Friday Happy Hour: Bloody Mary

The Bloody Mary is an old dowager of a drink that has remained as relevant as ever, maybe kind of like Hillary Clinton or, well, even Bill Clinton.

Like a lot of truly vintage cocktails, the Bloody Mary traces its roots back to the 1920s -- and this one even has a Paris pedigree.

Now that we're in August, maybe you have some tomatoes ripening, or have already plucked some tomatoes from your garden (or your neighbor's). Fresh tomatoes are one of the great rewards of the dog days of summer. We mention the Bloody Mary at this time because this drink is an imaginative way to put some of those tomatoes to good use.

For our drink, we used 2 fresh tomatoes. We muddled them rigorously, and then strained the juice, but you can also use a blender or any other device you can think of to pulverize the tomatoes. For us, this yielded about 4.5 ounces. For you, it may differ.

The fresh tomato juice breathes some new life into this old drink. Here's the recipe we used (but there are a lot of extras that are optional):

3 to 1 tomato juice to vodka (so, 4.5 oz tomato juice and 1.5 oz vodka)
.5 oz lemon juice
1 teaspoon of Worcestershire Sauce
sprinkling of pepper

Optional items include celery salt (some might argue this is hardly optional), horseradish, olive brine, or Tabasco Sauce.

We garnished ours with a classic celery stalk, but you can add a slice of lemon, olives, or any other kind of savory item. This is truly a savory drink.