FlaSoxxJim

Happy belated birthday, Big Ed!

QUOTE (G&T @ Jul 4, 2010 -> 09:09 AM) So I'm being dragged to James Taylor tonight, and it was almost entirely my own fault. My boss asked me last week what I was doing for the 4th and said we had no plans. She was flabbergasted and said my fiance and I had to go to this concert venue in the Berkshires called Tanglewood. The Boston Symphony plays there all summer because Boston's rich folk summer in the Berkshires. Anyway, the venue is outdoors and we bring our own beverages and food so I'm thinking this should be something nice for her. So I look online and it says James Taylor is playing and tickets are $22. I'm thinking, I hate James Taylor but she loves him, and at $22 who can go wrong? So I tell my fiance and she gets super excited. Unfortunately, the concert is actually sold out, but tickets are available on Stubhub for $75 a pop. D'oh. More than we should be spending with a wedding coming up. At this point, however, I had no choice. So now we are paying $150+ to go see a concert that I'm going to hate. BUT I get to bring wine, beer and food. And there are fireworks. So it can't be all bad. And it's going to be beautiful weather here tonight. I know he's old as dirt but it happens. I'm sure it will be a good show and you'll find out you hate him less than you think you do.

Happy birthday patriots!

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jul 4, 2010 -> 06:46 AM) You, my friend, need to somehow open your own bar or become a bartender in some schwanky joint back in Chicago before you go riding off into the horizon... I keep buying that lotto ticket and hoping. . . QUOTE (G&T @ Jul 4, 2010 -> 07:48 AM) I don't think there is nothing more entertaining on this site than a liquor cabinet walkthrough from Flaxx. And everytime I wonder why I haven't started my journey through these drinks. Quite frankly, to most people it seems like too expensive a proposition to have a well-stocked home bar. Slowly stocking up over time, though, it doesn't have to be too bad. Read through some recipes and find just one or two mixed drinks cocktails that use a few different ingredients and just shell out for those. Play around with those recipes and decide if you like the base flavor components as much as you thought yu would. Then maybe once per paycheck treat yourself to another new bottle — find new drinks that you have most of the ingredients for, and lowly add to the war chest that way. In a few months you'll have a respectable little home bar, and you'll probably have explored a couple different base spirits in a bit of detail. Once you have a few different base spirits, liqueurs, syrups and mixers on hand, the CocktailDB website will come in handy. If you decide you like using a certain ingredient you can search this database and find a boatload of other drinks that use that ingredient.

QUOTE (G&T @ Jun 20, 2010 -> 07:46 PM) Yeah. I respect the efforts on the oddball brews, but just having a lot of alcohol does not a great beer make. Last night made me rethink the oddball Dogfish offerings. The wife and I unwound over a nice Thai dinner with a big 750 of this year's Dogfish Sah'tea — brewed with rye, juniper, and black chai tea. The beer was memorably good. . . moreso than I had remembered it to be from last year. The first sip gave a distinctly Belgian impression, but I think that had more to do with the array of exotic flavors coming through than with affinity to any defined Belgian beer style. I can't remember what I paid for the bottle, but it was probably in the $13-14 range. Sounds pricey, but you'd pay at least that much for a decent dinner wine and the Sah'tea really paired well with the curried and peppered Thai dishes. Tonight I've adopted a different plan, and declared open war on the many nearly empty booze bottles taking up valuable space in the liquor cabinet. Just a scant amount of Hayman's Old Tom left (wonderful sweet-ish Victorian era gin style). . . that's enough to mix up a perfect Martinez with some Cinzano sweet vermouth, maraschino liqueur, and a dash of Angostoura. Just about out of Old Overholt Rye. . . full ounce of Ango, fresh citrus, and homemade orgeat to the rescue and we have a very nice Trinidad Sour. With sours still on the brain. . . let's polish off the last bit of Pisco Capel and shake up a pisco sour — raw egg white in this one so give it an extra shake before adding ice to emulsify it all. Dang. . . had no idea I was almost out of St. Remy brandy. OK, let's make a Japanese cocktail with maraschino, orgeat, and orange bitters. Botran 8-year bottle with not even enough left in it to shake up a short hoist daiquiri. . . Hmm, let's finish off the Trader Vic "Authentic" dark rum at the same time (been taking up shelf space for probably two years), add a bit of St. Elizabeth allspice dram, a splash of white grapefruit, and you have a dobles daiquiri that even Ernest Hemingway could have been proud of. So there you go. Six empty bottles out to the recycling bin, and it took only five cocktails to get there. Any one of them could have been polished off some time ago, but for the naked and vulnerable (and wholly irrational) feeling my soul has when I don't have at least a pour of [insert name of hooch here] on hand just in case somebody drops by for a drink and gets totally irate because I have to make his Ramos gin fizz with Plymouth instead of Hayman's. I know. . . The Horror! At any rate, the hooch cupboard now looks downright bare. Maybe it's time to write a nice letter to the booze fairy.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jul 3, 2010 -> 09:49 AM) Wow. You must have every electronic device in the world on all of the time. We are on a budget plan that averages us out to $135 a month! Budget Plan Step 1: Tap into neighbor's electrical box under cover of darkness. . .

