I’m about a thousand recipes from the finishing line of this challenge. But having cooked all the recipes from the first Thug Kitchen cookbook, I’ve moved on to the others. And I’ve done it with the sort of gung-ho attitude that you can only truly acquire if you’re sleep-deprived, over-tired, and just don’t have any fucks left to give about what other people think of you.

What do you do when your husband goes travelling abroad and you’re left to your own devices? Rather than starting yet another neighbourhood dumpster fire, you buy a watermelon and a bottle of tequila, and you get shit-faced drunk. The devil makes work for idle hands my friends, so I chose to occupy them with colourful cocktails.

To stay out of trouble I had a drink in the garden.

To keep my hands busy I had a drink while I cooked.

Then I had a drink or two with my meal.

And then a few more while I watched a film and painted my nails.

Did I mention the recipe makes enough for 18 cups? *

Before I turned into a sloshed, hot mess, I crawled into bed, dreaming delicious watermelon dreams till the sun rose in the strawberry pink sky.

The Final Assessment: After drinking many, many…oh-so-fucking-many…of these, for “Research and Evaluation Purposes” I’ve come to my conclusion. I’d give this drink a whopping score of 4ish – 5ish out of 5 neon-coloured cocktail umbrellas.

The strawberries and watermelon go really well with the tangy citrus of the lime and BLAM! of the tequila. And this drink just begs for a handful of potato chips on the side. It’s a match made in Tequila Heaven. (That’s a real place and they have a lot of salted rims there, you know what I’m sayin’?) This drink also works ‘virgin-style’ if you leave out the tequila. But if you decide to ride that virgin bareback, and you leave out the tequila you’ll be missing out on the inevitable staring competition you get to have with the creepy one-eyed worm at the bottom of the bottle. And who would want to miss out on that barrel of psychotic laughs? **

* Don’t worry this was a party for one so I halved the recipe.  I’m still a semi-responsible adult.

** The best part of that is the next morning when you realise the kind of tequila you bought never even had a worm in it to begin with. It was just the tequila worm of your mind, man.