I have a cold. It’s 81 degrees outside and probably 90 in my house. The tomatoes are so laden with fruit that the branches are breaking and a butterfly just flitted past the window. K and Dashman are talking about swimming and all signs point to a gentle slide into fall with plenty of sunshine, except that my throat is raw and my mind is foggier than Humbolt County.

This morning I dragged myself over to the Marvelous Plot of Awesomeness and came back with a bushel of ground cherries.

I thought that if I got out and walked around, my cold would take the hint that maybe it didn’t exist, but all the exertion only made me dizzy as well as sweaty. Back home, I realized that the extreme nature of my sore throat called for an extreme remedy, an exoti-toddy. While drinking a hot beverage on such a warm day seems counter intuitive, I recognized on my walk that my body really wanted to be sweating this virus out and that my throat was screaming for something warm and honey based.

And so the exoti-toddy was born. I shucked a handful of groundcherries (they grow in papery husks)

and muddled them in my pyrex measuring cup. Next I forced the pulp and juice through a mesh strainer, leaving the seeds and skins behind. I combined the ground cherry mush with a shot of rum, the juice of one desiccated lemon, a buttload of honey and hot water, and resisted the urge to add a cayenne pepper. The sweetness of the ground cherries paired perfectly with the old dry lemon and the rum. Seriously, this is my best cocktail yet! It coated my throat, tasted great, and didn’t make me all jittery like over the counter cold medicine does. I can’t wait to drink them when it’s actually cold out. Ground cherries keep for a couple months or so in their husks but I think I’ll puree a bunch and put them in the freezer for future exoti-toddy needs.