"Drink Your Garden: Recipes, Stories, and Tips from the Simple Goodness Cocktail Farm " is officially launched!
We’ve found happy hour, fresh from the garden, to be one of life’s utmost simple pleasures, and we're sharing it, with this book.
We love to learn traditional ways of making delicious things and preserving the flavors of each season through these methods. We hope that in Drink Your Garden you will learn a new skill or ten, that the recipes within are used to celebrate your big and small life moments, and overall that this book gives you the confidence and inspiration to drink what you grow (or buy at a farmer’s’ market or local shop), upside- down tomato cages or not! (You'll have to read the book for that story ;)
You can buy the book here.
Read on to hear all about our first book signings and launch week!
When I was asked during the Sumner book signing party Q&A what the most rewarding part of writing it so far has been, I answered that preserving my family's recipes, photos and stories in such a beautiful hardcover form is a privilege I didn't know I'd ever have. Now, to have those same recipes and stories available to people everywhere as the book is shipped across the country is a whole new layer.
On one hand, it's a bit like presenting a homemade gift- vulnerable, and full of love, where the subtext is saying "here is what I created, with you in mind. Please like it, because I love you." It's scary. Yet, already, watching people thumb through it as they share videos online is an instant joy. One day I hope to see it dog eared, fruit stained, and passed down.
We got to see people hold, flip through, and appreciate Drink Your Garden at two book events last week and hearing the collective "oohs" or "ahhh" when one of us would introduce one of the recipes, gardening tips, pro drink making secrets or helpful charts in the book was like unwrapping a gift 3 years in the making.
We celebrated the book's "birthday" in Sumner at Northlight Interiors, one of the very first shops to ever sell Simple Goodness syrups. Yesterday the owner Juleen remembered her first meeting with Belinda and said, "I didn't even want to buy them, but they tasted so good! And now look how far we've come."
Six years later, she still carries them and now, she carries our book. And holy moly did she bake her love into the most beautiful dessert table all featuring recipes from the book or using out syrups in the recipe!
From Blueberry Lavender marshmallows, to Nordic Coffee chocolate cupcakes with a Nordic Coffee buttercream filling, topped with a candied orange peel (the recipe is in the book!), she has definitely inspired a future blog post to add more dessert recipes to our website!
This photo below is of us and our mom, Denise, and Juleen and her mom, Julie.
Then later in the week we headed to Book Larder, Seattle's cult following cookbook store, for a recipe demo and author talk. At that event, 50 people gathered in a small room surrounded by books and a collective love of food, and we held glasses of the welcome mocktail in the air, and toasted to the book, and to it's readers and their many tasty happy hours ahead.
The drink was a beaut, as Springtime in the Pacific Northwest as you can fit in one glass, and featuring 3 different recipes from the book: the citrus cordial mixer itself, which is then used to make the Cordial Spritz nonalcoholic cocktail, and a salt and pepper rim that adds a sweet- heat component and a beautiful texture to the side of the glass. The garnishment was in the style of a Spanish G& T, with whole peppercorns, mint leaves, fresh rosemary and the final, foraged touch of Ossoberry (sometimes called Indian Plum)leaves that smell and taste of cucumber, and are the first springtime shrubs to bud out in this area's forests.
This event was casual and fun, with the attendees watching Belinda demonstrate the steps to make a Pomelo Citrus Cordial and making jokes along the way, while Venise and the book's photographer, our dear friend Rylea Foehl, talked through how Drink Your Garden is a cookbook that is not limited only to recipes, but to teaching its readers how to drink garden to glass, from start to finish.
Launching this book has been a whirlwind, and to the best of our abilities, we're soaking up this big moment and raising a glass to the many, many people who helped us get here. Thank you to each of you, and cheers, to the future of Drink Your Garden, and to the many happier hours ahead!
