It’s the evening before the first day of a three day weekend!!! If your week has been like mine, you’ll know why I used three exclamation points to finish that sentence instead of just one. Golly, it was crazy, wasn’t it?
In any case, I hope you all have some sweeet stuff lined up. For my part, I’ve got a bottle of The Prisoner (it’s okay, it was on sale) waiting for me to find one of the several corkscrews I have hidden throughout the house (I swear, I buy two or three of those things a year and have no idea where they go off to). I have a D&D game lined up for Saturday, I have to go over and do some tech support for Mom on Sunday, and Monday is *ALL* *MINE*. I plan on wasting it.
What’s on your docket?
Homework and D&D. Also a lot of lying down.
I suspect we’re in for rain, so housework and laying about it is!
I’m going to the theatre tonight – Gilbert and Sullivan.
How was it?
Very good, the guy playing Sir Joseph Porter practically radiated haughtiness.
Excellent.
I have purchased Gin for the first time in my life. My early experiences with gin were not pleasant, but I find myself enjoying the gin & ginger I’m currently drinking.
I’ll be missing out on Fourth-of-July festivities due to work, and I think the Call of Cthulhu game won’t be happening because of other people’s Fourth-of-July travels.
The Boyfriend is almost caught up on Leverage, which means we should be able to enjoy the season premier together this weekend.
And I think a certain blogger requested a guest post regarding the D&D tournament I ran last weekend. I should probably spend some time writing that.
What gin did you buy? Gin has a pretty broad range of flavor/quality and I’m always interested in what people prefer.
Tanqueray. Interestingly, my store only carries two brands of Gin in fifths: Seagrams and Tanqueray. The Tanqueray was more than twice as expensive. Given that the gin I had when I was younger was Seagrams, I’m realizing that the quality of the gin may have been the reason for my earlier dislike of it.
Our house occasionally has a bottle of Leopold’s Small Batch Gin in it.
I’m a wino, myself, so I can’t vouch for it but the person in the house who enjoys such tells me that it’s very good.
Well, the person in the house who enjoys such would caution that it’s not exactly a beginner gin, either. Much like Hendrick’s (roses and cucumbers) it has its own weirdness going on that is quite delightful but not straight-up ginnish…
Tanqueray Imported and Bombay Sapphire are my two favorites for everyday drinkin’. (Er, every week drinkin’. And thanks to some medical issues, I haven’t actually more than five drinks total in the last 6 months. So this whole post was kinda theoretical, except that I REMEMBER EVERYTHING.)
*wistful sigh*
I was at a party last night at a nice bar and they had Kendrick’s on the shelf, so I had a gin and tonic with it though I normally would only drink beer on a worknight. It was really, really good, I’d put it over Bombay Sapphire, though maybe not Tanqueray when I want to taste the juniper.
I’m a Tanqueray fan, though I don’t get to drink much liquor any longer. It’s pretty strong on the juniper and that turns off a lot of people I know.
The Juniper works well in a highball. I think i’d like it a lot less if I were making martinis.
Awesome.
I like Bombay Sapphire personally, but since I’m usually making gin and tonics it doesn’t matter *that* much.
My father, who used to be a Gin Man back when he was younger and drank, stuck with Beefeater. He said it was terrible but it was terrible in the way that Gin Ought To Be.
I personally agree with the Bombay Sapphire call, and I like Tanq 10. The 10 is overpriced, though.
Monday I’m brewing beer with a friend. Sunday I might hit the Hot Chicken Festival here in Nashville. Tonight I’m chaperoning my brother & sister-in-law to the U2 concert downtown.
Let’s see, it’s July… something Autumy? Wintery?
Saturday was my 40th birthday party. It wasn’t my actual 40th birthday (that’s a tad bit off), but we’ll be out of range of the immediate family on my actual 40th birthday, so we had a “Pat’s Family Party”.
My wife cooked for basically two days. The menu:
Appetizers:
* Grilled Artichokes
* Roquefort Popovers
* Crab Cakes
Salad:
* Mixed greens with bacon, blue cheese, and white wine vinaigrette
Pasta:
* Parisienne Gnocchi with tomato cream sauce
Main:
* Roast beef with scalloped potatoes and roasted asparagus with pancetta and sherry vinaigrette
Dessert:
* Chocolate mousse & a selection of cheeses
Each course had its own wine. The dessert course also came with scotch. I spent a good deal of Sunday resting and helping finish the dishes. A meal that size for 14 adults yields a metric ton of dishes.
Memo: when making the Roquefort popovers, only use the teflon muffin tins. Unless you don’t have teflon muffin tins, and then make them anyway because they’re so danged yummy, just know you need to soak them for a day to get them clean.
Second memo: skip the scotch when you’ve already had the equivalent of more than a bottle of… okay, probably about two bottles of wine. Even if dinner takes four hours.
Third memo: asparagus is out of season in July, no matter how badly you want it on your birthday. It was still yummy, but a couple of spears had gotten fibrous.
Yesterday we parked on the roof of a parking garage and watched the Rose Bowl fireworks. I spent the show inside the van, watching bits of it from behind a tree, because the daughter does *not* like the booms. But she sat in my lap and told me how pretty they were anyway even though she didn’t like the booms and that it was nice that they were so far away but stay here with me, Daddy.
All in all, I call it a winner of a weekend.
Wow. Kudos to the wife. I’d never even thought I’d see food related posting here, but now I want more…
Food postings!
That sparked something in my noggin as well. Hope I’ll have time to write on that today.
I don’t know that I could put enough syllables in ‘Damn’ to express my feelings on this.
This sounds like an awesome weekend.
Can’t you just use a non-stick spray?
The recipe actually calls for putting oil directly in the muffin cups before you put in the popovers. There’s plenty of oil in there as it is. Mucking with the amount and non-stick-spraying the cups might work, but it also might muck with the flavor.
And you don’t want to do that. These things are bits of heaven.
The spray I use for cooking is based on canola oil, which is flavourless.