Free Candy

L'Ailee and I had Valentine's night last night in order to accommodate the Daytona 500 today. Not a great tradeoff, as it turned out--Tony Stewart's car sucked all day, there were over 2 hours' worth of delays to fix potholes in the track, and Jamie McMurray won it. Another tradeoff we made for the 500 was only watching the Pittsburgh Penguins/Nashville Predators game during commercials and part of that first long red flag delay. We missed Sidney Crosby's 42nd goal, but we did get to watch Brooks Orpik score his annual goal! It was the sports highlight of the afternoon.

I meant to post this before Orpik went to play for Team USA in the Olympics anyway. I wouldn't have considered something sweet for Orpik, except that "Free Candy" just seemed like such an obvious name for his cocktail. Something named "Free Candy" almost has to be quite sweet, and then we had the cotton cannnDEEEE at Mellon Arena, and Jones' vanilla sodas taste a lot like cotton candy, so...I ended up with this. It's good.

Free Candy

About 6-8 ounces Jones Vanilla Bean soda or Jones Zilch Vanilla
2 ounces (1 shot) strawberry-flavored vodka

Half-fill a large tumbler with ice. Pour ingredients in. Stir or shake gently.

There are lots of red/white/blue cocktails out there, which seem appropriate for celebrating Team USA. Those will be coming within a couple days.

Let's go Pens! Um, I mean, USA! USA! USA!