POM Vanilla Martini

The week of no kitchen is almost at an end!  I'm not quite sure what I'll do if I win the lottery and can actually have my kitchen remodeled.  Wait, I'm a financial planner.  Winning the lottery is NOT a plan.  And, you've got to buy tickets anyway - lol.  Why did I have no kitchen?  Well, first off, no kitchen is an exaggeration.  Almost all the furniture had been moved out of the kitchen.  And, my pantry was scattered amongst the dining room and living room.  In about 25 boxes.  It's not that I use a lot of canned foods.  But, I do need jars of roasted red peppers, capers, and olives.  And, panko.  Connie's the one who packed up the pantry so I took to walking into the empty space and "getting something off the shelf" to show him where it was.  That worked the first day when he remembered where everything had gone.  Not so well after that.  Peanut sauce?  Four boxes later.  Dark brown sugar?  Don't ask.  Soy sauce?  Trip to the grocery store.  And, on it went - lol.  Remember, you've got two choices here.  Laugh or cry.  Laughing is better.  Trust me on this.


Now, you ask WHY was everything packed up?  Just when I got the pantry nice and neat and organized?  The only room in the house to be nice and neat and organized?  Chalk it up to brown and beige.  I've mentioned before that when we bought this house it was beige.  A really ugly beige.  And, I'd lived with it for five years.  We'd painted the dining room early on.  Since we eat dinner in there every night that it's too hot or cold to eat on the screened porch, that was kind of the oasis of beauty.  Then, we papered our master bedroom.  Ahhh, another room that didn't turn a menacing yellow when bathed in incandescant light.  That was progress.  This year thanks to being forced to paint the exterior of the house and replace some windows (and as it turned out, replace a good bit of siding since the prior owners didn't prime it with oil based primer and it rotted,) it was a great opportunity to paint the interior of the house too.  All the furniture was moved and a large number of the pictures on the walls, so the prep work wasn't nearly as daunting.  Yeah, right. 

I'd painted one wall in the kitchen a grey blue when I first moved in.  It's the wall where all of my copper pans and antique kitchen goodies reside.  Most of that was my grandmother's.  Am I lucky or what?  There's the wall behind my handsome nephew, Tom.

 Once the rest of the kitchen was painted a paler version of the grey blue and the trim went from brown to white, the brown floor looked worse than ever.  The problem was that thanks to the unexpected siding bill, I'd exhausted my budget.  Time for plan B.  Peel and stick flooring.  It won't last years and years but it's certainly MUCH better than the old brown.  See what I mean?

Typically, we only have a cocktail on Sunday.  But, after a particularly grueling day at the office, I wanted to fix a cocktail and sit down and relax.  The cocktail part was fine.  The sitting down and relaxing was a dream unless dinner was to be served at 10pm.  It needed to be something really easy that I could actually get to all of the ingredients.  Somewhere I read about a POM and vanilla vodka drink.  I could do that.  Out came the POM liqueur and the vanilla vodka.  (nb:  It's really easy to make your own.  Don't waste money on the expensive liquor store stuff when you can put a vanilla bean in a bottle of vodka...  It winds up brown but we don't care!)  I tested different ratios and settled on half and half.  Into a cocktail shaker it went.  Shake, shake, shake until it's too cold to hold.  Then, into a chilled martini glass.  Here you have it.  A lovely, refreshing cocktail.  Next to my kitchen's latest decor:

Don't forget to kiss the one you love!