Rainy Sunday wine
Eppa Sangria
It's rainy today, and we're 2 solid weeks in to coronavirus quarantine. We're stocked up on food, hubs is halfway through a 1000 piece puzzle that we've somehow managed to keep out of the hands of the 2 year old. I've been sewing masks and, in my efforts to come up with a genius new pattern that no one has ever conceptualized before, I've successfully wasted a fair amount of fabric and time. So I've gone back to the tried and true triple pleat with elastic ears. I'll post a tutorial under crafts.
My older kids, who normally don't get screen time at all, are both on their tablets, quietly melting their brains - the 4yo somehow found Spiderman episodes in Spanish, so my expectation is that he'll come away from the afternoon fluent in another language. The baby is wandering around the house aimlessly, occasionally letting himself in and out of the front door to check to see if it's stopped raining. And of course, asking every 7 seconds if we can have "candy dinner". It's just the right kind of day to open up a delicious sangria.
My first taste of sangria, or what I thought was sangria, was when I was 16. I spent several weeks at a Spanish language immersion school in Seville over the summer between 10th and 11th grade with a bunch of classmates from my high school. Every Wednesday there was a booze cruise that ventured slowly up and down the river for a few hours, and it was always packed with the high school and college students studying at the school where we were studying. Down the main street from the boat dock was a large open area, almost like an amphitheater. There was a little store there, and we could buy a bottle of red wine and a bottle of Sprite. They called it "Tinto de Verano", it tasted like juice, and it didn't take much for my 90lb frame to drink too much.
These days, I know what actual sangria is, and occasionally I indulge in the real stuff with rum and actual pieces of fruit. Today, though, I'm taking the easy route. Eppa Sangria, from Target (naturally). It's sweet, but not too sweet, with a teeny tiny bit of a bubble, which is strange because it's not carbonated. To add extra bubbles (and call up memories of my youth...) I sometimes add Sprite. It's also delicious mixed with a little lemonade if you've got a splash of juice left and don't feel like hearing the argument about who gets the last sip... Mom gets it.
That should always be the answer, at least when it comes to wine and cookies.
