Decluttering.

So we had this pantry shelf that was totally occupied by partly-empty liquor bottles.  

A couple of them I remember buying for one recipe or another (blackberry liqueur goes in my waffle topping, for instance).   Most of them dated from the Clinton administration.  I am pretty sure that some of them had been at the open bar at our wedding.  At least one was a bottle of ouzo that Mark's college roommate brought him back from an archaeological dig in Greece.  

It's not that we don't like a drink now and then.  It's just that we seem to have been running with a bad crowd ever since we moved to Minnesota.  

Anyway, Mark decided he was tired of looking at them, so he made a New Year's resolution to drink them all up.

"When we finish one of these full-size bottles," he said, "I will replace it with a half-size bottle.  That will take up less space."

Also we can buy better stuff then, I thought, eyeing the big plastic bottle of "Karkov" brand vodka.

"And if we finish the half-bottle fast enough," he continued, "that proves that we actually drink the stuff, and I can then replace it with a full-size bottle."

So we got down to business.  The Maker's Mark bourbon, arguably some of the better stuff we had, went first, mostly over ice, in just a couple of weeks.   "What's next, the Jim Beam?" I asked.

"Um.  I don't think that's all Jim Beam anymore," he admitted.  "I have a memory of consolidating a few bottles of whiskey at one point."  

Of course, when we got to the vodka we started to run into problems.  Who wants to drink plain Karkov vodka?  Not me.  Since it's the middle of winter, we always have  grapefruit around, and so we started making salty dogs.  With fresh-squeezed ruby red Texas grapefruit, they're quite nice.  However, we should have known that the moment we began twirling the rim of a glass in a dish of coarse salt, we were headed down the road of trouble.

"Hey, what do you need to make kamikazes?  Aren't those vodka and lime?"

"Let's ask Steve Jobs." [iPhone interval] "Yeah, but you also need triple sec.  Do we have any of that?"

"We have peach schnapps."

"Um, no."

"Blackberry liqueur?"

"Definitely not."

The next day a brown paper bag mysteriously appeared on the counter.  It contained (besides a chunk of fancy cheese) a bottle of DeKuyper triple sec.  Kamikazes!

"You know what else you can make with triple sec?  Margaritas."

A few days later a new brown paper bag appeared, containing a bottle of tequila.   Also some limeade concentrate, which is close enough.  I had one on the rocks while soaking in a hot bath.  Life was good.

* * *

One thing leads to another.  In other words:  If you give a mom a tequila, she's going to want some orange juice and grenadine to go with it.

And once you've got the grenadine, the floodgates are open.

… she's going to start coming down the stairs first thing in the morning saying, "You know what we need next?  Kahlua.  With Kahlua we can make white Russians."

Even Mark has been getting more creative at the bar at his business trips.  He came home from his last one and confessed, "I tried to get the bartender to make me something interesting, and I wound up with a Blue Hawaiian."

Which made me run to the internets for this clip:

(There's no recipe for a chocolate choo choo online that I could find.)

* * *

Anyway, I can't help but noticing that we set out, ostensibly, to get rid of all the old bottles taking up space in the pantry.   To simplify, you might say.  

And now we have more bottles of stuff than we had before.  Grenadine.  Bitters.  Triple sec.  TEQUILA!!!!

There's a lesson to be had here, but I'm not sure what it is.  All I know is that we have this bottle of rum, and maybe after years and years of bragging that I never kept the stuff in the house, I'm now starting to wonder if I could make some room for a case of Coke.