Hemingway (that’s Ernest, of course)  is associated with any number of cocktails, but perhaps none more so than the Mojito. The drink was invented at La Bodeguita del Medio in Havana, Cuba, where Hemingway drank them, as  did Brigitte Bardot, Nat King Cole, Jimmy Durante, Erroll Flynn, and countless others, famous and non-famous.

Mojito

6 fresh mint sprigs
1 oz. lime juice
3/4 oz. simple syrup
2 oz. light rum
Lime Wedge

Crush 5 mint sprigs into the bottom of a chilled highball glass. Pour in lime juice, simple syrup, and rum. Fill glass with crushed ice. Garnish with lime wedge and remaining mint sprig. Sometimes a splash of club soda is added, according to individual taste.

No, not THAT kind of jam session

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No matter how many summers I’ve done this, every time I make a batch of raspberry or blueberry jam I’m astonished that I can produce something so practical, delicious, and beautiful. I leave the newly filled pint jars out for days, admiring my handiwork. (And reminding my family to, as well.) I do have some advice for you. Don’t take the dog berry picking. Or at least don’t take my big old retriever Forte. He eats berries like a hungry black bear right off the bushes, and if I am not paying attention will root them right out of my pail. Also, buy one of those wide plastic funnels for pouring the boiling goo into the jars. They keep it from running over onto the counter and oozing into, say, the silverware drawer. Don’t ask how I know that.

-Heather

Excerpt From Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs by Heather Lende

Today, we have a video of Smith as he forages for honeysuckle for one of his signature desserts: Honeysuckle Sorbet.

Honeysuckle Sorbet

Makes about 2 quarts

4 cups (tightly packed but not smashed) honeysuckle flowers, leaves and stems discarded
5 1/3 cups cool water
1 1/3 cups water
2 cups sugar
Few drops of freshly squeezed lemon juice
Speck of cinnamon

Place the flowers in a nonreactive container (glass or stainless steel) and cover with the cool water. Weight down with a plate. Let stand on the counter overnight.

In a small saucepan, make a syrup out of the sugar and the water by boiling it until all the sugar is dissolved and it begins to look lustrous and slightly thick, 3-5 minutes. Add a few drops of lemon juice to prevent the sugar from recrystallizing. Cool the syrup completely. Strain the honeysuckle infusion, gently pressing the blossoms so as not to waste any of your previous efforts. Combine the two liquids and add the merest dusting of cinnamon. You don’t want to taste it, but you can tell if it’s not there. I use the tip of a sharp boning knife to measure it. Churn in an ice-cream maker. This does not keep for more than a week or two.

Enjoy!

Adopted when she was a baby, Mei-Ling Hopgood grew up in the Midwest and was never really curious about her Asian roots. Then one day, when she was in her twenties, her birth family finally came calling–on the phone, on the computer, by fax–in a language she didn’t understand. The Wangs wanted her to return home. But this unexpected reunion had a price; she uncovered secrets that haunt them to this day. Delving into Chinese culture and tradition, Hopgood tells a tale of love, frustration, hilarity, deep sadness, and great discovery as she comes to understand the true meaning of family.

To learn more about Hopgood and view the book trailer, check out her website here.
Excerpt From Lucky Girl by Mei-Ling Hopgood

On his BLOG he writes about Dream Golf and about Old Macdonald, the course that is the subject of the new material in the book. Read the first chapter of Dream Golf below!

Excerpt From Dream Golf by Stephen Goodwin

Contrary to popular belief, not all writers sit in dark corners scribbling their serious, serious story about how gloomy and awful life is. Most writers use laptops now. Others, like George Singleton, forgo the expected, ho-hum gloom and doom stories and instead write dry, hilarious stories about eccentric characters and their bizarre run-ins with characters even crazier than themselves. So here’s to you, George Singleton, and your short story pick of the month. Seriously.

–Ana

(Ana Alvarez is the Publishing Coordinator at Algonquin)

New Stories from the South 2009 – George Singleton, Between Wrecks

ABOUT GEORGE SINGLETON
George Singleton lives in Dacusville, South Carolina, and teaches writing at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. His short stories appear regularly in national magazines–the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, Zoetrope, Playboy–and literary journals–the Southern Review, Shenandoah, the Georgia Review, Yalobusha Review, and many others. He is also the author of These People Are Us and The Half-Mammals of Dixie.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune called it “A masterpiece.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer called it “Gleaming, spellbinding fiction . . . Terrifying and abruptly beautiful.”  Personally, I’ll hang with any author who uses a Shakespeare quote as the epigraph to a Western.

The plot: The year is 1916. The enemy, Pancho Villa, is elusive. The terrain is unforgiving. Through the mountains and across the long dry stretches of Mexico, Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, leads an expedition of inexperienced horse soldiers on seemingly fruitless searches. Though he is seasoned at such missions, things go terribly wrong, and his patrol is suddenly at the mercy of an enemy intent on their destruction. After witnessing the demise of his troops, Napoleon is left by his captors to die in the desert. Through him, we enter the conflicted mind of a warrior as he tries to survive against all odds, as he seeks to make sense of a lifetime of senseless wars and to reckon with the reasons a man would choose a life on the battlefield.

Far Bright Star

David Arbus will be graduating from high school in the spring of 1975. His divorced parents offer two options: embrace his mother’s Hasidic sect or go into his father’s line of work, running a porn theater in the heart of New York’s Times Square. He joins the family business. What else would a healthy seventeen-year-old boy with an interest in photography do? But he didn’t think it would mean giving up his mother and sister altogether.

Today, instead of a boring old Scribd excerpt, we have a recording of Joshua’s brother Zach Braff reading the first chapter. So listen up! Also, check out Joshua”s website for more about his tour and his books.

Zach Braff Reading the First Chapter of PEEP SHOW

Now for the coffee and the deals: Our friends over at Raven’s Brew Coffee, an Alaskan roastery (and The Official Coffee of the Heather Lende Tour), are also pretty excited about Lende’s new book and are running a promotion from May 17th to June 1st. Not only is their Skookum Blend 20% off on the website, but if you enter HeatherLende at checkout, you’ll get 15% off your entire purchase! Check out their community page, dedicated to Lende, here. I’m feeling 1lb of Skookum, 1lb of Wicked Wolf (French Press Ground, of course), and a Wicked Wolf T-Shirt.

Now, smugly count the money you just saved and read Chapter 9. Enjoy!

Excerpt From Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs