DO IT YOURSELF

CUCUMBER-GIN COCKTAIL

My mother keeps all the Jamie magazines (you know, from Oliver). Give me a stack and you won't hear from me for the next few hours. Somewhere in an issue from last year, there was a cocktail with gin and cucumber. I thought it was an excellent drink to start last week's Easter dinner and also an excellent drink to share with you now. It really breaks the week nicely. I did tweak the recipe a bit to my own taste, sorry Jamie.

Peel the cucumber and chop it into pieces. Put it in a cup where you can easily use an immersion blender. Blend everything into a puree.

Add a small splash of rose water and mix again. Just put the cup in the fridge for a while.

Take two small plates. On one, pour a splash of rose water and on the other plate a mix of salt and sugar. Dip the rim of the glass in the rose water and then in the salt-sugar mixture. There, now you have a nice rim.

Now you need crushed ice. I only had ice cubes. I wrapped a bunch in a sturdy tea towel and then look for a wall that you can hit really hard against so that the ice cubes break and get crushed. It's a bit of a task, but it works.

Put a lot of crushed ice in a cocktail shaker, along with half of the cucumber mix and pretend you're a bartender. Shake shake shake.

Then divide the whole mixture between two glasses and finish it off with a basil leaf.
Then do the same with the other half of the cucumber mix.

A cocktail: a good idea at any time of the day.