred to me that I was drink-free so I ran back in and grabbed this pre-made concoction from the fridge. Man was I happy that I’d made this earlier in the day before soberness had fled out the door. I brought the hard lemonade outside with a drunk handful of ice cubes and some sparklers. I managed to slosh it into glasses just as the fireworks started, and after many attempts with numerous lighters lit the sparklers.

Shit that drink was good. One of my favourites from the night. Dangerously tasty, so you didn’t even notice the vodka in there. And so unbelievably fresh, you could feel the vitamin c coursing through your veins…Or was that the evening’s alcohol? I don’t know.

Drink 10: Lights Out Bloody Mary

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When the fireworks were over nearly an hour and many hard lemonades later, we went inside and made Bloody Marys. I’m not usually a fan, but Oh My Fucking Celery was it good. It was like a meal in a drink, with a shot of hidden alcohol in the background waiting to fuck you up. My husband said it was literally the best Bloody Mary he’d ever had, and got me to make him another right away. I have to admit that when I made the first batch I made a small fuck up and it took me ages to work out how to correct it. What’s wrong with this picture?

I was about to do the fancy rim on the glass, but I’d already made the drink in the glass. I stood there for an age trying to figure out how to do the rim if the glass was already full. To my alcohol-hijacked mind this was quite a conundrum. Then finally I shrugged, laughed, and got a new glass.

Later there was random dancing, more drinking, and eventually worrying about blowing out candles before eventually going to bed. At one point I stood looking at myself in the bathroom mirror trying to figure out if I had enough energy to remove my eye make-up. I suddenly remembered that one of my friends had actually used nail polish remover to remove her eye make up with when she was drunk. How she didn’t have her eye out I don’t know. This didn’t just happen once, but two times. Something about that thought made me laugh, and I stood there cackling to myself, all alone in the bathroom. Then I remembered I was the only one still awake so I should be quiet, so I started shushing myself.

All in all a good night. The cocktails all had their own personalities and flavours. They’re all welcome to appear in my home again, especially High School-Style Hard Lemonade, and Apollo’s Fury. Did you know Apollo’s Fury was named after a cat that would terrorise the neighbourhood, pissing and clawing its way to dominance? I’m looking forward to trying the drinks with gin, with ACTUAL gin. The fresh fruit and root ginger really took these cocktails to another level (not like the levels in Scientology, but more like levels of unparalleled heights on the fucking skyscraper of taste experiences.) I could live without Dirty Dianne, because she’s strong, a bit of a dirty tart, and brings out the foul-mouthed bitch in me, but I guess it’s sorta nice to know she’s around if I need her. I wasn’t into Michelada but she seemed to be right for my husband, so whatever. Maybe it was the fancy rim job.

 

 

* Hippy Fact:
Did you lovely cocktail drinkers know that numerologically 2018 is an 11 year? That’s a MASTER number. That shit is rare, and powerful, and means that this year makes it possible to manifest our dreams. We just gotta guard our thoughts because the Universe will give us an abundance of what we focus on. So focus on the good shit in your life, rather than the fucked up mess that’s going on “out there”. Appreciate and enjoy things that make you happy, whether that’s having an ice cream cone with a friend or fucking base jumping off a building. Whatever floats your boat go float it, and do it now, because the better you feel, the more good shit will come your way. The more time you spend worrying and talking about the stuff that makes you mad or unhappy, the more of that shit will appear too. So take responsibility for the crazy emotional see-saw that is your life and keep piling on the good feeling shit to keep the scales tipping in your favour.

We all know that watching the drama unfold on Twitter is as addictive as crack, but maybe it’s time to take a break, put down your phone and walk away. Why not replace one bad habit with another, and take up drinking cocktails instead? At least if you stick with these TK fruity delights you’ll be getting your vitamin C.