Last week, we were all about the whips and chains! I’m so glad my authors didn’t all agree on one or the other. Diversity is more fun at the brunch table!

Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day, and I hope you’re all getting your very American St. Patrick’s Day meal of corned beef and cabbage ready. I think this year I’ll make colcannon and see if the kids like it. With my offspring, you can’t go wrong with potatoes and butter, I wonder if that’s true if there’s cabbage mixed in?

I want to know what you’re planning for St. Patrick’s day celebration. Do you go out? Do you stay home? Do you watch The Quiet Man? Do you turn off the TV and let your  “petty fingers” do the rest?

If I were a drinking girl, I’d be tipping a pint of Sam Adams or Heineken for for proving that some businesses can put principle over profit.

For a bonus prize: The best made-from-scratch Bloody Mary mix recipe — just the mix, not the cocktail — wins an “I heart St. Nacho’s” T-shirt like the one William, my lovely assistant (pictured here) is wearing!

 Either leave it  in the comments or email it to zamaxfield at zamaxfield dot com. I like ’em rich and spicy, and I want to make them without all the additives you find in the mix bottles at the store. Help a writer out here! I’ll be in your debt.

Today’s question is also about liquor:

“It’s prohibition again, what are you trying to concoct in your bathtub?”

 We all know that if it’s prohibition time– my family is doing its part to help those in need. That’s right– my family used to help those in their time of need receive the life-saving benefits of whole grain alcohol from that wonderful land up north known as Canada. *grins* Once again, it means that I’ll be carrying on the tradition since I’ve been learning how to make wine, mead and spirits for the past couple of years. Don’t look surprised. You thought it was all research for books, I know, yet, I knew years ahead of all of you that this time was coming again. Which is why I stockpiled enough supplies to make the necessary arrangements for sacramental wine and mead.

The next thing on my list– spirits. Between you, me and the wall– it’s for cleaning and for cooking– but hey, you make sure the cook, the diners and everyone else gets a sip or two of the good ole bathtub vodka. 😀 Distilled by these hardworking hands– you can even use it to create special dishes like penne pasta with vodka sauce. I love my food, which does show up in my writing. Occasionally, my love for alcohol creeps in too. but I think I managed to keep that away from the Department of Revenue this time…What’s that noise? Did you hear that? Run for your lives– it’s the coppers! Don’t let them have the flask I gave you. Run! Run! Run! If they catch you– they’ll make you sing like a canary if I don’t skin you first. Now go!

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My go-to booze of choice lately is gin, so that’s the easy answer. Although, actually, I think I’d do pretty well in a speakeasy. If I’d been alive in the 1920s, that’s certainly where I would have gone for my cocktail fix. I love the idea of glamorous people in hidden locations drinking and dancing and carrying on.

New York City loves a novelty bar, but I imagine the faux speakeasies now are not the same as they were during Prohibition. I went to a party once at a bar in the West Village that billed itself as a speakeasy, and certainly it was just as hard to find; I walked by it three times trying to find the place because the only signage was a tiny sign on a non-descript door, and then you had to go down a dark staircase and get past a bouncer. The place was quite posh, but it’s hard to get excited about paying $20 for a cocktail, no matter how skilled the bartender is. Still, it seems so classy, well-dressed people sitting around in dim lighting, sipping from martini glasses. (This is my life in my imagination.)

Not to peddle in stereotypes, but Brooklyn is also this hotbed of people making their own stuff, and alcohol is not an exception. I went to a homemade beer tasting once and some of the beers tasted pretty good, even though I was baffled how anyone in Brooklyn could have space in their living quarters to brew beer. (I mean, my bathtub can barely fit a person. I don’t have a clue what brewing beer involves, but I imagine it would need more space than that.)

Hopefully the US has learned its lesson where Prohibition is concerned and so that I never have to solve the problem of how to make gin in my bathtub.

But if you like a little baseball with your illicit cocktail, check out my story “One Man to Remember” in the Playing Ball anthology put out by Dreamspinner Press. It’s a Prohibition-era historical romance between a rookie baseball player and a sports reporter, and they do indeed visit many a speakeasy.

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