I should’ve realized much earlier; the recipe called for vodka. Not just plain vodka, but flavoured vodka. Not just flavoured vodka, but TWO flavoured vodkas. Not just any two flavoured vodkas, two flavoured GREY GOOSE brand vodkas. It’s kind of like the adage about the dog you kick but still keeps coming back; but the cocktail recipe you know is wrong in every way possible, but you still tried making it.

I blame it on my qualifiers, which has affected my palate till I’m practically pregnant. Case in point; I really really wanted a creamsicle. I never want a creamsicle! And I wasn’t going to go to the store to buy a bag of creamsicles of which I’d eat a quarter and then throw away the rest of the box.

Thus, this Vanilla Creamsicle cocktail appears to be the perfect answer.

Vanilla Creamsicle
Ingredients:
- 1 oz Grey Goose La Vanille (substituted with UV vanilla vodka)
- 1 oz Grey Goose L’Orange (substituted with Svedka clementine vodka)
- 3 oz Orange juice
- 1/4 oz triple sec
- fresh cream
Garnish: orange peel

The promise

What can I say, I’m a sucker for things served in parfait cups. *sigh*.
However, when I tried to make the concoction myself, it looked alot more like baby formula from China pre-FDA-chief-execution, than anything non-toxic.

The truth

It tasted pretty foul too — had to dump it out after the tiniest sip.
I think I’m going to stick with White Russians to get my creamy cocktail fix from now on.

The lady didn’t like the blackberry stuff, but I do. Perhaps my palette is damaged, perhaps we simply have differing opinions on how blackberries are supposed to taste (and let’s face it — on my budget there aren’t many fresh berries in my life).

It is a tad bitter, though at this point it seems that most of the things I drink are — perhaps that’s my problem? I’ve definitely had better fruit teas (all courtesy of Dandan; god only knows where she gets all of them). But, to me at least, it does a pretty serviceable job of tasting like blackberries and giving me something noncaffeinated to drink at night. I’m even somewhat convinced that if I had steeped it for less time it would be less bitter, but that might not be true.

Oh but don’t spill it anywhere, because it’s actually the purplest thing in the world. I may have to boil the pair of pants I was wearing to get the stain out.

So I guess what I’m saying is: you should try it if you want something adequate and aren’t physically inept.

Just call me Mr. Positive.

Due to a long-ago bad experience with Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, I’ve avoided the stuff for a long time. At the least, I wouldn’t pay money for it.

Recently, I’ve been at two different events where I didn’t have to pay money for it, so I threw caution to the wind and decided to give it a fair shake.

First, I was at an event where there was a big old box (yes, box) of their hot coffee. Not that it was all that hot, but there was also a microwave — we scientists are clever. Taken black, it’s… drinkable. In fact, it would even be good if it tasted less acidic. It’s got a mild nutty flavor, pretty inoffensive, but it left a sort of bitter taste in my mouth, and the farther down the the cup I got the more I could swear I felt my teeth dissolving. Probably that was psychosomatic though. Anyway, it’s a lot better than, say, the coffee you’d get at the 7-11.

Then there was Free Iced Coffee Day. Boston being Boston, it was chilly and rainy. What else would you expect on May 15? Thankfully, the line was short. Now, apparently people in this part of the world (at least the ones who patronize Dunkin’ Donuts) take their coffee with cream and sugar, because if you don’t specify that’s what you get. I found this out the hard way, but then, this is one of my few opportunities to explore Bostonian culture (how many times have I said that?). Anyway, the iced coffee tastes like sweet milk. With ice in it. It was colored like it had some coffee in it but I sure couldn’t taste it. I’m not much of an iced coffee person (I prefer iced tea), so that’s probably not the biggest loss. Does anybody drink iced coffee when it’s not free iced coffee day? I have no idea. But I’ll be generous and assume that they don’t.

It would be easy to say that I don’t know what all the fuss is about, but then again, I’m pretty sure Dunkin’ Donuts’s stranglehold on New England predates Starbucks and all the other quasi-upscale coffee shops (yes, black coffee from Starbucks is better than Dunkin’ Donuts, and if there are options in downtown Boston other than Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, I’ve not heard of them). And besides, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee is a slightly cheaper, I think, and if all you want is something to wake you up and keep you from freezing to death, then that’s a valid selling point.

So while I don’t think there will be much Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in my future, I’m still happy to report that at least in once specific instance it’s at least somewhat better than the swill they serve at fast food restaurants (true story: I once ordered coffee at a Burger King. I added one mini-carton of non-dairy creamer. It turned white), and that the locals aren’t all totally crazy.

I mean, except for the driving, the accent, and the baseball.

There’s advantages to dating foreign men (read: non-Americans). I mean, beyond the looks, the accent, the lack of English, and the hot hot way they say “No, what is the meaning of this Make Out?”

I mean, what, no, from personal experience? Definitely not.

Seriously though, even when all is said and done and the foreign man in question has moved back to his foreign country that is an ocean removed from the Us of A, it’s nice to daydream sometimes, about the man, his accent, and a country full of similarly looking men with similar accents smiling at you at a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. All-American boys are great and all that, but after its all over, you’re never going to romanticize about him and you idylling in, say, Southern California. Or New Jersey. Or Connecticut.

Liquids? Oh, right, this is a blog about liquids. We’re getting there!

Anyhow, I tried my hand at nostalgia a couple nights ago; fresh basil, pine nuts, parmigianito and pecorino romano on the kitchen top. No mortar & pestle or food processor (food processor?!, an Italian mama laments in the distance), but a wooden spoon and a bit of good ol’ fashioned work made for a decent pesto. I threw some De Cecco farfelle on the stove (if the Italian expats use De Cecco exclusively, that’s good enough for me), and even threw in a couple green beans on top because that’s what he always did, despite the obvious placebo effect.

To come full circle, I opened a bottle of Pinot grigio from the same geographic area. I wasn’t expecting much, after all, I’ve always thought of Pinot grigio as Chardonnay lite; not exactly a derogative, but fairly close, considering I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Chardonnays either (though these $5 bottles of Barefoot has slowly been changing my mind). But this inconspicuous $7 bottle of Vezzo Pinot grigio worked perfectly for the occasion! This was probably the first time that a food pairing had actually made a difference in my mind for a wine. But semi-spicy, musky, yet light in the throat, it went amazingly well with the pesto.

It was a really nice evening.

P.S. Bonus points if you’ve guessed the region of Italy the boy’s from.

I’m in finals right now.

Normally, I’ve got a lot of self-righteous pre-yuppie disdain for all things sugary. While I may, in fact, have consumed multiple liters of Mountain Dew per week when I started college. I fell off the wagon when I saw Super Size Me and realized just how many pounds of sugar I was ingesting (really - go ahead and mock me) and switched mostly to coffee (which I take black because I prefer it that way — even coffee with sugar has quite a lot less sugar than soda).

But I’ve been drinking coffee with every meal for the last week or something; it’s about to burn a hole in my stomach.

So I did what anybody desperate to stay sharp but without the money to start a cocaine habit would do. I went to the campus convenience store and bought a really big can of Red Bull (I thought they came in only one size!). Then I drank it in like five minutes.

For the record? 220 calories in 16 ounces. So the same as soda. Sucrose instead of HFCS, if you care. It’s not exactly good for you.

But that stuff gives you wings.

Time for my obligatory controversial statement: While I definitely don’t know much about human physiology, I could swear that that stuff works better than coffee. It makes me less jittery, but still makes me want to sail across the Charles River under the cover of darkness and claim the Prudential Building for God and the Queen (note: while you absolutely should click on that link, there is a single audio usage of the ‘F’ word. Just a heads up). Is is the magical blend of amino acids or the placebo effect? It’s hard to say. Anything banned in Denmark has to have something going for it, though.

After consuming that monster can of Red Bull, I spent three hours working on a single problem on a take-home final, cleaned my desk, realized that I had been using the wrong boundary conditions, rewrote the offending part of the routine I was using, and still didn’t get an answer that made any physical sense.

Then I fought a grizzly bear. With my fists (more slight impoliteness. But seriously, if you don’t laugh at this you’re old. Or less stupid than me).

I can’t afford to drink Red Bull every day, and it probably wouldn’t even be the smartest idea to get into the habit of drinking it every week (after all, I wouldn’t want to build up a resistance to placebo). But it’s good to know that it’ll be there for me.

Almost as good as it is to know that classes will be over soon.

Last Wednesday, sitting around a conference room table, going over a friend’s qualifiers presentation:

J: “Hey. Want to get beer tonight?”
Me: “Ok.”

And simple as that, 6pm, we’re strolling out of the UES to the painful transnat corpdom that is Midtown, heading towards the Ginger Man, a Manhattan beer powerhouse with 66 beers on tap and 120+ bottles,
and one of 12 listed bars in NY with Dogfish 60 on tap.

It’s a Wednesday, Midtown’s a wasteland, and it was 6pm. We didn’t expect there to be much of a crowd, but by the time we got there, it was completely packed! This is a huge bar with plenty of seating area, but alas, all seats (and standing room) was taken up by suits loosening their ties. After standing around awkwardly for a bit, waiting for the last member of our party to arrive, we finally procured a table, got our beers, got halfway through the first round, and then realized… the bar was practically empty. Somewhere in that one hour differential, the B&T crowd had finished pounding in that one last drink before catching the PATH back home.

