My Front Door Mojito Delivery Service

The benefit of making sushi for your neighbors is that one day—one day when you’ve had a terrible, awful no good, very bad day—your neighbor might happen to drop by to borrow your Cuisinart.

On this particular day, you may be reeling from discovering that the person who was meant to be helping you with a very large project seems to be in la-la land. She hasn’t been able to do the few small tasks she was given a month ago, she tells you, due to the fact that she’s been busy going to bridal expos because she is getting married—wait for it—next summer.

You tell your neighbor how very awful your day has been—how very awful the next two months of your life are going to be because you now have to do two people’s work—and how, while you love weddings and appreciate how very much work they are to plan, you don't think they should completely incapacitate a person for an entire year.

Then, offhandedly, you say you need a mojito. She asks you what a mojito is and you explain that it’s a Cuban cocktail made with mint, lime, rum, and soda water. She says it sounds good and you agree that, indeed, they do hit the spot. You don’t drink much these days, but every once in a while you get the hankering.

And it’s not ten minutes later when the doorbell rings and your neighbor is standing there, a glass filled with mint, lime, and rum in her hand, a smile on her face. “Here,” she says. “I think you could use this.”

And that, my dear friends, is what being neighborly is all about.

For more about the miraculous mojito, and a recipe, take a look at Anita and Cameron’s blog, Married…with Dinner. These two are serious cocktail aficionados, unlike yours truly, and so nice that they’d be the type to bring you a drink when you've had a down day (not that any of us endorse alcohol as a panacea, ahem).

Also check out Jeffrey Morganthaler’s Dos and Don’ts of Mojitos, for the essential primer on mojito etiquette. I'm sure I've broken at least one of these rules before (sorry, Jeffrey—and bartenders everywhere).

As for me, I think I might have to hie myself away to the Zig Zag Cafe (Anita and Cameron’s favorite bar) here in Seattle, to try the mojitos made be the famed Murray Stetson, recently picked as one of the top ten bartenders in America by a certain girly mag whose name will not be mentioned here (click through at your own risk).

Hmmm, wonder if I can get the Zig Zag to deliver…