WA sisters write cocktail book that’s also a gardener’s dream

In the late 2010s, as sisters Belinda Kelly and Venise Cunningham planted their drink-syrup business in the fertile lands of the north foothills of Mount Rainier, they struggled to find resources that spoke to their growing vision.

Beyond the boundless edification of trial and error, they read books — about farming and gardening, bitters and shrubs, cocktails and cooking and the art of the dinner party. It might seem incontrovertible that these earthly tasks go hand-in-hand, yet in the dense ether of cottagecore and tradwife TikToks, enlightening-to-disconcerting Instagram DIY reels, cookbooks and shows with seemingly any famous person who eats, recalled Kelly in March, “There wasn’t a book that did all of the things we wanted to learn.”

So, amid getting dirt under their fingernails — much to the chagrin of their Enumclaw-based photographer and friend Rylea Foehl — and ice in their shakers, they poured over shared Google docs night after night.

“Drink Your Garden: Recipes, Stories, and Tips from the Simple Goodness Cocktail Farm” from Countryman Press, an imprint of W.W. Norton, hits shelves this spring. At 250 pages, it’s the compendium of garden-to-glass literacy they wished they’d had.

“We want garden to glass to be as big as farm to table,” said Kelly. “Are you drinking intentionally and with a purpose?” asked Cunningham.

Cocktail book meets gardening guide

The book aims to give anyone, from home bartenders and gardeners to professionals and everyone in-between, the confidence to maximize everything you buy or grow. It’s as much a cocktail and bartender’s resource as it is a gardening and preservation guide.

“Hopefully it can be your jumping-off point,” Cunningham said.

It begins with the sun-kissed star of the garden-to-glass universe, or “homesteading, light” — the cocktail garden — and moves through how to squeeze every ounce of goodness from that labor. There are recipes for syrups and cordials with fruits, spruce tips and flowers; shrubs (or drinking vinegars) of figs, ginger and beets; tinctures, liqueurs and infused spirits like fennelcello and veggie garden vodka; juices, teas and botanical waters; and garnishes, from candying citrus wheels to braiding chive flower stems and quick-pickling asparagus.

“Growers cannot bear to throw out or waste what they’ve spent months carefully tending, and so they must create something, anything,” Kelly writes in the book’s introduction. “The same plant that gives you a crisp and refreshing salad this month can give you a pickle, a sauce, or a cocktail syrup next winter, when the garden is frozen over.”

Added Cunningham in a March interview, “High-quality ingredients are expensive for people, and there are thin margins at bars, but people don’t necessarily translate that into their own home.”

Each recipe reveals a personal snapshot of the authors and their families, whether through endearing anecdotes or lessons learned. They also highlight multiple uses, with corresponding page numbers, in 50 cocktails and 13 nonalcoholic sippers.

Add it to your collection for the garden planning, including 13 edible flowers for showstopping flair and a fanciful infusion chart, alone.

The tips in this chapter and throughout the book are incredibly detailed but not overbearing. They “give you permission” to skip the growing part if you hate dirt; outsourcing is dandy, too, although they encourage supporting local farmers markets whenever possible, especially to keep with the seasons.

Maybe you have a whole yard you’ve dreamed of turning into a cottage garden or you have one small garden box. Turn to page 43 for Cunningham’s 4-by-4-foot cocktail garden map, replete with lavender, chamomile and rosemary, prolific nasturtium, tomatoes and chives, hot peppers, basil and cilantro, marigolds and buzz buttons.

After reading the sisters’ description, you’ll immediately want to plant the latter flower, also called toothache plant or electric daisy. Used in Chinese medicine and known for their “popping or buzzing” sensation when chewed, they likely entered the drink sphere via a bartender in Las Vegas. They are, Kelly writes, “a gimmick that just keeps giving … found stuffed in Venise’s cheeks like a hippie’s chewing tobacco in late summer.”

Cultivate your own ‘happier hour’’

Other reminders — to not touch your eyes after handling jalapenos to avoid “peppery eyeballs,” to embrace your “weird like tarragon,” to be content with sharing half-eaten bags of nuts and crackers so long as they’re arranged nicely on a serving board — bring an irreverence to a lifestyle that, with the Simple Goodness Sisters as your unfussy chaperones, feels attainable.

Calling it cottagecore “all feels a bit more folksy — we’re not that,” said Kelly. “We’re busy people.”

Inspired by accomplished recipe developers and food celebrities like Alison Roman, whose signature “Home Movies” style catapulted her to fame, and the dinner party queen Ina Garten, they wanted the book to tell the stories they couldn’t tell in Instagram posts.

“Everything we’ve done in the Simple Goodness world lends itself very well to a book,” explained Kelly.

What started as a garlic farm in Buckley morphed into a dynamic cocktail garden, but Cunningham, the farmer, was defining that idea in real time. She and Kelly, the bartender, looked to incorporate homegrown herbs and flowers into packaged syrups to make restaurant-worthy drinks, both with alcohol and without, at any kind of bar or in any kind of kitchen. That, too, was an exercise in experimentation — in the inevitable failures and victories of both farming and small business ownership.

They gleaned more on-the-ground insights in the teeny town of Wilkeson, where they opened a family-friendly bar and restaurant in 2021. That steady stream of locals and Mount Rainier National Park visitors became “our little focus group,” said Kelly, who has also crafted three cocktail recipes every month for their Cocktail Farm Club.

“Drink Your Garden” also serves as a much-needed reminder to breathe, to call your friend for a drink last-minute, to include your kids in what the sisters call “happier hour,” a lesson they learned from their grandmother, Nancy.