Serious Partying

Since we're getting ready to head into party season I thought I'd post one of my favorite adult beverage recipes.

I created this recipe a couple of years back and have kept it my special secret up until now. It gets it's name from its beautiful burnt orange color:

Longhorn Hooch:

1 Large can of frozen orange juice concentrate
1 can frozen strawberry daquiri mix
the juice of 3 large lemons
3 large over-ripe bananas - mashed
1 1/2 liters ginger ale
1 5th bottle of Southern Comfort 100 proof (more to taste if you like)

Combine first 4 ingredients well in a large punch bowl. Slowly add the ginger ale. Remove excess foam. Stir in Southern Comfort. Add a lemonade ice ring and some maraschino cherries if you like. Enjoy!

Sweet Tea oh how I love thee

Let's get something straight Sweet Tea is NOT just iced tea. OK, well maybe it is but don't tell a Texan that. If you plan on doing any entertaining while living here get yourself a plastic pitcher at the Dollar Store and write on it "SWEET TEA". And if you really plan on being a gracious host (as all good Texas women are) you will buy a second plastic pitcher and write on it "UNSWEET TEA" (I kid you not). These are now your dedicated Sweet & Unsweet Tea pitchers and should never be used for anything else under penalty of death.

A few brief lessons in sweet tea:

Lesson #1: You can NOT make Sweet Tea from a powdered mix. It must be brewed.
Lession #2: You must use REAL sugar. If you call it "sugar free sweet tea" because you used Splenda instead of real sugar, people will laugh at you (please learn from my mistakes).
Lesson #3: If anyone asks you what kind of tea you use tell them "Luzianne, of course!"

How to make good Sweet Tea:

Boil Water
Put 1 Cup of real sugar into plastic pitcher with "Sweet Tea" written on the side.
Place 2 to 3 Luzianne tea bags into pitcher with sugar
pour the hot water over it until the pitcher is full
let it steep for about 5 minutes & remove the tea bags
Place in refrigerator. If you need to serve it promptly simply place ice in the pitcher. Good sweet tea always seems to be warm with ice in it anyway.

Enjoy your sweet tea and then quickly develop an addiction to sweet tea.

A Little Background

In February of 2006 we moved from Temecula, California to Leander, Texas. Big move. My husband didn't have a job yet. He had come out here a month earlier with our son (who was 19 years old at the time) and stayed with some friends to look for a job and a house. Two years prior we had started looking at leaving California. We were about to have a daughter and I wanted to be a stay at home mom. Instead, we refinanced our house. I still couldn't stay home. I had to work. I hated it. We lived in Temecula but worked in La Jolla. For those of you who don't know the geography of the San Diego area, I will educate you a bit. Temecula is north of San Diego...way north, and east too. It's kind of this gray area of Southern California that everyone tries to claim as their own. Los Angeles considered Temecula a suburb. Orange County likes to consider Temecula a suburb. San Diego considers Temecula to be a suburb. I would say that we were closer to Orange County but since we were San Diegans and still worked in San Diego, we considered it a suburb of San Diego. We lived in a beautiful house, high up on a hill above the wineries. I loved that house. But I HATED that commute.

That commute was 55 miles each way. Since we worked near each other John and I would carpool. Which was great for the company. It was a miserable drive. The I15 is really the only freeway from San Diego to Temecula so EVERYBODY uses it. Our drive in to work took anywhere from 2 to 3 hours and the drive home was just as bad. To make matters worse, once I had our oldest daughter we brought her with us. I was breastfeeding at the time and would pump in the car on the way there and on the drive home. It sure made for some interesting drives but you do what you have to do.

When I became pregnant with our youngest we decided that we couldn't continue living like this. So we picked several places to move within the United States and did some serious research to find out where we were going to settle. We decided that we couldn't deal with super-cold weather so we settled on the South. We decided on Austin because of my husband's career path. He is in the computer industry and Austin has many corporate headquarters here (Dell, Apple, Samsung) and he really wanted to work for Dell.

At the end of June, our youngest daughter was born. We put our house on the market. It took several months but finally sold. In January, my husband and son drove out here and I moved in with my parents until our house closed escrow. I flew out after a couple of weeks and we found a house. We closed escrow and moved into our current home in early February. In March, my parents came out and visited. They loved it and bought a lot and had a house built in this area also. The moved here in July.

I guess you could consider us part of the great mass migration from California to Texas. There are many many former Californians here in Austin. We seem to be magnetically drawn to each other. It's strange, kind of like a sixth sense. The vast majority of former Californians love it here. Every once in awhile I'll run into one who hates it. Kinda rare tho.

Texas is a strange beast. It really is it's own country. Once you acclimate yourself to the Texas lifestyle you'll find that your outlook on things change. It is those things and observations of Texas life that I plan to write about on this blog.