Personal Creations, Finger Limes and Planters Punch!

I had some grand – albeit vague – plans for Labor Day Weekend. But being a grown up with jobs and junk (HOW did I let responsibility happen in my life?!), I ended up doing what Jonathan and I always do on not-quite-but-almost-holidays… staying in and binge watching Netflix! (Kind of like Netflix and chill, but the boring parents-of-a-toddler variety.)

But when we chill at home, we do it RIGHT. We have a professional bar tool set from Personal Creations that we were itching to use over the weekend (Jonathan is my personal mixologist, so the initials are his!) and to better utilize the contemporary bar tool set and properly christen it’s first use (two piece glass and stainless steel cocktail shaker set, double jigger, lemon/lime slicing knife, bottle opener, cocktail strainer, stirrer, tongs, chopping board and rectangular stand) we pulled out our favorite cocktail – Freeman’s Planters Punch – that utilizes a little bit of everything the bar set had!

We’ve made this cocktail a bazilliondy times, but this time we decided to sex it up a bit with fresh squeezed orange juice from Ferry Farms and fresh lemon juice and finger limes from Lindcove Ranch at the Visalia Farmers Market.

Now finger limes are really freaking cool. Enter the wise sage Wikipedia:

The Australian finger lime plant (Citrus australasica) is a small thorny tree. The finger lime has been recently popularized as a gourmet food and the globular juice vesicles have been likened to a “lime caviar”, which can be used as a garnish or in lieu of limes in recipes. The fresh vesicles have the effect of a burst of effervescent tangy flavour as they are chewed.

I was super duper excited to discover this cool fruit at Lindcove’s booth! I’d never seen this freakish little thing before, and I was fiddling with it, staring at it, and fantasizing about all the cool cocktails I would make with it the entire way home from the market!

I ended up using the finger limes to rim our Planters Punch glass! Instead of lime juice, sugar and cayenne on the rim, we used agave nectar on the rim (to make it lovely and sticky!) and slid the finger limes over the rim and sprinkled the cayenne on top!

Fresh Central Valley orange juice, lemon juice and lime caviar did this potent concoction of rum, sugar good! It’s not a bad twist on this iconic drink of the South!

Fresh, local, gourmet cocktails mixed in a personalized pro bar kit, and imbibed while zoning out over a White Collar marathon on Netflix? Not a bad holiday weekend if I do say so myself! 😉

Check out the recipe to my lovely lazy Labor Day Weekend:

Lindcove Ranch

Ferry Farms

Visalia Farmers Market

Personal Creations

CLICK HERE to see our Freeman’s Planters Punch recipe!