Dear PAMA, You Make Me Sad.

Earlier this month, one of our good friends, a bartender, clued us in to a contest by PAMA Pomegranate Liqueur, looking for the “Best Home Bar Star.” The contest required an original cocktail creation (using PAMA, of course), along with a photo of your entry, due by the end of the month.

After some poking through dessert recipes using pomegranates, I had a flash of inspiration: I’d take pear brandy (I’d bought a bottle with a big ol’ pear inside it as a gift for Shake last year) and combine it with some “exotic” spices and PAMA. Whoopee! I was off and running to Whole Foods for a six-dollar pomegranate. (And, can I tell ya, pomegranates? They smell kinda weird.)

A few recipe tweaks later, I had a recipe for my original concoction, now dubbed “Be Fruitful and Multiply.” It took two photo shoot attempts before I got photos I was satisfied with.

While waiting for some photo processing to run, I idly clicked on the fine print rules and eligibility statement for the contest…and right there, in the first paragraph:

The PAMA’s Best Home Bar Star Contest (Contest) is open to legal U.S. residents, except residents of Alabama, California, **HAWAII**, Puerto Rico, U.S. Territories and where prohibited, who are NOT professional mixologists or bartenders and are 21 years of age or older. [Emphasis all mine.]

D’oh. PAMA, why you gotta hate on Hawai‘i?

Shake says that I should sit on my recipe and enter it in some other contest later that’s willing to show Hawai‘i some love, so I’m not going to reveal it yet. But enjoy the photos! It sure took me long enough to get ones I liked!