She makes a mean tiramisu. I voted for her.

QUOTE (Brian @ Jul 2, 2010 -> 11:23 PM) Netflixed it. Turned it off halfway through. My 12-year old daughter seems to be the only kid in her demographic that thinks these movies are turds. She tried to watch the first one just so she would know what her friends were yammering about and she bailed on it about 30 minutes in. She's the same kid who knew Last Airbender was going to suck even though I was holding out some hope for it.

We'll finally get out to Toy Story 3 this weekend. I'm sure it will be great, and I've slowly softened in my opinion that Pixar should be above doing sequels. The truth is they are the best at what they do by a large margin, and they should do what they want to do and it will be great.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jul 2, 2010 -> 09:28 AM) Ace, that is awful, I hope he recovers quickly. I was coming in here to post something funny, now I feel weird about it. Or, maybe I should anyway. So I'm watching TV last night, and a commercial comes on. I thought, no way this is real, this has to be a parody or something. But no, its real, and its is both the funniest and most disturbing commercial I have ever seen. My wife and I couldn't stop laughing. Enjoy. Ha! I knew exactly what ad you were talking about before I even clicked. There's one for women as well and they are both incredibly visually disturbing, but the guy one takes top prize. How can the makers of that product think that visual is going to sell units? Also, how do they get the network censors to air it before 10pm??

Holy s***, Ace, that is brutal. All my good thoughts are with your friend. Some people are just plain worthless scum. Hope they get prosecuted and rot for a few years.

QUOTE (Brian @ Jun 30, 2010 -> 10:29 PM) Last Airbender getting destroyed in reviews. Stop making movie M. Knight. You are bad. That's too bad, I was hoping he'd do it justice. It seemed an odd project for him from day one, but I held out hope he'd rise to the occasion for the first time in a long time.

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Jun 30, 2010 -> 05:43 PM) Ah, I don't know how I thought that was McKellen. I've seen like 10 movies with John Hurt in the last few months. Then again, I've been uncharacteristically tired the last week or so... It's John Hurt, but yeah he's grown to look a lot like McKellen.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jun 30, 2010 -> 11:25 AM) Without checking IMDB, that looks like John Hurt of Alien and Contact fame. Oh, that's gotta. . . Hurt. (See what I did there?)

QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 29, 2010 -> 12:28 PM) I went to blue ribbon glee club last night at schubas. I am hungover. One of my favorite places in Chicago for music and drinks.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Jun 29, 2010 -> 10:38 AM) ^^^HAHA Awesome post Indeed!

Think of it as taking one for the team. If you gat a direct hit it means the storm will pass well south and west of Deep Horizon ground zero. Stay safe.

QUOTE (Quinarvy @ Jun 27, 2010 -> 10:12 PM) Does anyone else here enjoy They Might Be Giants at all? Very much so. I loved the early days of just the Johns of course, but I like a majority of the later stuff as well. And the kids stuff like "No" is a lot of fun and came out at the right age to allow me and my kids to have a favorite band in common.

Two more iterations of the watermelon rumrunner this afternoon during the game. Here's the tweaked recipe for 1 serving, and it really is a really good frozen summer drink. Next weekend when you're doing the 4th of July watermelon thing, chunk and freeze an extra one and try this drink. It will impress your guests. Watermelon Rumrunner • 2 cups frozen watermelon chunks • 1 oz white rum • 0.5 oz Cruzan 151 • 0.5 oz blackberry brandy • 0.75 oz Rose's sweetened lime juice • 0.75 oz 2:1 simple syrup Blend until smooth. Sip and think of sunny, oil-free beaches.

