Oh dear, oh dear. We’re suffering from a healthy dose of STB this morning. It must be his profession, because hubby loves his little initialised phrases. I thought they were called mnemonics, but my spell check scratched its head at that one. Anyway, I think mnemonics are more like aide-memoir things such as Never Eat Shredded Wheat. Sorry, rambling there a bit. Anyhoo, whatever they’re called he loves them and STB in our house stands for Self To Blame. Oh. Hubby’s just come in and said they’re called acronyms. I invited the smartarse to BO. I’ll leave that one to your imagination.

I’ll elaborate: last night, feeling somewhat elated after our success with the house check, we decided to celebrate by whipping out the blender attachment for the shiny, stainless steel beast of a food processor, and knocking up a few cocktails with the help of our well-thumbed Cocktail Bible. #1 was still up for the first one, so we opted for a non-alcoholic passion fruit cocktail without the passion fruit (not exactly a store cupboard essential). And jolly nice it was too.

After his bedtime, things got a little more grown up with the raiding of the cocktail cabinet (okay, the shelf above the bin in the cupboard, but it sounds nicer saying cocktail cabinet). We polished our best UrbanBar cocktail glasses and cocktail shaker (www.urbanbar.co.uk - go there and drool) and soon, the kitchen was back in its customary state of disarray. We started with frozen pineapple Daiquiris, except we didn’t have any pineapple so we used tinned peaches so I guess that made them frozen peach Daiquiris. Highly recommended. After a couple of these we got a bit more adventurous and went for a White Lady. After those, we got even more adventurous and a bit random but I’m not sure anything actually had a proper name.

Hubby and I can talk for England. We don’t actually pay much attention to what the other person’s saying, and we interrupt each other a lot, but it’s all fairly good natured. We were soon rambling away (very much like C and I but with much less coherence), mulling over the impending responsibility of dog ownership, arguing about who would pick up the poo, planning our future and generally putting the world to rights.

So, fast forward to this morning and my throbbing head is a raging testimony to the jolly good night we had last night. I can’t remember much but the state of the kitchen this morning (think half empty tins of peaches, chunks of lime in the sink, half empty bottle of cointreau and bits of food processor everywhere) seems to confirm my suspicions.

So here, if you want to recreate my spectacular headache, are the culprits. Needless to say, the only cocktail I’ll be consuming today will be one of headache tablets and vitamin C. STB indeed.

White Lady

1 measure gin
1 measure Cointreau
1 measure freshly squeezed lemon (or lime) juice

Shake with a few ice cubes until the cocktail shaker has misted up and pour into chilled glasses (or just neck it out of a tumbler, I don’t care)

Frozen Peach Daiquiri

Put crushed ice into the blender (learn from my painful experience and don’t blend whole ice cubes, it blows the lid off - entertaining at the time, but very messy to clear up in the morning), then add:
Sliced peaches
Juice of one fresh lime
1 measure Bacardi
Slug of Cointreau

Whizz up and pour into chilled glasses.

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