Refreshing

As a quick credit, I may have pilfered this idea from Joy The Baker. Also, if I ever use the word "may," I actually mean "will," "have," "did" or some variation on that theme. That said, today I have a salad for you. Well, it is technically a salad in that some green bits most assuredly exist within it and we're making a dressing, however, it's not a pansy little side salad. It is carb central. We have rice and potatoes and chickpeas and all sorts of good stuff. There is an argument to be made that it is healthy, though I wouldn't necessarily say that it's slimming.

Being who I am, I took Joy's recipe and made the dressing far more acidic and stripped down some of the embellishments since I didn't have a bushel of parsley sitting in my refrigerator. It's delicious and a really great summer evening meal when you just don't have it in you to eat something hot and straight out of the oven. The salad works equally well cold as it does with the potatoes and rice still warm, and if you make a sizable batch, you can snack on it for days... or feed it to your family, if you want to be nice.

Don't worry, making dressing is actually easier than shaking the bottle of the store bought kind enough to have the perfect distribution of floating bits.

Lavender... not just for Bath and Body Works anymore.

During the summertime in the south, there is the feeling that you should be on a porch somewhere drinking a refreshing, but clearly alcoholic, drink and strolling through a conversation with your friends. As I am not a mint julep girl, I'm always on the lookout for a new warm weather beverage. Yesterday, my friend Jenna was perusing my spice rack and found a canister of lavender. Well, when you find an interesting ingredient, you have to use it. So we started perusing the web for ideas and came across several variations on lavender lemonade. After picking our favorite bits from different ones and a surprisingly long grocery store trip, we (and by "we" I mean "Jenna") started juicing lemons. Lots of lemons. 15 lemons. Admittedly, they were rather small and not as juicy as one would like, but still.

After various preparations (to be detailed below), we decided to try the finished product with vodka in one glass and tequila in the other. The vodka just tasted like the lavender lemonade, hardly even added a kick. The tequila, however, blended perfectly with the tangy sweetness of the underlying drink, and we both decided to stick to that version for the rest of the night. I'm writing this the following morning and I still think that was a good idea. Of course, you can go with whichever suits your tastes better (or any fear of tequila you may have developed after particularly interesting nights).

Tasty beverage recipe after the jump...