Summer Sangrias

I'm not that big of a drinker. But you wouldn't know that looking at my Pinterest board. In addition to non-alcoholic drinks and food recipes, I've collected a whole slew of cocktails - most of which I haven't actually tried.

When I do drink, I'm into stereotypically girly drinks - wine or fruity cocktails. Thus I love sangrias, because they are both wine-based and fruity. In fact, at its basic, that's all sangria is, wine and fruit. Its perfect in that it is both simple (sort of) and customizable. Along with the wine and fruit/fruit juice can be added other liquors (often rum), soda or seltzer water, and various sweeteners or spices.

In my collecting of drink recipes, I've come across sangrias for all seasons - sugar plum for Christmas, various fall apple cider based sangrias. It is summer, though, that I think sangria is truly best suited for.

Here are some of the most summer-worthy sangrias I've come across:

Cherry Limeade Sangria c/o Recipe Girl 

Limeades themselves are the epitome of summer, but this sangria ups the ante by mixing store-bought limeade with cherry juice, fresh cherries, Sauvignon Blanc and vodka.

Or how about a lemonade sangria? 

There are different variations around, but the above raspberry lemonade sangria looks amazingly easy and simple as well as refreshing. It uses just white wine, vodka, raspberry lemonade concentrate, fresh raspberries, and Sprite.

Did I mention I like fruity drinks? The tropical passion sangria from the blog Pineapple and Coconut is basically a cross between a pina colada and a sangria, with a little bit of passion fruit juice thrown in. The pineapple simple syrup sounds a little daunting though.

Krista from Joyful Healthy Eats mixes sweet summer fruits with a kick of spice in a Strawberry Jalapeno White Sangria. 

Of course it wouldn't be summer without iced tea. The Loveless Cafe in Nashville, Tennessee features a sweet tea sangria made with red wine, sweet tea, lemonade, strawberries, oranges and lemon.

Of course if I don't feel up to attempting any of these recipes, there's always chilled white wine mixed with frozen strawberries for a simple summer slush.

Cheers to summer!

Pixar Has Done It Again With Inside Out

Usually I leave the film reviews to Ken and stick to reviewing books, but I did want to post on Pixar's newest film, Inside Out. 

With my academic and personal interest in psychology (I double majored in it along with English in undergrad), I was really excited to see that Pixar would be making a film in which the main characters were personifications of the emotions inside a preteen girl's brain. Pixar has a reputation for making multilayer-ed films that appeal to adults as much as to children, but Inside Out took this beyond most of their previous films (beyond maybe Wall-E). Topics that I'm sure went beyond the heads of the many children in the audience included core memories, long-term memories, abstract reasoning, and dream production. Oh, and my favorite, a "train of thought" was portrayed as an actual train which the emotions Joy and Sadness hitch a ride on.

Joy and Sadness, along with Anger, Fear, and Disgust, live in the Headquarters of protagonist Riley's brain. With Joy in the lead, the team helps her make sense of the world, and things are going smoothly until Riley's parents uproot her happy home life in Minnesota with a move to San Francisco. From there, conflict ensues at Headquarters and Joy and Sadness find themselves lost.

It's all pretty existential stuff that only Pixar could pull off, making abstract emotions into believable characters. Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust look and sound the way we imagine the feelings they represent would. Anger is squat and red; Sadness is blue with a voice like Eeyore. The relentlessly optimistic Joy looks and acts like a fairy/pixie. And the green Disgust, voiced by Mindy Kaling, is all sarcasm and snark.

Yes, the kids in the audience, of which there were many, enjoyed Inside Out too. It's colorful and whimsical and funny, and not really scary (besides a couple scenes with a huge clown, which is terrifying at any age). But the content is way deeper than that of the average kids' movie.

I really appreciated the underlying message of the film, which was refreshing in a society that can take "positive thinking" overboard to the point of dismissing or suppressing all "negative" thoughts or emotions. Initially Joy tries to prevent Sadness from touching Riley's core memories and "tainting" them. Over the course of the film, however, she and the audience see that Sadness actually has an important place in Riley's life (and all our lives). It is Sadness that allows Riley to feel and receive empathy, and it is Sadness that finally urges her to open up to her parents about missing Minnesota.

I would enjoy seeing where Pixar would go with a sequel.  After all, our emotions only get more complex as we age. Would they add more characters to capture nuanced emotions like confusion or impatience? Or would the main team of emotions work together to create these degrees and blends of feeling? Maybe emotions are like colors, with primary colors mixing together to create blends or giving off more or less saturation for various shades/hues. But I digress...

After a few lackluster films, Pixar is definitely back to doing what they do best: multi-layered movies that are deeper than they appear. Inside Out has something for pretty much everyone - kids, adults, people with an interest in psychology, anyone trying to navigate their emotions in a healthy way. Yeah, really, everyone.