This bar’s location was really a shame, considering the wonderful bounty of beer they had available.

I tried (ever my own or someone else’s glass… no I didn’t drink 4 beers there):

Stoudt’s Blonde Double MaiBock
y’know, i just wasn’t feeling this beer at all. i really wanted to, since double bocks sound like candy on a stick, but while this had alot of different flavours going for it, they didn’t… mix together at all. just ended up being a bit weird and incongruous

Franziskaner Hefe Weisse
typical hefeweizen with a bit more spice/kick than usual. pretty decent, but not too special for a hefe

Victory Storm King Stout
yummy, good stout.
didn’t stand out from other stouts, but had the same texture & nice malty taste of caramel & choco (not sweet). delicioso!

Dogfish Head 60 Minute
Wow. So unlike the Dogfish Head 120 minute, this actually still tastes recognizably like an IPA. However, its also the best IPA i’ve ever had. just the right balance of hops, acidity, flavour… i wouldn’t, however, compare this to the 120, just b/c the 120 really belongs in a dessert beer category, instead of the normal IPA.

One of the best things, however, about 36th st though, is its proximity to K-town. We jetted over there, grabbed some korean bbq & Hite korean beer (which is pretty amazingly mediocre, but hey, every country has their own macrolager), and it was an excellent night.

I’d definitely head over to the ginger man again sometime, just not between 5 to 7:30pm on a workday.

The Ginger Man
11 E. 36th St., New York, NY 10016
nr. Fifth Ave.
212-532-3740

1. Even when the tea is free, people will reuse teabags when the tea is a floor down but there’s a hot water dispenser right down the hall.
2. Mountain Dew is, in fact, the breakfast of champions.
3. The signs that say you can’t have beverages in the computer lab don’t apply after 8 PM.
4. There is no such thing as too much orange juice.
5. The only problem with storing beer in the office fridge is that you’ll inevitably forget about it for six months and the cap will get rusty.
6. Washing your coffee cup is optional.
7. Unless you take your coffee with cream; then it’s not.
8. Especially if you don’t empty your cup at the end of the day.
9. If that day is a Friday, then god help us all.

Every one and their mom is having a rosé wine tasting this week. Its almost like the release of every year’s Beaujolais nouveau on exactly the third Thursday of November. Luckily for me though, I enjoy rosés far far more than I’ve ever taken to a Beaujolais nouveau (granted, I’ve only tried the cheapest kind).

So in honor of wine consumerism, a group of us headed down to our ecletic neighborhood wine store, Crush, to sample some wares in their annual War of the Rosés. There was a lively and energetic crowd, consisting mainly of young female Midtown drones come to drown out their petty sorrows with free wine (ok, I may have made the backdrop up, but forgive me a mite of jealousy for our salary differential). But our group did stand out a bit; instead of the collared shirt, black skirt and office pumps, I was sporting a bright red tshirt depicting squirrel violence, one of our group had a blue tubetop, the last one was wearing sneakers and brought a JanSport backpack. But hey, we’re used to it, dressing like students in the Upper East Side means you get used to shopkeepers looking either 1) suspiciously or 2) disdainfully at you.

One fact still remained though; none of us knew much about wine. We understood the concept behind roses. We knew they tend to be cheap, low quality wines, meant for being quaffed in copious quantities with a picnic basket full of food. Finally, we knew… or at least, thought, they were supposed to be light and fruity and all the other wonderful easy characteristics of a white zinfandel that didn’t just suck.

Well. We certainly didn’t get that.

Our first few glasses were disappointing; perhaps we were just expecting the wrong thing. Most of us enjoy dry wines, but… not in our roses. We moved on quickly to the next table, where upon my first sniff, I exclaimed.

“Buttered popcorn!”
“What? Are you crazy?”
“No! It’s hot buttered popcorn, theatre-style!”
“Huh… well I guess I can kind of see that.”

I quickly lost this good will though, after exclaiming “Buttered popcorn!!” for each of the next 3 wines.

“Dandan. Are you sure you’re not just hungry??”

We moved on, tried a few inoffensive, but unremarkable wines, none of which had that light fruitiness that we had come to associate with roses after years of acclimation. Spotting a couple bottles of sparkling rose in the corner, and remembering the wonders of the FRV 100 we had tried a couple weeks ago, we planted ourselves in front of the sparkly and readied ourselves for magnificence.

I took the first sniff, of the Strohmeier 2000 Schilcher Sekt Reserve we were served.

Hesitation. “Wasabi. Definitely. Wasabi.”

The other two girls stared at me like I had grown two heads, one of which was made out of green horseradish.

“No, seriously! Wasabi!”

They sniffed. Tasted. Mouths dropped open.

J: “This is… this is like an entire sushi meal in one.”
Me: “Isn’t it?! Isn’t it?! There’s that salty miso soup at the start, an intense buttery tuna belly in the middle, and then the long wasabi/soy sauce finish.”
A: “Crazy! You’re right! This is crazy!”

How could one sip of wine, hell, one sip of rose, taste of an entire sushi entree? I have no idea. There’s black magic in this. None of us could decide whether or not we actually loved it, but the novelty factor was so strong, it didn’t even matter. Hell, I could just skip dinner and drink a glass of this. It’s Violet Beauregarde from Charlie & the Chocolate Factory all over again!
Unfortunately, it was also the most expensive wine, knocking in at $26.99 with the discount for the day of wine tasting (normally $29.99). Even if a whole bottle would’ve ended up being too much weird wine, it would’ve been worth the cost just to videotape your friends faces as they try the wine. This is not your grandmother’s rose.

All in all, not a bad expenditure of a Thirsty Thursday hour. Even though we ended up not buying anything, the experience truly broadened our expansions in terms on roses (one friend couldn’t believe the geographical diversity represented by the wines that night — and here we thought roses only came from California).

Wines we tried at Crush
Jean-Paul “Big Boy” Brun’s 2007 Rosé d’Folie (Made from Gamay in Beaujolais)
“Cool Guy” Copain’s 2007 Le Printemps Rosé (Pinot Noir from California)
Gérard Boulay’s 2007 Sancerre “Sacrificer” Rosé (Pinot Noir from Sancerre)
“The Commander” Commanderie de Peyrassol 2007 Rosé (Syrah from Provence)
“The Ferocious” Fenouillet 2007 Rosé (Syrah from Rhone)
Lauverjat “Loverboy” 2007 Sancerre Rosé (Pinot Noir from Sancerre)
“Lean and mean” Lafond 2007 Tavel Rosé (Grenache from Provence)
Triennes “Go ahead and Try Me” 2007 Rosé (Cinsault from Provence)
Jules “Rules” 2007 Rosé (Grenache from Provence)
Palmina “You’re Mine-A” 2007 Botasea Rosé (Dolcetto and Nebbiolo from California)
Stringtown “Meantown” 2007 Rosé (Grenache from California)
“Strong arm” Strohmeier NV Schilcher Sekt (Sparkling Blauer Wildbacher from Austria)
“Vintage Strong arm” Strohmeier 2000 Schilcher Sekt (Sparkling Blauer Wildbacher
from Austria) (our favorite, and unfortunately, apparently only available from Crush while in the US).

As Neil informed you previously, wine tastings are made out of all sorts of win. What he neglected to talk about, however, is how much win you can find post-wine tastings, from the dregs of papers lurking around in your purse. Being the woman, and holder of all things that is material (though yes yes, thank you to the menfolk that hold the wallets when purses are not in use), I ended up with the papers indicating our favorite choices.

They’re not too illuminating if you’re actually interested in the wines, but fairly entertaining regardless.

We didn’t manage to try all the wines there (I was determined, but my compatriots are far more rational than I), but from the ones we did try, we went in numerical order, roughly. Thus, you can see, in paper form, with what amazing swiftness we managed to go from sobriety to inebriation.

I love the last page, where there are notes on 4 wines; consisting of “!!!!”, “whee”, “whoa!”,  and “DD likeys”.

Haha, but all in all, it was a lovely wine tasting, I’ve discovered that my eno-childhood contained far too many bursting Starbusts-type fruity explosions that most of these French wines tasted very boring & watery to my palate. Ah well, children always did like bright colors.

There were still a couple gems that stood out, of which one, the FRV 100 (try pronouncing it in French, it becomes effervescent), was actually affordable ($19.99/btl) and truly the star of the party. I’ve never had a rose like it, and I might never again (once I’ve opened the one bottle I bought). The others were in the $40-70 area, a range that I hope never to approach on a general consumption level.

One of the best things about living in Cambridge is the Cambridge Brewing Company. It’s a nice, spacious location, with a lot more restaurant space than bar space (the food’s pretty decent though I’m not too impressed by the pizza), not too crowded on the weekends. And, of course, they make their own beer; the sides of the rooms are lined with enormous vats of beer, and you won’t be ordering a Corona here.

The biggest downside is that it’s at Kendall Square, so if it’s too full you’ve got a bit of a hike to get anywhere else. Also, they close at 1 for some reason, probably related to the fact that it caters more to adults who appreciate artistry, and less to grad students who want to get thrashed. I wear both hats, as the situation warrants.

This is an ale-only establishment; they’ve got I think four house beers that are always on tap (a golden Kölsch, an amber, a pale, and a porter), plus another five to ten seasonal beers that they rotate through as they become ready.

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