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SLM contributor (and former Riverfront Times food critic) Rose Maura Lorre has written a new book, just for women who drink to take the pain away. Before you get upset that Maura Lorre is encouraging addiction, relax – her maiden effort, The Big Book of Martinis for Moms, is very much tongue-in-cheek.
Maura Lorre, along with co-author Mavis Lamb, has compiled a list of more than 150 drink recipes, each one paired with a particular moment of “mommy triumph.”
There are drinks for getting a child through the night without wake-ups for the first time, for teaching your kid to use the potty or tie her shoes, for successfully getting through a commercial flight with a baby in tow, and so on. There is even a drink for launching a witty comeback after another parent says something snide about you at a PTA meeting.
For surviving one of those unexpected and very long snow days with your kid, after he goes to sleep you might mix up an “Alaska” (gin, Chartreuse, bitters, and a cherry). To toast the days of summer, The (World's Greatest?) Frozen Banana Daiquiri (below) that calls for light and spiced rum. For getting your child through her first dentist’s appointment, you might reward yourself with the “Adirondack Mint” (chocolate liqueur, peppermint Schnapps, cooled hot chocolate, and whipped cream). For staying up all night with a sick baby, you’ve earned the “Reviver” (cognac, calvados, vermouth, and an orange peel).
A number of the drink recipes may also be found at Maura Lorre’s blog, the Five O’Clock Cocktail Blog, a finalist in the 2012 Saveur Magazine Best Food Blog Awards. (It’s more than likely that she whipped up a few of these drinks while she bartended at The Royale, too, back before she got hitched and ran off to Montreal.)
Recently, Maura Lorre (right) became pregnant. Like a lot of pregnant women, she spent considerable time thinking about the booze she’d given up and how as soon as she gave birth and got her new baby on the bottle, she would be hitting a bottle of her own. Unlike most pregnant women, Maura Lorre wrote a book about it. The journalist spent her maternity leave writing Martinis for Moms.
When she finally had her baby (what a cutie!), Maura Lorre referred to the child in a blog post as “a writhing, smiling, life-sucking raison d’inebriate.” Hello, brutal honesty!
Martinis for Moms includes very simple concoctions, like the “Woo Woo-tini,” made with vodka, peach Schnapps, and cranberry juice; and the Thin Gin-tini, comprised simply of dry gin and diet ginger ale. The book offers recipes for the sort of sugary drinks that have come to dominate the young-women’s demographic at the bar, like the Snickerdoodle-tini, the Sour Apple-tini, and so on. Then there are old favorites like the Bull Shot, the Gibson, the Hot Toddy, the Hurricane, the Cosmo, and the "Month Old" Manhattan (below).
The roster of drinks in intriguing, but let’s be honest, very few readers will actually take pains to pair the specific triumph that Maura Lorre mentions with the specific cocktail she recommends. That conceit is probably a bit on the gimmicky side.
But anyone raising children understands that the two are most definitely linked. I have a friend raising twin five-year-old boys. After she and her husband finally win the nightly battle of getting the hellions to “Go the F___ to Sleep,” she and her husband kill a bottle of wine in celebration. I would not presume to counsel them about their bibulous proclivities.
The Big Book of Martinis for Moms may be half in jest, but reaching for mother’s little helper is no joke.
