Cocktail hour at the dirty dogs!

This post is the first of what will undoubtedly be many celebrating my amazing sister Melissa. She is a creative genius-talented in all of several crafts and a skilled artist. 

Several months ago she told me about an idea she had for a Christmas gift for my hubs. She had gotten a stencil making machine, and was working on stencil drawings of our dogs. We have three dogs: Elsie, a great lady of experience and class; Ernie, a desert dog brought to the US from the Middle East, and Emmett, our COVID Oops Puppy. You may have noticed a theme in their names. Collectively, we call the lot of them “The E’s”. The original E was my #1 souldog, whose name was Eddie. He passed a few years ago (at the tender age of 18) but not before making a significant impression on everyone who met him. 

My sister wanted to make cocktail glasses with visages of each of the four E’s, and she enlisted me to make signature cocktails for each one. I do like to make up my own cocktails, so this was a really fun project for me. Especially figuring out how to integrate the unique personality and features of each E. 

Aren’t they incredible?

I’ll likely be sharing new cocktails every so often, but I thought I would start with these, so that I can show off the incredible glasses my sister made (and more importantly, her portraits of the pups).

First off is the Tux and Tails, which belongs to Eddie. 

Image courtesy of my sis.

I got Eddie in my early 20s. I was a couple of years into grad school, and had adopted a retired racing greyhound. Arthur was a lovely gent; I had him for over a year but he never adapted to the travel schedule I was maintaining as a student of anthropology. My hope had been to have my parents take care of him when I was traveling, but he had a hard time in the car. I tried several things, including having people come to the house and stay with him when I was away, but he remained highly anxious. 

Among the things I tried was adopting him a companion - Eddie. I met Eddie at a local rescue, and immediately he began to play and run around with such joy, I knew he’d need to come home with me one way or another.

Eddie coming around seemed to help Arthur come out of his shell a little bit, but not enough to make it a workable situation. Arthur didn’t seem to think of other dogs as dogs - or rather, he didn’t think of himself as a dog, he only really got excited to see other greyhounds. I really didn’t know how to help Arthur, but I began to suspect that my home wasn’t going to offer him what he needed. Which seemed to be a high degree of predictability, every single day, which I wasn’t in a position to give him.

Fortunately, I had a neighbor who adored Arthur. She’d greet him every evening as we walked around the complex, and I had shared with her some of our struggles. At one point, she suggested she might be able to adopt Arthur. It seemed like a better situation for him than what I was offering. She was from Atlanta, and rarely traveled, since her family was all there. Best of all, she was getting ready to move to a house next door to a herd of six greyhounds. She had asked their “dad” if Arthur might play with them if he came to live next door, and he said absolutely. The match was blessed by the rescue, and in the end Arthur went with her and did really well. 

As a note: as a life-long lover of all companion animals, the decision to rehome him wasn’t an easy one - adopting a dog is a commitment for their whole life. However, in this case, his needs weren’t well met by the life I was trying to set up for myself. Some people will say that you should change your life before rehoming a dog. I would never in a million years have given Arthur up to a shelter, and it would have taken a lot to even contemplate sending him back to the rescue where he’d be taking up the place of another dog in need. But in this case, I knew that Arthur was going to be much, much happier with his new mom, and she had already grown to love him, so it didn’t feel like I was putting him into harm’s way. I did a home visit with him a month after he was rehomed, and he was doing very well. His mom also knew that I would take him back or help her out if she ever ran into trouble, and she signed the agreement with the rescue to turn him over to them in the event she ever couldn’t keep him. The risk felt low, and as far as I know he stayed with her for the rest of his life. This was before social media, so we didn’t stay in touch the same way we might have today. 

Eddie, of course, stayed with me. He was a dapper gentleman, always dressed to the nines in a black tuxedo with white spats. In his early years, he could practically walk on his hind legs; when I had dinner parties, he would make the circuit around the kitchen, walking from person to person on his hind legs collecting scritches and snacks. He was a charmer until his final days, showing unfettered but not overwhelming affection for everyone he encountered. 

I adopted Elsie (who will get her spotlight in a coming post) a few years later; she’s white with black spots; I used to call them my little salt and pepper shakers. 

So it felt right to do something a little peppery for Eddie’s cocktail. Hub’s favorite is a dirty martini; and of course this was a gift for hubs, so on that concept I came up with a dirty martini that uses caper juice instead of olive juice for that extra pep. To create that deep black of a nice tuxedo and to add that extra richness, I used oil-cured black olives as the garnish (plus a twist of lemon). 

Eddie left us almost five years ago; it’s hard to imagine that it’s been that long, but those who knew him still have him in their hearts. Even in his final years when we had to administer sub-cutaneous fluids every other day to help his kidneys, he never registered the slightest pain. He only ever showed how glad he was to be cuddled up in his dad’s lap for a little while. He was a true gentleman, and the kindest, sweetest soul. RIP little manski, we love you.

The final recipe is below: 

Tux and Tails AKA Most Charming Gentleman

Photo credit: The Hubs

• 3 parts vodka (or gin)

• 1/2 part dry vermouth

• 1/2 part caper brine

• Garnish: 2 to 4 oil-cured olives and a lemon twist