Today's cocktail: Dirty Martini

Today's ingredients: vodka, dry vermouth, olive juice, green olives, blue cheese

At the moment, I'm both shaken and stirred, so I figured I'd bang out this blog post while I'm waiting on some computer stuff to rebuild. See, one of my freelance gigs is to provide content for a radio news service. It has hard deadlines. Mine is currently 6:30am Eastern, so I get up a little before 5am so I can wake up, check overnight developments, dig out some filler material, write copy, record reports, upload files to our server, and leave some material for other staff to use throughout the rest of the day. It's a pretty simple setup... unless the technology on which the entire operation depends goes something other than boink.

Yesterday, my machine randomly decided to snap-dock windows that don't work well in that state (I deliberately do not dock these programs)--I didn't have time to diagnose and fix the issue (I later did), so I had to use a roundabout way to produce my content before emailing it to my boss for upload. This morning, I wake up to what appears to be a newly-formatted machine on boot-up, so I had to scramble to move equipment to a different computer and do a lot of web-based cut-and-paste work before emailing my files to my boss for upload. This is not what I want to be discovering, let alone dealing with, a few minutes after waking up. For what it's worth, I've found the issues and am now just waiting for a server sync to finish (will take most of the day), but if another glitch happens again, I'm going to have to go buy a new Windows machine (needed ONLY for these Windows-only programs). I may have just thrown up in my mouth a little, but this is not instilling great confidence in my employer at the moment, not that I can blame them, and let's face it: I'm nursing along some fairly outdated hardware here.

ANYway, still irked, so let's talk about something more fun while I wait. The wife is a James Bond aficionado. She has watched all the movies multiple times and holds strong opinions on which movies belong in the canon and which are junk. I'm not quite so enamored with the saga, but there are worse ways to spend a couple hours at a time, and I do maintain that Sean Connery is the best of all Bonds. Neither of us (the wife or I, that is) has read the books, but I understand that Bond actually may have enjoyed far more whiskey than vodka--it seems that ol' JB preferred a scotch-and-soda above all others with a smattering of Old Fashioneds, red wines, and champagne. I may have to pick up the books and see what's up.

Dirty Martini

At any rate, let's talk about the wife's combined love of martinis and olives. One of her all-time favorite drinks is a dirty martini, "the dirtier, the better." We're talking cloudy with a chance of blue cheese here. While the IBA has its official recipe:

• 6cl / 2oz vodka
• 1cl / .18oz dry vermouth
• 1cl / .18oz olive juice
• Pour all ingredients into a mixing glass filled with ice cubes, stir, and strain into a chilled martini glass.
• Garnish with green olive.

...the absence of blue cheese (either muddled or stuffed into green olives) does not stand in this household. Please try this without the blue cheese first.

In fact, there are a couple different things you can do to back off here. Replace the vodka with gin for a slightly different, somewhat crisper flavor. On top of that, ditch the olive juice altogether, and you have the IBA's official dry martini. However, if you want to go the other way and muddy this thing up, consider a skewer of olives, possibly stuffed with blue cheese (we found some at the grocery store, but some package stores will carry them, too). Not enough stank? Once you've poured the drink, drop in a half-to-whole teaspoon of crumbled blue cheese, then either stir, or muddle then stir. Hey, some people are weird.

Regardless, this is a classic cocktail that really does need the right glassware for presentation, so check out your local thrift stores or pick up something cheap on eBay if you plan to serve this up to guests. We're lucky to have a Habitat for Humanity ReStore nearby that has a fairly large kitchenware section. Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that this particular drink used up the last of our Topo vodka. Happy trails, bottle #797. May your followers serve us as tastily as you did.