cooking.nytimes.com

Frank Bruni, a former restaurant critic for The Times, came up with this drink at Ward III, a lounge in Tribeca that lets you choose the ingredients and qualities you want in a drink that's then custom-made for you. It's a lightly-sweet strawberry-tequila cocktail that gets a flicker of heat from the addition of jalapeño. It's got summer written all over it. Keep in mind that some jalapeño is hotter than others: it’s impossible to give a measure that will assure a specific degree of heat. So if you make the following recipe, go especially light on the jalapeño the first time around, and don’t overdo the ice in the shaker.