Macro Monday Beholds The Blood Orange

Today will feature not just one image, but several.

I am a fan of the blood orange. I like its aesthetics — it’s a bruise-dark fruit that does indeed bleed into the glass — and I love its taste, sour and sweet and mmm. And so I quite enjoy using it in recipes when I can get them, and lately I got a whole bag of blood oranges (and then later, some Aliseo blood orange juice) and I used it to make two different cocktails and a taco. The taco recipe will be forthcoming, likely this week, but I’ll give you the two cocktail recipes here:

Blood Orange Negroni, aka the Miriam Black: Make a fucking Negroni, then put blood orange juice into it. … … mm, okay, that’s simplifying it too much, maybe? Whatever. Seriously, in a shaker, make your Negroni as you would: ounce of gin, ounce of Campari, ounce of sweet Vermouth, then squeeze 2-3 blood oranges into the mix. Shake that motherfucker like a pair of dice and then guzzle it with your booze-mouth. For those of you unsophisticated monsters that cannot abide gin, I say: sub out the gin and use bourbon.

The Mimosa, Reloaded: Yesterday I decided that the bottle of Champagne that my wife and I have had in the fridge since the Cretaceous needed to stop taking up space, and I thought, HEY FUCK YEAH LET’S DRINK MIMOSAS. What were we celebrating? Our ability to make mimosas and drink them whenever we want because damnit, we are adults. Then someone on Twitter — @mattaccount — said, “You should put amaretto in that,” and I thought, ew, no, why would you do that. The taste profile seemed odd to me — but that’s because I’m dumb. Almond cookie plus sour plus Champagne actually sounds great when you think about it. (I have admittedly only recently come around to amaretto, which as it turns out is fucking amazing, especially Lazzaroni.) So I changed my tune and decided, you know, okay, maybe. Maybe. And I did what this person said and it was amazing. Then I thought: let’s go bigger. LET’S GUY FIERI UP THIS SONOFABASTARD AND DRIVE THIS DRUNK BUS THROUGH THE WAL-MART IN FLAVORTOWN, and then I bleached my pube-beard and put on sunglasses and surfed on a tide of — wait, no, none of that happened. But I did add something to the third iteration of the drink, and here’s what I did — ounce of Amaretto, ounce of blood orange juice, ounce of pineapple juice, top off with Champagne. I did not put this in a fancy flute glass because I am not a fancy flute glass kind of guy. You can drink this out of a proper wine glass, or a bike helmet, or a shoe, I don’t care. It’s good. Have it. And it’s breakfast. Totally nutritious because fruit juice.

THERE YOU GO.

Before the images, I will remind you of some things:

AN EVENING WITH CHUCK WENDIG is next week, so if you’re in the PA/OH/WV environs, come say hi, listen to me jabber, get a book signed, take a picture, get in the van, fight a wizard.

Also, now there’s a whole different EVENING WITH CHUCK WENDIG (seriously, I’m pretty sure I’m going on a date with the whole audience), and this one is more Star Warsy in nature — on May the 4th I’ll be at the Cherry Hill public library at 7PM, but you can also buy tickets to a catered reception at 6pm (see? a date!), and so if you’re closer to PA/NJ/NY/DE, come say hi.

I’ll remind you folks that the second Atlanta Burns book, THE HUNT, is now out. If you want a kind of… noir-ish grim-dark Veronica Mars, well, I got your book, so go check it out. In it, Atlanta’s ex-BFF Bee needs her help untangling a nasty knot to find out who got her pregnant. That means Atlanta’s got to go around once again kicking over logs, and as always, what she finds underneath is a squirming, teeming mass of corruption.

NOW, ON WITH THE BLOOD ORANGES.

These images all belong together — though, given that they are macro photos, some may hide their true nature. But I promise, this is all part of a series, all taken together. Enjoy.