CELEBRATION COCKTAILS: Outstanding Batch Cocktails and Individual Drinks for Holidays, Parties, Birthdays, Weddings, and Other Festive Occasions

CELEBRATION COCKTAILS: Outstanding Batch Cocktails and Individual Drinks for Holidays, Parties, Birthdays, Weddings, and Other Festive Occasions
RHIANNON LEE
Harvard Common Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Make any size gathering truly festive and magical with a delectable themed cocktail that pairs perfectly with the occasion.

Let's face it: If the occasion is special, the drink should be special too. Why trot out your weeknight gin and tonic or scotch and soda when something extraordinary is called for? Whether you're serving a get-together with three people to celebrate a job promotion or a grand holiday party for three hundred people, cocktail expert Rhiannon Lee, author of three masterful books on mixology, serves up the recipe ideas you need in this colorful, photo-rich, and inventive book. She provides recipes both for pitcher and punchbowl batch cocktails perfect for a big crowd and for single-glass drinks a host can make to suit guests' individual tastes.

With short ingredient lists—so you can spend less time shopping and more time celebrating!—the recipes include:

Lots of themed drinks for Fall festivities, Christmas, New Year's Eve, and Easter

For sharing with your sweetheart on Valentine's Day, a romantic vodka martini with a splash of cranberry and a touch of rose water

A delicate and exotic Lunar Martini, a blend of lychee juice, vodka, and a hint of lime, for celebrating the Chinese New Year

The Blushing Bride, a pink-hued bubbly pomegranate-flavored drink ideal for bridal showers and wedding parties

Cocktails for holidays all around the globe, including the Hindu holidays Diwali and Holi and Hanami, the Japanese cherry blossom holiday

Touchdown Tea, a strong and refreshing iced tea cocktail with bourbon and lemon for tailgating and any other sporting occasion

From the Spring Equinox to the Winter Solstice to all the weddings, birthdays, retirements, and holidays that lie in your future, you will find a lifetime's worth of perfect drink ideas in this fun and delicious book.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Party season is coming! Do you need to stock up your bar? Of course you do!

contents, aka shopping list

The thing about a book like this is it can hide your ineptitude with or ignorance of alcohol as a party-starter by being a beautiful thing to look at. One friend of mine would put a book like this open on the bar, and say, "come pick a drink!" Since he knew he could look up how to make it, gracefully, and already had everything needed for it in the bar (having read the book and made the list), it was training and fun combined. I liked those parties.

the why and the how

So as a (self-)gift, as a thing to have around, or just something to thumb through and wonder "who thought of that?":

seriously?

...there's a reason for this one to join your celebration and libation of the season.

winter

spring

summer

fall

Rejoin cocktail culture! Time to swig your way to happiness! (In moderation, of course, these're some very fattening tipples.)

Over NINE YEARS (with an interruption) and ELEVEN HUNDRED POSTS!

When I posted PANCAKES IN PARIS: Living the American Dream in France to my blog, it was my 1,100th post (not review...post)! I started blogging again (Geocities, *sob*) because I was unnerved by the Amazon data defilement in 2009 (snatching paid-for content off Kindles without warning or compensation) then their purchase of Goodreads in 2013 hard on the heels of losing dozens of my reviews to their bizarre "off-topic" review bullshit...go here and/or here if you want to know more about that!...made me think it was time to have *another* public-facing place to put my reviews.

Now, that event was followed by my complete and utter collapse in 2014. Six months in the goofy garage, reading James Rollins books and doing nothing but thinking, followed by moving into an assisted living facility and getting accustomed to the systems in place to enable the destitute to live...well, no posts from October 2014 to January 2016 suddenly makes sense, no? It was a difficult adjustment. It's been quite a shock to try to accomplish things and meet with disparagement, obstacles, and contempt! But, at the same time, the people who survived this unintentional purge of my life-list of friends made themselves a devout disciple.

In the nine and a quarter years since I started the public-facing book-reviewing practice here, I've had 451,000 unique views and accrued a high of almost 3,000 email subscribers as well as 1,200 Feedly followers. It's not The New York Review of Books, but it's not too terrible and all I do is talk about books I've read. Once in a way an essay...that first link is to the essay that was my first post that got over 1,000 views. No affiliate links because 1) ew and b) I can't afford to make money lest some jackass run report me to the DSS for exceeding my allowed income for a disabled person. (Yes, it's happened more than once and it was indeed someone from real life not my "parasocial relationships." *snort*) So it's really just me talking about books that, almost a half-million times, others have made the effort to find me or to go to my blog via a link and read what I've said.

I hope to post at least 1,100 more times and amuse and entertain and illuminate more books for all y'all. My sweet Young Gentleman Caller, when he called to say "congratulations", was very complimentary about the work I've done. He was kind enough to say he thinks I'm good at the job, and it's a job in the sense that it absorbs my energy, my thoughts and my time, so he's unsurprised that so many read my work. Really though, he said it best and most sweetly when he was getting back to his own work: "Everybody loves a curmudgeon. Especially when he's really a truffle."