Lucky Lucky

First of all, St. Patrick's Day, oh, how mixed my feelings are for you... it's like, ok, sure, I'll start drinking at 5 or whatever, and I do think that with all the people we celebrate on our annual, federal holiday schedule -- MLK, George Washington, Veterans, Dead Veterans, The Working Man, Columbus (mmm...genocide), Jesus -- we might as well add Drunks. After all, drunk people are (at any given time) a substantial societal constituency.

And really, I know it sounds like a joke, but I'm dead serious -- drinking is pivotal to this society and much of the rest of the world. Booze is what human beings, as a species, have chosen as an acceptable, leisure-time drug, and we use the hell out of it, so we might as well celebrate it.

On the other hand, St. Patrick's day is truly celebrating the bringing of Christianity to Ireland and the clover represents the holy trinity, so really... it's just a 250-year old Americanized bastardization of a holiday celebrating something that happened 1700 years ago, far away, with a church. Which makes getting hammered and celebrating the City of Boston a pretty hilarious way to celebrate it.

Or in my case, drinking like, 4 beers and watching a basketball game. At home. In my sweatpants. It was awesome.

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Topic 2: Lucky Charms. Bought a box, had a bowl, and I swear to St. Patrick they've tipped the marshmallow ratio. It's like...it's like the box was assembled by that same fat kid who always sniped the M&M's out of your trailmix. I'm talking multiple marshmallows per spoonful. Almost too sweet, but really just kind of great.

On a lighter note, a pork chop recipe!

Spice Rub:
Minced garlic
Salt
Pepper
Paprika
Cayenne

Breading materials:
Flour
Egg (2?)
Bread crumbs

Pork chops
Sweet potatoes
Bacon (thicker and smokier = better)
Mascarpone (optional)

Whatchu gon' do:
1) Chop and fry some bacon (the start of all great recipes)
2) Your potatoes -- cut 'em, boil 'em, mash 'em. During the mashing process, add the chopped bacon, some butter (to taste), and optionally the mascarpone. Be light on the fatty stuff -- you don't want to lose the taste of the bacon.
3) The chops -- Give the chops a couple whacks to tenderize them and rub them w/ the spice rub.
Bread them (flour -> egg -> bread, make sure you keep one of your hands dry!)
Heat up some olive oil (or butter or both) in a pan and sear them bitches on both sides. Reduce heat, cover. They're cooked when they resist a push from your thumb and the meat inside is all white. Because they're pork.

Serve w/ barbeque sauce (I use Sweet Baby Ray's. I also advise setting the BBQ out ahead of time so it's at room temperature.

Eat with like, 14 glasses of water and at least two helpings of salad.

Food Update

A couple of cooking novelties pulled from a recent camera-dump:

1) Bear egg

This is not super complicated to pull off.

1 egg
1 cookie cutter
salt & pepper

All you do is crack an egg into a cookie cutter. The smaller your shape's area, the trickier it is to cook the egg through without turning the yolk into a crumbly little piece of crap, but the metal frame makes it really easy to flip the egg early and cook it evenly.




2) Beer can chicken

This one was lifted from Achewood pretty much verbatim. Basic procedure is drink a few beers, then another half beer. Throw some spices and taste into the halfie, shove it up the chicken's bum, cut up some vegetables, get it all really oily and bake it. Simple and delicious and crispy and really, it's just a great recipe. Excellent as-is or as a template for repeated experimentation.




3) Meat cake

Oh, that meat cake. Meat cake, meat cake, meat cake.

This was my birthday cake this year, courtesy of X and Julia. Truly stunning. Three layers of extremely good meatloaf iced with mashed potatoes and decorated with ketchup and, yes, bacon. Mmmm, bacon. Original concept, Black Widow Bakery.

Seriously, check out that bacon work. That's some professional quality bacon lettering right there.



And a very convincing cake. Just look at that slice action.

Today is Thursday

So are these things supposed to convey a sense of continuity -- "Dear reader, it's Thursday, and wow it's been a busy two weeks since the holidays and hey, happy New Year!" -- or is it cool to just pop in and scratch out some notes like marker on a public bathroom wall?

Were the Internet indeed a public bathroom, the "blogosphere" would certainly be the handicapped stall at the end of the row.

Meanwhile, it's Thursday, and it's been a busy two weeks, and Thursdays are really early days on the ol' Wrigley front, and I'm sleepy. I've been writing actual code lately (as opposed to doing my much-beloved secretarial and monkey work), which feels pretty good in an academic-justify-your-existence kind of way. I've also been eating candy like it's my job, which it kind of is, so I guess that's ok, too.

Seriously, though, I got some boxes of candy from Wrigley right around when I got back from Maine, including several boxes of Orbit. This is important, because I decided to quit smoking on New Years and now chew approximately 20 sticks of gum a day, at about 2 minutes per stick. Coincidence? Highly doubtful.

Also, I don't know what the etymology of "cold turkey" is, but...oh, wait -- wiki: Cold Turkey. Also, it is damn sweet that wikipedia exists, and that Google exists, and that both are such pervasive tools as to have become verbs, and that if you use Google for a phrase you need a definition on, it will more than likely point you at wikipedia. Only by the grace on the Internet is it completely legitimate to say, "Well I Googled it, but Google just pointed me at wiki, so I guess I could have just wikied it in the first place."

***

Went to Faneuil Hall with some heads for bar trivia the other night; nice bar, outskirts of the plaza. Too bad the start times listed on the trivia site and the bar itself showed a two-hour discrepancy, and too bad we showed up on the late side of it. So too bad we were in Faneuil with no reason to be there and ended up going to this empty wanna-be sports bar called The Tap. Why do I mention this? Because The Tap is in a long row of bars where someday, someone (maybe you!) might be walking and thinking, "Wow, so many bars, and which one should I patronize?" In the event of such a query, I advise skipping The Tap. Decent food, decent service, but horribly overpriced for the quality on both counts. Looks like a place where you should be able to snag a $10 pitcher. Not so much. Also the fries were soggy and the onion rings verily burst with room-temperature fryer grease. Note: if you are getting people drunk and you have a kitchen where 50% of your output is fried, do everyone a favor and make sure your fryer is hot and that you don't plate the fried stuff 10 minutes before you plop a crappy $9 club sandwich on the plate and trot it out to the table.

Really though, the nail in the coffin (checkpleasethankyougoodnight-style) came from a two-man band with which the bar was trying to attract patrons through the open door. We left halfway through their first song, a cover of Otis Redding's (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay, handled exclusively in the way-out-of-tune register and quite possibly transposed into an extremely depressing minor key. As we departed, the singer (who looked like an ugly rendition on something stupid) was whistling his way through the bridge and the bar was almost completely empty.