I have been vindicated.

This rant is a long one so please, do make yourself comfy. There’s a lot of times I could have gone with the “to cut a long story short” option in the piece, but then my yarn would be condensed to a paragraph and much less humiliating for me. And no one wants that.

So please, boil the kettle and find yourself a pillow.

The other day I came home from work, treated myself to a cup of tea and a read a bit of Nigella Express – Nigella Lawson’s book where she details her most half-arsed but lovingly-created recipes for people who don’t want to fuck around cooking for half the night but also don’t want to eat crap. It’s excellent and I’ve been reading it like a novel lately.

Reading Nigella is like curling up with a big bowl of macaroni and cheese with a scented candle burning – it’s just so soothing and comforting. After watching so many of her shows last year, I now hear her voice when I read the delightful blurbs that accompany her recipes. Her words are like my godmother telling me to take care of myself and not in the “eating your greens” and “keep the apartment door locked” kind of way. It’s the kind of “take care of yourself’ that’s about loving yourself and going easy on yourself and being kind to little old you after a hard day. I love reading her justifications for decadence. “I can’t defend my doughnut French toast from a nutritional point of view, certainly,” I imagine her saying in her warm, understanding way, “but know it has to exist”.

Brilliant.

Anyway, I was getting to the tail end of the book when I reached the Christmas drinks recipes. And amongst the gingery fizz and ode to eggnog was something called rouge limonade.

And you want to know what that is?

Red wine and lemonade.

This is huge for me personally.

You see, as a thirsty, tight-arsed uni student, I was one to mix a little lem and red together.

My friend and I would routinely sign up to attend the formal dinners held by our brother college. These dinners were surprisingly swanky (well, Queensland college swanky anyway…) and would see a whole bunch of wine bottles plonked on the tables of guests. Guests like my friend and I who had very little interest in the guest speakers brought in to inspire the leaders of tomorrow. We weren’t there to network or be motivated to become better people. We were there for the wine.

Only, I hated wine. Sure, I could double-fist glasses of champs until the bar tab ran out at balls but that’s only because of the soft-drink-like fizz. And I would smash a goon bag out of necessity, but even then I would attempt to mask the rank taste of bad choices and paint thinner.

White wine tasted like foot vinegar to me. Red wine was like prune-infused brine.

But I loved being drunk. It was one of the closest things I had to a hobby at the time. So I did what I could to mask the taste of the potent reds tempting us at the dinner table. And being a resourceful young woman, I worked with what I had: lemonade.

I mixed the two together and found it more than bearable. It was actually kind of good.

Now, people scoff at this. They think it’s the ultimate white trash. I’m classless. Scum. I have a palate with the sophistication of a five-year-old daycare kid who licks the other children.

I would reason that it tasted good. I tried to explain the merits of a sweeter, more carbonated red. I justified the combo as a way to make a heinous metho-grade red more palatable. I would argue that it was simply sangria without the menacing fruit pieces.

And yet, people continued to scoff.

But now I have been exonerated.

Not only has my drink been legitimised by a world-famous cook, but it even has a name. And fark me, apparently it’s even something they do in country France. Country France. That’s the epitome of quaint. “It’s not chic, but it’s thirst-quenching,” the goddess herself writes. She even agrees that it is a “major help at a party”, a claim which I have plenty of anecdotal evidence to back up.

Suddenly, I feel all my other “laughable” concoctions could be just as authoritative. My onion and bacon swelter, my tiger toast depression cure, heck, even my favourite childhood sandwiches (Maggi two-minute noodles on white bread with lots of butter). And all it seems that all takes to legitimise this is to put it in print.

That’s it, I’m writing my own cookbook.