Cinco de Mayo

Yes, it is Cinco de Mayo, and I am feeling sorry for myself.  It's true.  Indulge me while I whine.  Or go ahead and go somewhere else.  Whatever.

I am far from where I started, far from corner taco stands -- not that there were ever any here, per se, but close, no more than twenty minutes down the hill -- far from fresh, genuinely ripe fruit from a farmstand with which I could make frozen margaritas if I didn't have this &*%$ing sinus infection -- oh, wait, maybe I'll make some anyway.  I've got some Patrón silver and a ton of grapefruit.  Vitamin C and all that. Plenty of liquids.   Cool.

Okay, never mind about the whining after all.  Sorry, false alarm.

One more note:

If you want to know what this Cinco de Mayo thing is all about, other than the "drunken stockbroker coming down your chimney" alluded to by Jon Stewart on last night's installment of The Daily Show, try to find a copy of The Crown of Mexico:  Emperor Maximilian and His Empress Carlotta, by Joan Haslip, publisher Holt, Rinehart & Winston (1971).  Though it somewhat suitably seems to have disappeared into a vortex of untracked lending years and years ago, I discovered my own copy where someone else had left it behind, in a hotel room in Haines, Alaska, where I happened to find myself with a long night ahead and not a thing to read.  Fortuitous, no?  It's a great read, too.  I couldn't put it down.  And up to that point, all I'd ever known about any of this came from a surprisingly accurate (if necessarily thin) and beautifully cheesy movie named Juarez starring Bette Davis as Empress Carlotta.  (Ah, she's delicious when she goes nuts on film.  "Maxl!  Maxl!"  Who can forget?)

So wherever you are, if like me you are too old to be out partying all night in dive bars by the beach, kissing strangers and dancing on tables (sorry, didn't see those nachos there -- uh, you gonna eat those?), and you can't lay hands on the book, here's what I recommend.  Hie thee to the nearest fruit source and pick up a lot of fruit -- a whole pineapple and/or a couple of baskets of strawberries and/or a half a dozen ripe peaches, if you can find them this early.  Blueberries.  Raspberries.  You get the idea; just grab a lot.

Then get to the video store and grab yourself a copy of Juarez before they run out.  And look, if you want to enhance your Benito Juarez experience with a little extra Bette Davis, heck, I'm no purist and it's fine by me.  You can make it a double feature and check out young Ronald Reagan playing a generally useless young man in Dark Victory while you're at it.  The contrast between Bette Davis as a mad, betrayed empress and Bette Davis as a spoiled rich girl with terminal cancer is not as broad as you might expect.

At home, make sure you have crushed ice, really good tequila (the expensive stuff -- not Cuervo or the like -- plata preferred), some Grand Marnier and some sugar.  Peel and chunk the entire pineapple, or seed/pit/peel and chunk whatever you bought, as appropriate, about a pineapple's worth in volume.  Throw it in the blender and purée.  (If your blender is small, throw in only half and make two batches.)  For each 8 fl. oz. of liquid your blender holds, throw in one shot each of tequila and Grand Marnier.  Add ice and grind away until you get the right slushy texture.  Add sugar (organic Florida Crystals preferred) to taste, and note that if you use peaches or strawberries at this season, it's probably going to be more now than later on in the season.  Pour into margarita glasses and get pleasantly, crazily bombed with someone you love while watching Bette Davis pretend quite expertly to break her own heart in glorious black and white.

Salt is optional, but not required.  Enjoy, and wish me luck with the grapefruit.

Or you could just go to Wikipedia.  But that's boring.

Comments

[sugaredharpy]

I really, really need you to make drinks for me. I get all worried and fussy about it and you, darling, you're all breezy and knowledgable.

[Sara]

Yep, "breezy and knowledgeable"; that's me. Sure.

I am from L.A. (more or less) and live with a guy who's half-Mexican. I spent many years performing in-depth (ahem) research with my friends, and then ran a quick search for recipes around the internet about eight or nine years ago just to help me define that Q ingredient that I couldn't quite put my finger on (Grand Marnier). In point of fact, it would be shocking, SHOCKING, if after all that I didn't know how to make frozen margaritas.

Besides, I have something like 13 years on you. That's a lot of pitchers.

Of course, I'm not 100% sure this recipe is accurate. I know the tequila and Grand Marnier measurements are true, but you might need a lot more fruit than I have indicated. It depends on what kind of fruit you use. Some kinds are pulpier than others. You kind of have to feel your way through this.

Incidentally, I ended up just eating one of the grapefruit, and then stayed up all night crocheting. The grapefruit was sumptuous, and I am old.

[sugaredharpy]

Old? Bah.

The Grand Marnier is what I wouldn't have thought of on my own. I'm not worried about accuracy see, just general yumminess. My standards, they are not high.

[bonnie]

Sheee*t...next year I'm comin'to YOUR house!

[Sara]

Of course you are welcome at my house anytime, Bonnie, but note that I ended up eating grapefruit and crocheting 'til 4 a.m. Big party animal here. Yeah.

Well, once upon a time I was. And it's funny that you wrote this post within a week of my writing the above, because my first exposure to wheelchair dance was in a bar in Venice Beach on Cinco de Mayo when I was 19 or 20 and had to sneak in the back because I was still underage and couldn't look the doorman in the eye without giggling when I handed him somebody else's driver's license. A guy who, as I remember through a haze of margaritas made with probably not the best tequila, had become a paraplegic in a motorcycle accident was there, dancing in his wheelchair. He had biked up, too, in a bike converted to accommodate his chair. He was pretty damn cool.

My second exposure to wheelchair dancing came more than 20 years later through this by way of this, which has nothing to do with Cinco de Mayo at all.