Squid Mixes: Martini

Story time.  The first olive I ever ate was out of my grandmother's martini.  I have no idea how old I was.  9, maybe?  As a kid, I adored fruit of all kinds and her olive looked like a grape so I asked to try.  She agreed to let me, with an impish grin.  Blech!  Ruined me for both olives and gin for years!  Fortunately, I have since come around on both.

When taking on cocktails as a hobby, the martini is, of course, inevitable.  However, neither of us is an especially big fan of the king of cocktails.  I've had it on my list of possibilities for a while and on Sunday, my wife finally said "we might as well get this over with."  The classic recipe is gin and dry vermouth, 6 parts to 1, olive garnish.  You'd better really like gin in order to enjoy it!  I made mine from Robert Simonson's variation in 3-Ingredient Cocktails: 3:1 with a dash of orange bitters and a lemon twist.

The result was, I must say, quite nice.  With the orange bitters (seemingly a favorite of Simonson's), you don't really taste much of the gin.  The lemon's a good choice, too.  The following is a video of me, encouraging the lemon peel to express itself: