Jazz and wine and halloween

So it's intensely weird to eat at a restaurant where you wait tables. You see your boss and coworkers out of the corner of your eye and you're all "oh dammit I forgot to polish the big wine glasses aga... wait... wait..."

Even so, tasty stuff. I had a decent glass of red and a really excellent white burgundy. I don't know if it was really 12.50 a glass excellent... but it was certainly delicious. Very smokey. The jazz band was pretty awesome too.

Tonight I clean more for the party. The fun part will be dragging the table for beer pong into the basement in such nasty weather. Then I must acquire Red Cups and ping pong balls. At some point I am going to carve a pumpkin. I have a scene planned out of the Slender Man sneaking up on an unsuspecting person on his creepy legs. I'm going to need to find the right pumpkin for it.

I am somewhat disappointed in myself that I never made the pumpkin pie liqueur... it would have taken ages and breaking down pumpkins is so time consuming... so of course I'm going to do it in Friday to make my spicy pumpkin and sweet potato soup. Because what *else* would I do?

Rheingau Riesling Rocks

Nothing makes you want to drink more than waiting tables. If the service industry does not turn one into a raging misanthrope, it certainly turns one into an alcoholic. I enjoy working large parties, because most of the time people are so busy chatting with each other that they forget if I screw something up. Unfortunately tonight I was the only waiter who spoke English reliably. The others spoke only French. I was the only native English speaker in the entire staff that night, actually. It's depressing. I can't imagine how it feels to be in an entire country like that, divided off by language all the time.

Actually I can. I grew up in Germany. I learned enough German to get by, but I could only actually make friends with the other Army brats. Still, what a beautiful place to grow up in! We lived in a small town by the Rhein in a red sandstone castle (not kidding) within walking distance of the vinyards. We used to run around the vines and generally irritate the vintners as kids. It was good times.

It is impossible to get Eltville whine in America. They don't export it. This is a sadness for everyone who loves sweet riesling or spaetlese wines. It's hard enough to find good Rheingau wines at all, most riesling seems to come from the Mosel valley or somewhere in heathen France. I updated about our last bottle of Rheingau riesling earlier in the blog and was unimpressed, but my mother managed to find a bottle of riesling from a vinyard only a few miles down the road from our village: Schloss Vollrads.

I am not normally a fan of sweet wines. I find that most rieslings taste either like honey or vinegar. This, however, is very tasty.

It has a faint, fall appley smell. It is a very sharp wine, light bodied and  almost feels like it's pinching your tongue. It tastes like apples that have been macerating in sugar. It is a very fall drink, it conjures up images of fires, blankets, and early snows. I am enjoying it.

This weekend should have been much more interesting in terms of bottles being opened. it was MetalChef's 21st birthday party, after all. I gave him a gift of the cinnamon-apple infusion (formerly the apple-botulism infusion) and we all had a bit of a taste. Wow it was good. I probably over-sweetened it, which is unfortunate 'cause I definitely don't have a record of how much simple syrup I actually used. The cinnamon aftertaste was strong, almost, but not quite, overpowering. I almost think I should have used a stronger tasting apple. I used a Fiji apple when I should have used Granny Smith. I hate eating Fiji apples though, while if there is a Granny Smith available I am probably already eating it.

Anyway, the big problem at that party was that I decided to layer a bottle of hard cider on top of questionable alfredo, which was itself layered on top of a knot of seething, unthinking rage. This is not a recipe for success, and I found myself quite unable to continue drinking after a bottle and a half of cider. What a shame.

On Saturday I had an overly sweet margarita sno-cone at the Greene Turtle in Ocean City with the Boyfriend after watching Zombieland, which was a surprisingly excellent movie.  There was an exceptional band playing there called Pompous Pie. They were not exceptional for their music, which was decent, rather for the volume at which it was played. For some reason the Greene Turtle on Rt. 611 feels that they need to provide music for the entire eastern shore, and turns up their speakers appropriately. I just want to have a terrible boat drink and chat, you bastards!

Party with Stark

Today I went to Corridor and my wallet cried. This is what I got:

Miller Lite (for beer pong)
Yuengling (for dranking the drank)
Rum (silver and gold)
Drego Azul tequila (and the gross-ass margarita mix I like)
Stoli Vanilla vodka
Frangelico
Silver vodka
Vampire cabernet
Two Big Cheap Bottles Of Wine (when they are this cheap you pronounce it "whaan")

So god damn. God damn. God damn.

I wonder where I am going to keep all this?

goddamn goons. goddamn slender man.

I make poor decisions. Today's poor decision was to read all the Slender Man stories on Something Awful. After watching the first few Marble Hornets episodes. I am now jumping at movement in my peripheral vision. Luckily I own a parrot, so screeching and giggling sounds are so standard in my life that I can't even notice. And so I turn to wine and terrible German pop to drive the distressing images out of my mind.

Last night I had a large party of people order a large quantity of red meat. They ordered three bottles of red and one bottle of white, and proceeded to drink all the red and half of the white, so I liberated the bottle. It is another white burgundy wine, I can't find the grape varietal, and it is tangy and tropical and kind of delightful for sitting open in my fridge overnight.

I also decanted the apple-caramel and the raspberry infusions. They both smell *amazing.* I flavored the raspberry with a metric crapton (about a half cup) of simple syrup and dropped some food coloring in there to turn it a beautiful, dark-dark red. I made knockoff chambord! Yay me! I have no idea how I am going to use this stuff at my party. I guess people can drink the apple-caramel stuff like a martini, maybe with a rim of cinnamon-sugar. I think I'll mix the raspberry stuff with the pama knockoff and add... something else, maybe just straight up pomegranate juice... and call it Persephone's Tears. Suggestions?

GREs

Okay first? To hell with the GREs. They are useless as tools to determine suitability for graduate study. I have an undergraduate degree, graduated cum laude, and completed an undergraduate thesis and a separate comprehensive exam, and to hell with you I don't need to retake the SATs to prove my academical worth!

But yeah I got a pretty good score so go me!

In other news, it's booze-buying week for the Halloween Shindig. My paycheck is pretty much going to determine what sorts/how much I am providing. I know that there will be beer and wine and probably some basic stuff like vodka, rum, and tequila... we shall see!

Big Post! Many pictures!

I have been procrastinating updating this blog because I have been pretending to study for the GREs. There is something really peculiar about a single exam that may determine the next three to six years of my future. I do not like it one bit.

So lets start with the oldest news! It is MetalChef's birthday party this coming Friday, so I made him a present! 

Yes, that is the apple-botulism infusion. It does not actually have any botulism in it.

Check out those tasty, vodka-filled apples! They look tasty to me! But I nibbled one and wanted to die, and that was my lesson in "looks are deceivingly full of vodka."

Next I put the apples in some cheesecloth and squeezed them like they owed me money, or perhaps were dating my younger sister.

Now for some cinnamon simple syrup! which is made exactly like the regular type of simple syrup, except you throw a stick of cinnamon in there.

All together now! I'm still trying to find a good way to bottle it for gift-giving purposes, so it looks less like moonshine and more like the tasty apple pie schnapps that it is. we shall see, we shall see.

I also checked out my other infusions and decided that the pomegranite one wasn't looking too good after about a week, so obviously it needed to have the berries swapped.

                                     

See how the berries are all white and pale? The liquid looks a lot darker in that picture than it was. It was a very pale pink, not anywhere near the deep red I wanted for my Pama knockoff. So obviously it was time for a new pomegranite.

This pomegranite was about twice the size of the first one and had twice the berries. Cutting open pomegranites is always kind of fun because you can pretend to be sacraficing hearts on an alter. Or maybe that's just me, I don't know.

That is MUCH nicer, isn't it? Now, this was some time last week. I can't quite recall. I *believe* it was before Texas showed up. hopefully these things will be all nice and tasty for my Halloween Party.

Now I could start talking about Pub Dog, but that's BeerSnob's schtick and I'll let him have it. Suffice it to say that I got a Blonde Dog beer and it was tasty, refreshing, and four dollars.

The more interesting news is that I went over to the B's house last night. I've known these people for pretty much my entire conscious lifetime. They are good people and dangerously fun to drink with. By the time I came over they and my parents had already finished off the better part of two bottles of wine, though I got the last glass of a pretty unspectacular muscadet. The one we have at work is honey sweet and kind of super gross. This one tasted like lemons. It was tart and kind of nice for that, but it had a completely different flavor profile than I was expecting. It was okay with the foie gras (they left me a piece, thank god. I was both starving and REALLY looking forward to eating that stuff), but not as good as the vouvray they had before I showed up. I love vouvray even though I normally avoid sweet whites.

With dinner, which was some sort of delicious Indian-inspired roll-up, there was a tasty cotes du rhone. Cotes du Rhone always makes me want lamb or rib eye or some other super flavorful red-meat.

I brought with me a bottle of that Marques de Caceres rose, because Mrs. B introduced me to the joys of dry rose wine and she loves it probably more than I do. Everyone loved it. I'm going to have to go to Corridor and find out how much it is a case. It is extremely flavorful for a pink wine and is liked by pretty much everyone I've given it to.

So tomorrow I've got these GREs, so I'm going to pop off and study for those. Tomorrow expect to hear a complete rant about how much I loathe them and why I think I should have gotten a higher score.

