Friday night plan:
Stay home. Grill out turkey burgers. Make potato salad. Dinner on the deck. Check.
Prepping sun dried tomatoes, shallots and basil for the burgers, mix well with the meat.
Roasting potatoes in the oven. Make the vinaigrette. Toss with the warm potatoes. Check.
Enter sudden darkness and KABOOM! It’s pouring, down and horizontally, rain.

Plan B:
Create a cocktail with the spouse to pass the time until, or if, grilling is possible, since after all, necessity is the mother of invention.

Preparation.

Inspired by a cocktail we tasted a few weeks ago at the Old Edwards Inn in Highlands, NC, we decide to concoct a rosemary-infused martini. So as we watched our deck start to become saturated beyond-outdoor-eating-return for the evening, spouse (he’s the main bartender and grill master, I control the kitchen) went to work. I skewered rosemary branches plucked from the garden with some stuffed green olives while the mixing was going on. The final result? The Raindog!

It’s a nice, medium-dry martini, a little dirty from the olives and infused with a light, pine-y rosemary taste and fragrance, which works really well with the herbaceous Plymouth gin and slight sweetness of the vermouth (Plymouth is essential for this recipe because it is lighter in flavor than London gin.)

The finished product.

After a few false starts, the rain slowed down enough to at least light the grill, though eating outside was not in the forecast. But we had a very nice night anyway, feeling revived and excited about concocting a new “keeper” cocktail recipe. We stayed inside, watched the newest version of the movie True Grit (which seemed apropos, somehow), had our burgers and turned lemons into, well, martinis.