First note: don’t forget to vote for me in the Mixoloseum blog entry for last week’s TDN!  I’m tied for first!  My drink is “The Derek” if you remember it from last week.

Before I left town on Saturday I’d tried to come up with a drink for the esteemed Mr. Camper English of Alcademics.  I despaired of this task on Friday night as I had to deal with maintenance men cutting holes in my drywall and just a general inability to get the drink where I wanted it.  I went to the other dream which Marshall so generously published for me yesterday and decided to leave it for after the Pink Ribbon Polo match down at King Family on Saturday and hanging out with my parents.

After a long drive home Sunday from Amelia – there was an accident on I-95, it seems, so we got to route over to 301 – I got home and went into a serious vegetative state, getting nothing done at all, for a while.  I eventually went out and got some food – and there’s a chance I did that with my fly down, which means now I get to shoot myself – and definitely stuck one of my fingers deep into a surprisingly decayed citrus fruit of some now untellable type.  Ewwww.

My initial thought  had been to work on a ginger-based drink for tomorrow’s Mixology Monday but I was too distracted.  However, I’d had a mini-epiphany about the drink I wanted to make for Camper, which I knew had to a) include tequila and b) be pink.  This was after watching dad make mom a Cosmo on Saturday night.

I grabbed a non-decayed lemon and my housemade (cold method) grenadine.  Soon I had a drink that was better than I could’ve expected and the only regret I had was not having the perfect garnish for it!  I’ll describe what I wanted to garnish it with and we’ll see.

The garnish would've been PERFECT.

The Camper
2 ounces blanco tequila (Tequila Ocho)
1 ounce lemon juice
1/2 ounce grenadine
1-2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
pink Ting
Shake the first four ingredients together in a cocktail shaker with ice.  Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and top with pink Ting.  Garnish with a piece of pink grapefruit on a skewer.  Your choice the shape it is in; I would’ve done a heart, myself.

I’m really happy with how this drink came out.  If you can’t find pink Ting, you can try regular, or another grapefruit soda.

[Seventh in a series of drinks named after bloggers, mixologists, and random others who'll hopefully be at Tales.  The first post in the series is here.]