Jalapenorita

This recipe was tweeted by Tabasco, so it is shamelessly stolen. I love Margaritas and Dirty Martinis so I have been really keen to try this.

½ a lime

Coarse sea salt

400ml gold tequila

100ml Grand Marnier

1tsp Green Tabasco

Dampen the rim of a glass with a piece of lime and dip it into a saucer of salt a few times until the rim is nice and crusty. We have some Martini glasses that my brother persuaded me to buy from Ikea ages ago. They turned out to be a good investment.

Squeeze the lime into a cocktail shaker. It needs to be nice ripe juicy one which can be a challenge.

I have a couple of cocktail shakers but my favourite is etched with the Martini logo which I think is from the 70s. Pour in everything else and add some ice and strain into the glass, being careful to preserve the salty rim. We have had to hunt the ingredients down. Our tequila is silver, so that needed replacing, and we don’t have Grand Marnier, though we do have Cointreau which will do just as well. Hardest to track down was the green Tabasco, though Waitrose do stock it. The boy loves it for dipping chips in. We stock up when we find it. I feel I want to try a really good tequila but Jose Cuervo is all I can find.I can't bring myself to buy the brand that has a plastic sombrero as a bottle top.

It’s cocktail hour. We have a Josephine Baker CD on but are mostly ignoring it. Dipping tortilla chips into some very hot tomato salsa. I think the tartness of tomato goes with this; the boy just likes salty snacks.