We had a big over-ripe watermelon here yesterday that was going to go to waste, so we cut it up to play around with frozen watermelon daiquiris. Before the end of the night we realized that we'd get better results if the melon was frozen so we could use less crushed ice in the blender and get a more intense watermelon flavor. I also had evolved the drink from a fruit daiquiri to something much more like a watermelon rumrunner by the end of the night. It actually showed a lot of promise. Froze the rest of the melon and will mix up something along these lines this afternoon after I cut the grass and get cleaned up to watch the Sox sweep the Cubs. Watermelon Rumrunner (serves 2+): ~ 3 cups frozen watermelon • 3 oz white rum • 1.5 oz 151 (Cruzan kicks Bacardi's arse) • 2 oz Rose's sweetened lime juice (Rumrunners are about the only place this works better than fresh lime juice) • 1 oz blackberry brandy (cream de cassis or Chambord would work here as well) • additional crushed ice if needed to blend smooth The recipe may get a bit of additional tweaking once I see how the frozen watermelon works. I'll report back on the results. It's about as summery as it gets.

I think the 5th anniversary is a budget anniversary as a general rule rather than the exception. It certainly was that way for me. I'd say stay home and do your own thing, but do it up for the special occasion. If you both like to cook, then cook for each other and pull out all the stops — buy a nice bottle of wine, have multiple courses, and be creative with dessert. including what you serve and where/how you serve it. I'm not really trying to romanticize budget-tight couplehood, and I reallt have not moved too far from that situation. But if you can pull off a memorable anniversary at this stage in your marriage it will be one you both remember forever. Happy Anniversary.

QUOTE (DBAHO @ Jun 26, 2010 -> 07:21 AM) I had a Hoegarden right after a Stella when I was at a pub watching the England vs Slovenia game the other day, and I much preferred Blue Moon actually. Hoegarden was too sweet / fruity for my liking. Stop drinking the Stella, it's knocking yor taste buds out of whack! Honestly though, I fear you are being indoctrinated into the young and hip clubbers-and-pubbers society that nearly drove British Real Ale to extinction a few decades ago. Back then it was "dead" keg beer like Watney's Red Barrel, and then lagers like Bud, Carlings and finally Stella Artois that appealed to young generations of Britons to the degree hat they totally forsake Real Ale which remains one of the dearest gifts the bygone age of brewing has left modern beer lovers. If not for the efforts of CAMRA and beer preservationists like Beer Hunter Michael Jackson, real ale could have died out with the old ale drinkers as all the kids were drinking mega-lagers. In more recent times of course, the mass consolidation of smaller UK breweries by large corporate breweries has been the more dire threat, and sadly there are next to no independently owned traditional UK breweries anymore. Modern micros have popped up which is a positive development, but there is a lot of craftmanship and tradition being lost. You know this is really not a dig at you, and all in all it's a good thing we that beer brands and styles are as varied as beer drinkers are. But the cyclical nature of consumer tastes and brand imaging is sort of ironic. With the large number of witbiers available now (be they Belgian, Belgian-styled, Americanized, or totally bastardized knockoffs like Shock Top), how many folks just coming into the beer culture even realize that the witbier style actually WAS driven to extinction by the sorts of changing consumer tastes we're talking about here? The last original witbier brewery (Tomsin) closed in 1955 and it took more than 10 years for the style to be revived by Pierre Celis who had worked part-time at the Tomsin brewery before it closed and thought he kinda-sorta remembered how that beer used to be produced. That beer that Cellis brewed in 1966 was Hoegaarden of course. A lot of old timers like me think Hoegaarden's quality has suffered a bit at the hands of Interbrew/Inbev, but I still consider it a premiere example of a traditional Belgian witbier. And, damn if I could somehow magically get some of you to try the phenomenal Celis White that Pierre and his daughter brewed out of Austin from the late 80s until 2001 after a fire at their Belgian brewery forced the Inerbrew sale. . . Along with Dublin Guinness and a couple of British Real Ales, I truly think that was one of my all-time favorite beers. The corporate monster rears its head in this story too. Miller bought a majority in Celis with the promise (unfulfilled) that they'd get the brand into more markets. The Celis family ended up selling their stake to Miller and in 2001 the beancounters at Miller decided the brand was too costly to brew compared to the revenue it produced and they ceased operations. I have yet to try the Michigan Brewing Company versions of the Celis products but I am happy they are making an attempt at carrying on those products.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jun 25, 2010 -> 08:47 PM) Yeah, I've had Hoegarden... I think I'm just not as big a booze snob as you, Jim...and there is nothing wrong with that - we all have our hobbies/obsessions. Give me something cold and wet and I'm pretty happy as long as there is some nice scenery, some solid tunes, and a decent breeze. I certainly did my share of lowbrow boozing, and I totally agree the right setting can make all the differnce.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Jun 25, 2010 -> 05:44 PM) :lolhitting