My son’s godparents are margarita aficionados, social creatures, and more like family than friends. When I was a single mom for a while and they didn’t yet have kids, our standing Friday night ritual was pizza and spicy chicken wings washed down with their handmade margaritas at my 1920s cottage in Old Sugar Land. To get there, the husband would run (literally) the 23+ miles from downtown Houston, and the wife would drive with Dolly the Dog. They’d bring the margarita makings, and I’d order the pizza and wings from Gepetto’s Pizza: Suicidal Wings and Margherita Pizza (seems fitting). We’d laugh and talk and catch each other up on happenings at work and in our extended families, and often share the food and drink with random neighbor friends who somehow began to realize that the party was always at my house on Friday nights.
After consumption of the ritas, driving was perhaps not a good idea, so my friends always made use of the guest room and stayed through breakfast. My son really loved watching Thomas the Tank Engine with his godparents on those after-ritas mornings, or having them bring the ferocious-looking gentle giant Dolly to his Saturday Little League games. Simple pleasures…but I digress. This post is about a citrus juicer. Stick with me…
The main margarita-maker is the male of the couple, and he is GOOD. I’m working on him to become a guest blogger and publish his recipe here or just let me post it (stay tuned). He got tired of packing the juicer for the Friday treks, so they bought a new one and made their old Krups model a permanent installation at my house. Years later, it made the move to Glover Gardens just fine.
I love this vintage juicer. I’ve been hooked on citrus the past month since my midnight harvest of our tiny orange and lemon crop before a hard freeze, and have been working the juicer overtime to use all 28 fruits in a variety of recipes. You can juice an orange in less than 30 seconds with just slight pressure on the cone. And there is No Juice Left Behind. I used to have a big juice extractor, but this kind of juicer is actually easier to use and much easier to clean.
Sadly, this hardworking little Krups model is “out of print”, so to speak, but you might find one on eBay or at a garage sale. Snap it up, if you do! There are other electric juicers that use the spinning cone approach on the market, but I haven’t tried any of them. Click here for the current ones available on Amazon (not an ad or promotion, just a public service).
It’s not an every-Friday event any more, and we live too far for our margarita-making friends to “run on out here”, but at least a few times each year, they arrive at Glover Gardens armed with margarita supplies and settle in for the night. We’ve got the right juicer. 🙂
Resources
- Recipes that use citrus juice from my Krups juicer (with more to come as I work my way through the rest of the 2017 crop):
- Moonlight Citrus Harvest Haiku, the story of our 2017 crop
- For another story that features life in quaint Old Sugar Land (at least at the beginning), click here
Copyright 2017, Glover Gardens Cookbook
Friends like that are a blessing! (Not just for the margueritas obviously…….)