Agave Sweetened Mint Limeade

Part of this week's Iron Chef challenge (AKA Whatever is Delivered by Farmhouse Delivery) are keylimes. You know... the tiny, grape-sized limes that cuted their way into the citrus family. Since I hadn't done anything with them yet, dear husband suggested that I make a variation on the lemonade recipe I crafted/stole last year from the Babycakes cookbook: lemon juice, agave nectar, and water. That's tasty stuff. At the time, we had a rather thriving orange-mint plant, so I added mint to the recipe. Breakin' the rules! Oh the delicious anarchy! The green concoction was met with rave reviews.

But back to my new enemy: key limes. Sure, hubby, I say! Great idea! We're cutting back on drinking these days, and a nice minty limeade truly does sound like a perfect Fourth of July beverage. For forty-five fucking minutes, I cut these little dudes, try to pry out the tiny seeds, scrape out any pulp that wasn't selfishly hanging on to the skin, and squeeze until my fingers were shriveled like dead worms. I end up with, I'm not joking here, less than a half-cup of pulpy lime juice, and this is of course before I have to pick out all the seeds I missed, which much have displaced a good one-fourth cup themselves. Needless to say, this exercise was about as productive as milking a guinea pig for cheese. I realize this was a fool's errand. I should have given up. But what the hell else were we going to do with the limes? Make one of those key lime pies everyone talks about? I don't even know how those exist at this point. Why aren't these pies rare and costly?

But I'm done bitching. On to some instruction! After harvesting a tiny tit's worth of lime juice, I muddled about a dozen large mint leaves from our herb pots in the bottom of the bowl. Next, realizing that there was no way this would be enough lime, I added some lemon juice we had in the fridge. Awful stuff. I don't know how you can make "real" lemon juice taste processed, but evidently you can. A tear might have dropped into the mixture as I tasted the new formula only to find that the lemon stuff completely masked my 45 minutes of limey hell. From here, there's really not much more to say than add a crap load of agave nectar--keeping in mind that it's sweeter than sugar, so don't go too overboard--and a crap load of water. Just keep tasting and modifying to your liking. While the beverage itself is healthy and delicious, I can't say it wins in the ol' aesthetics department. At best, it looks like a urine test gone horribly wrong... so make sure you enjoy such a libation with friends who are open-minded, as our dinner partners are tonight.

If a tree falls in your backyard and no one's around to hear it...

Bryan and I are both tree lovers. We don't just hug trees. We say nice things to them, ask advice from them, and let them guide our daily meditations. After all, the Buddha didn't become enlightened until he stuck it out under a bodhi tree for 49 days. And it wasn't from the Shrub or the Cactus of Knowledge that our Judeo Christian God forbade Adam and Eve to eat. Tress are important. Like others, I've always gained a certain peace from trees and hold them in reverence. My childhood is peppered with tree-themed memories... planting them, climbing them, picking pears and peaches from them, hanging upside down in them, falling from them. My parents even let me choose "my tree" when we were clearing the plot of land upon which we would build our ranch. I spent hours on my swing set under "my tree." My beloved cat Murfee was buried underneath it. This year, I was excited to find that Texas vanity plates now offered a delightful "Texas Trees" option alongside the bizarrely popular "Fight Terrorism" and the just plain confusing "Louisiana State Alumni Association."

So yeah, you get it. I like trees.

Which is why I'm saddened to have two wonderful trees cut down in our yard. They were old and sick and started dropping large limbs. They were a danger to our house, our fence, our neighbor's house, our neighbor's fence, and not to mention the kids and pets who play near them everyday. Though I insisted initially that this was something Bryan and I could do ourselves, Bryan pointed out that even on my most coordinated of days, climbing to the top of a tree with a chainsaw is just an ER visit waiting to happen. So we could either pay that bill or we could pay a professional several hundred dollars to do the job. We chose door number two. If you've never seen anyone cut down a tall tree, take the opportunity if you get it. It's a fascinating system of levers, pulleys, unlikely acrobatics, and large power tools dangling on wires. There's definitely an art to it, as I suppose there's an art to embalming the dead. And just in a few hours, the lanky, twisted tree that took 70 years to stretch taller than a two story building lays in tidy piles in the backyard. RIP, Sweet Tree. We hardly knew ya'.