Back to booze-ness (get it it sounds like business haha)

At work today I finally broke down and bought myself some potato-leek soup to take home with me. I made an EXCELLENT choice. I have said before and I'll say it again: I will eat anything made by Chef or Jaime, even if I normally hate it. I usually won't eat veal because, well, it's kind of cruel, but Chef made a veal stew with french fries and it was the greatest thing I have ever put in my mouth oh my god. "Wait," you might say, "you don't order veal because it's cruel, but you order foie gras every time you get the chance. You hypocrite!" It's not hypocrisy. I just hate birds and want them to suffer.

ANYway with this soup I am drinking a small glass of Chateau de Rochemorin sauvignon blanc, and it is wonderful. I find it to be very herbal and crisp. It is dry and high in acidity, and my father thinks it has some cork in it. I wouldn't know. I haven't been drinking wine long enough to experience a "corked" bottle.

Speaking of cork, what is up with this cork debate? Suddenly I'm opening bottles with plastic corks, or worse, screw tops! Now, I secretly like the screw tops because I lose my wine key at least twice a day, but absentmindedness aside... this is... not good. Cork is a recyclable, biodegradable and renewable material. Cork trees are not damaged by the harvest, and they have this awesome tendency, as most plants do, to grow. But no, because one bottle in a thousand gets some nasty-nast in it due to a bad cork (I don't know the real statistic) we have decided to go all crazy for alternative bottle closures. "The screw tops are recyclable stark!" No, no they're not. The metal bit is, but to actually recycle that metal bit, you have to strip away that rubber piece that provides a true seal. It is not cost effective to recycle bottle caps. And the plastic tubes? Sure, they provide a better seal, have no risk of ruining the bottle, and they maintain the full, poncy wine-pouring ritual. Lovely. Except it's more goddamn plastic that is not going to get recycled.

I'd call this entry "stark goes green" but the image that brings up of Iron Man retooling his suit to lower emissions makes me giggle too much.

I have some pictures for infusion reports that I'd love to post here, but I can't freakin' find the calbe for my camera. So that'll happen in a more different post.

Oh, it's also my good friend MetalChef's 21st birthday tomorrow. Everybody say happy birthday!

Seriously, I'm not an alcoholic.

I'd just like to make it clear, since there is apparently debate over this. This blog is about booze, not about my daily life, so I really only update it when there has been some sort of event in boozing. It's a biased sample, see? I'm out of college now, I don't do the "hey let's get shitfaced" thing anymore. I didn't do it MUCH back then... though there were a few evenings spent worshiping the porcelain idol that I wish I could take back. And that one naked time, but hey, it was MayDay. NO REGRETS.

Alcohol is a poison. No, I'm not screwing with you. It is an antibiotic, and guess what? You are biotic. Congrats, you're poisoning yourself! But it's okay, right? Right. Sure. Be responsible and don't act like your trying to become the Saint of Liver Damage (hey T, how's the hangover?) and you should be fine. It is also worth knowing exactly how alcohol works in the body.

Everyone knows that alcohol is a diuretic, right? It makes you pee. That's what the whole "breaking the seal" thing is about. If you take a moment to notice you will see that you almost always pee clear after you've been drinking. Of course, after enough drinking you'll pee blood... which is actually related.

Alcohol (along with other diuretics) shut off your kidneys. The kidney is built to function like a filter: it sucks all the water out of your urine, leaving behind all the nasty metabolites and toxins you ingest throughout the day. Our kidneys are pretty good at that, but we always lose SOME water. Desert mice (Muad'dib!) have such powerfully salty kidneys that their urine is actually a solid. The more you know, right? Even without getting into the drama of kidney failure, which can happen, it means you're losing a lot of water, which gets you nasty dehydrated and gives you the headache and light sensitivity of a hangover.

The muscle fatigue and nausea portion of the hangover come from the first metabolite of alcohol: acetaldehyde (any medical student can correct my spelling, or even my entire post). Acetaldehyde is poisonous and unpleasant, and in some people it can stay in the body for hours. Do you know someone who doesn't show that they are drunk for a long while, and who tends to get hangovers BEFORE they go to bed, not the next morning? These people likely have an excess of the enzyme that breaks alcohol down into acetaldehyde. These people are also the most likely to become alcoholics, and should be the most cautious of their drinking.

Acetaldehyde stays in your system for much longer than you would like it to, but it does go away. If I recall correctly, it is metabolized into salicylic acid and peed away.

This is all recalled from memory of a class in health psychology taught by a recovered alcoholic. I *can* back up any statements with the appropriate literature, though it would take me time and effort, and if enough people bitch at me I might do it. Of course, if I find out I was wrong on any point I'd correct it.

There *are* people out there with less sensitive systems. You might be one of them. However, unless you have been tested for Extremely Awesome Liver and Kidney Function, it is not safe to assume that you are in the minority.


