I’m starting the week off with an easy recipe. We had a very fun and productive weekend, but I think I’m still suffering from a little bit of jet lag. Every night, 8:30 or 9 p.m. rolls around and I’m falling asleep in my chair. Right now I am drinking Tazo’s “Awake” English Breakfast Tea. It is 7:54 p.m.

Maybe I can attribute it just a little bit to our busy weekend. Yesterday Dave and I worked for hours reorganizing our kitchen, getting rid of unneeded donation items and throwing out all of the boxes in our basement. They tend to pile up after a while, but boy does our storage area look nice now! I mean really, it’s so organized and clean. Things are in permanent plastic containers rather than cardboard boxes. And all of the cardboard boxes are safely at the recycling center. We even were able to recycle the packing peanuts and bubble wrap we found down there! Did you know that Postal Annex takes old packing material to reuse? Well, now you do. Well done, Postal Annex.

We finished up our big day of organization yesterday with a pretty amazing dinner. My parents bought Dave a copy of Ted Allen’s “In My Kitchen,” which is a fabulous cookbook, and we used it to inspire our dinner from last night. We also had a little remaining ginger beer from Rachel’s Ginger Beer in Seattle, and Dave suggested we do an easy riff on a Dark and Stormy. It turned out to be a perfect cocktail for us to enjoy while we worked on the other delicious elements of our dinner.

Here’s what you need:

3 oz. mango ginger beer (recommended: Rachel’s Ginger Beer)
1.5 oz. dark rum
Twist of orange
Ice

Fill a rocks glass with ice – if you have a large ice mold, an ice cube from it would be even better. We like these round ice molds.

Add a handful of ice, the ginger beer and dark rum to a cocktail shaker. Shake until chilled and then pour over the ice in the glass.

Finish by squeezing the orange above the drink, then rubbing the rim of the glass all the way around with the orange peel. Afterward, use the orange peel as garnish.

Now that I think about it, some orange bitters would probably be really nice in this.