Spring has finally sprung. I didn’t actually realize how much I’d missed having my windows open until the weather turned warm enough to force me to have them open, and now I’m loathe to close the place up again. Spring is a wonderful time in my neighborhood—you see, we live on the fourth floor of a very old building with no air conditioning in an area of Los Angeles that regularly tops 95º most days during the summer. During July and August being at home feels sort of like being roasted alive, so the 75º-and-breezy days of March–May are little slices of heaven. Well, heaven with the added bonus of fresh strawberries, but I digress.

We’ve had a rash of particularly fine days this week and decided to celebrate by breaking out a little tiki. I combed and combed through my various tiki tomes looking for a bright, cheerful, springtime sort of drink—of course, most of them fit into one of the categories, but I was feeling demanding and wanted all three. When I hit upon the Lei Lani Volcano in Intoxica!, it was the clear winner.

Well, it was until I started to pour the pineapple juice and was confronted with a very strange, crumpled, green-and-white chunk of…something. It smelled like pineapple but looked like a morel mushroom, thus leading me to the conclusion that our pineapple juice had been taken over by an alien being, thus rendering it useless to my plans. Damn! Necessity being the mother of invention, I juiced a blood orange in the hope that its mild tartness could hold up in the place of pineapple and got to shaking.

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Since I managed to completely flake on last month’s Mixology Monday, I’m posting a drink that was posted by Jeffrey for the Variations event. I know, I know—another Jeff Morgenthaler post?!?! Don’t I read any other cocktail blogs?

The answer is, of course, yes. If you could see my daily cocktail RSS feeds you would probably goggle a bit. I stopped counting at fifty, so I couldn’t even give you an accurate count of how many blogs I read on any given day. Be that as it may, it is nevertheless a coincidence that I made the Flor de Baya so soon after the Richmond Gimlet. Jeff just happened to post the recipe right after I found both a bag of fresh cranberries in my freezer and a bottle of Sauza lurking in the back of my bar. I chose to take that convergence as a sign…but then again, it doesn’t take much to encourage me to take up the shaker. Or the beaker, as the case may be when making a gastrique.

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As a very small number of people who visit this site may recall, I made a furtive, failed attempt at the Negroni more than two years ago. While I am proud that I’ve come this far in my cocktail knowledge since then, I can admit somewhat sheepishly that I had no idea what I was doing the first time and fell prey to a fiendishly altered abomination to the name “Negroni.”

Be that as it may, such failed attempts have produced the results I post today. After the recent rain, Los Angeles is bouncing right along into spring. The trees are greening, the allergies are aggravating and the weather is pushing the mercury past 70º during the lengthening, sunny afternoons. The evenings are even warming up, though there is still a little bite to the air, but that just means it is perfect weather for a drink that embodies those two opposing characteristics.

So let us now sing the praises of the Negroni! Oh, bitter, lingering, sweet, sweet drink! Your gorgeous color, your subtle hints of orange, the cool nip on the tongue laved away by the subtle sweetness of vermouth! How we miss thee when thou art not here! (Why yes, I have been reading Steinbeck’s translation of Morte d’Arthur, why do you ask?)

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There are days when I get home from work and I don’t feel like doing anything. Not cooking, not eating, not even getting a glass of water. Alas, since I don’t (yet) make enough to appoint a full-time manservant (hey, I need jars opened!), these are the nights when I turn to my go-to solution: a Bloody Mary.

I know, I know. This sounds dangerously like a person who’s hip-deep in a drinking problem. Rest assured, though, that there’s a method to my madness. I mean, relatively speaking, a Bloody Mary is good for you! All that vegetable juice balances out the vodka, and it has vegetables. Real, honest-to-God vegetables! Oh, and I usually drink mine alongside some whole-grain toast and a piece of fruit or a veggie. Just in case you were worried about my mental and/or physical health.

For me, the Bloody Mary is like liquid comfort food—it was the first drink I learned how to make. At age ten, my father taught me how to measure and pour and mix (which, I later realized, was because he didn’t want to get off the couch during the last quarter of a football game). Since then, through years of trial and error, I’ve found the riff on the Bloody Mary that makes my heart go pitty-pat—including the garnish. I’ve sampled the traditional celery, sipped with carrots, lime wedges, olives…you name it, I’ve tried it. But my favorite is, and likely always will be, a couple of crispy pickled green beans.

In the beginning I didn’t give garnishes much thought. They were, after all, just some pretty, occasionally tasty, accoutrements to the Big Show. When I finally picked up my entertaining Bible, Raising the Bar by Nick Mautone, and read through the section on garnishes and syrups, a light went on. Why was I paying money for overly brined cocktail onions? Why was I eating flourescent red maraschino cherries that were suffused with artifical colors and flavors? If I wouldn’t cave and buy a pre-made sour mix, why wasn’t I pickling and stewing at home, too?

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