Birthday Weekend

This weekend, I turned 38. I was in Nashville to attend the wedding of a cousin a decade my junior, but I also got the opportunity to take a road trip with Bella and hang out with my buddy Paul for the first time in quite a while. I received a lot of kind Facebook birthday wishes over the past couple of days, with many questions about which wines I consumed. And the answer is zero.

Instead, I enjoyed great cocktails prepared by people other than me. Between the wedding and a dinner at my grandparents' house, Paul invited me to my first visit to The Patterson House, a small speakeasy with an eclectic range of spirits and recipes as well as a list of rules that must be followed. I had a lot of fun with the Summer Negroni and would share pictures, but alas, they discourage the use of cell phones at the very dark bar and it makes for a more pleasant experience.

Back at Paul & Anna's place, I was treated to martinis. I overhead a conversation about what size to fix, and discovered that they had developed an internal standard of sizes depending on mood and occasion. As I am currently working on a lot of process standard documentation in the day job, I was happy to lay out the proportions for them in proper retro style. Enjoy!

Slightly better version with adjusted recipe... I can never quit tinkering with these things.