Everyone knows someone who fits the DSM-IV-TR's definition of alcoholism. Hell, I may very well BE that person for some of you. However, there is usually a pretty obvious distinction between enjoying drink and having an inappropriate relationship with alcohol. If you know someone who you think is developing a drinking problem, talk to them about it. Encourage them to seek help. Don't be afraid of seeming pushy or obnoxious, you might save a life.

The website for Alcoholics Anonymous is here: http://www.aa.org/
For those who prefer a less religious organization, the website for Rational Recovery is here: http://www.rational.org/

Drink for the joy of it, drink with friends, drink with caution and awareness.

A very "meh" weekend.

 First, let's get on-topic. I have a bottle of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay here, and it is quite tasty. Not sweet, sort of off-dry. It has a cranberry sort of tartness and a lightly floral aroma and is heavier and spicier than a lot of whites I've been drinking. I also threw together a caramel-apple and a ginger snap infusion, but since I don't have pictures of them I won't bother talking about them much.

Other than the wine, this weekend was not a successful alcohol weekend. I had a tasty tequila sno-cone on friday at DuClaw, where Boyfriend drank an extremely disappointing beer. BeerSnob may disagree, but both Boyfriend and I found the Hellraiser IPA to be a one-note failure as a beer.

Of course, we then went on to drink Keystone Lite at the college, where Boyfriend's friend was having his 21st birthday. What an epic shitshow that was. The birthday celebrant was blacked out by 5 pm, but somehow managed to stagger to the bar at midnight for his birthday round. We have received word that he is not, in fact, dead of alcohol poisoning, nor did he have to get his stomach pumped. Good job, dude.

Things like that make me really glad I had my 21st birthday in a foreign country where no one knew me nor cared to know me. My flatmate threw a party and trashed the apartment, and I drank a few beers at an Brog, but that's about it. Not very interesting, but there was no horrifying intoxication. Granted, I experienced horrifying intoxication later during a pub crawl in England, but I feel fortunate that I escaped the stereotypical 21st birthday shitshow.

Also, WOW is alcohol expensive in restaurants. One of my tables tonight easily ordered a hundred and fifty dollars worth of wine, knocking back overpriced by-the-glass selections like it was their job. I love it when people do that, because it means I get paid for watching the bartender work, but seriously. Where are these people working where they make enough money to spend that much on a night of not-immoderate drinking? Can I have their jobs? Please?

I have become a huge fan of ordering one or two drinks and a dessert in restaurants. The bill stays low and I am satisfied.

I have a confession to make.

 Sometimes I pretend to be classy, which is probably a mistake to begin with. Some of my friends make the mistake of believing me to actually BE classy, since you know I drink wine and all and wine is apparently classy when you are twenty-two. Unfortunately my lies crumble when I order mixed drinks in the summer time.

My name is Stark and I adore blended margaritas. With sugared rims. They are delicious tequila sno-cones and that is just about the best thing ever. You know what's worse? I like them with cheap tequila and even cheaper Margarita Mix from a plastic jug. Make my own sour mix? Naaaah. Too much trouble. Got to squeeze all them lemons. Besides, this way they are a pleasant green color usually associated with radioactivity, or maybe Denarians.

I also am now incapable of drinking spiced rum after a night of ill-advised consumption, during which there may or may not have been public nudity (woo college). This really appears to have spread to all forms of brown liquor, excepting firefly vodka, naturally. This means that when all of my manly friends are ordering Jack/rum and cokes or  scotch and ginger ale (boyfriend drinks these incessantly. I think they smell like paint thinner) I get a fruity pomegranite martini and contempt.

It could be worse, though. I drank a chocolate martini once in a gay bar in Philly. Never again. That stuff made me understand what it must be like to be diabetic.

I redeemed myself on that trip, though, by going to a fabulous bar called the Apothecary, which specializes in amazingly creative savory cocktails, such as the Booty Collins, the Sage Wisdom, and the Aviation. The Booty Collins comes in a pint glass, is lemon yellow, and tastes like delicious hate due to the cayenne pepper they put into it. The Sage Wisdom comes with cinnamon and a sage leaf and really does look like a potion. It is dusty green and opaque with a layer of sage foam, and it tastes, well, like sage and cinnamon.

Personally I liked the Clever Club, which was made with raspberry, simple syrup and egg whites and some manner of liquor. It was mild and fruity, the way I like them. I love me my sissy drinks. That is my confession.

______

In unrelated news, my parents recently returned from France (pronounced "fraynst") and brought with them amazing things. Mother brought back three bottles of wine, a pink champagne, an Alsatian pinot gris, and some manner of Cotes du Rhone (The bottle is in French, you see, and I can't read it. It's a problem). My father brought back six cans of foie gras. Holy science. This  is going to be an awesome weekend.