Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Consider this to be your official Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun Reminder to Change Your Clocks Tonight. But more importantly, remember this: the only people who are losing an hour of sleep tonight are the people who aren’t committed to sleeping in an extra two hours.

And in celebration, listen to “Tapdance” by Kevin Devine.

Sometimes, you run across a piece of prose that touches your heart with the poignancy of its undiluted, universal truth in such a way that, had it not been written more than a hundred years ago, you feel it could have issued forth from your own pen. In all my years, of all the brilliant writers I’ve read, of all the insightful arguments I’ve consumed, none have ever found themselves in such lockstep agreement with my own sentiments and perspective as this piece from the May 3, 1902 edition of the New York Times, simply and appropriately titled “Pie.” Precious readers, I can assure you that you’ll never find a clearer, more illuminating window into how I look at the world (well, maybe not the “woman’s baneful influence over man” part). Please read it. Hat tip to Lawyers, Guns, and Money for this wonderful treasure.

Usually, just by aiming my laptop screen at a plate or a pot. To wit, this chicken soup I made the other day.

Those shadows are purely for effect.

It doesn’t make a difference to me! The food usually turns out pretty good. Eating that soup, for instance, was like getting smashed in the taste bone with a flavor mallet.

However, comma, not everyone has such a poor attitude toward food photography! My dear friend Meg has a food blog (appropriately titled Meg in the Kitchen) that not only looks excellent, but features great recipes. Meg is a fantastic cook, and she’s also studying to be a nutritionist, so you can count on her to not lead you the wrong way when it comes to wholesome ingredients. So bookmark it!

Dear precious readers,

I am writing this post in advance of drinking a small can of Moxie. Moxie, for those who are unfamiliar, is the clove(?)-based soft drink that’s not quite cola and not quite Dr. Pepper famously endorsed by notorious and repeated fan-spitter-upon Ted Williams. Although once one of the most widely consumed soft drinks in the country, Moxie’s popularity has waned in recent decades, probably owing to its mysterious taste, and is now found primarily in Maine, commonly referred to as the Texas of New England.

I haven’t had much Moxie in my day, which puts me in league with the vast majority of Americans. There’s no predicting what kinds of pernicious side effects this unknown fluid will have on my physiology. Here goes nothing!

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune . . .

I’m just yankin’ ya! Moxie isn’t that bad. I’m actually taking a shine to it. Not so much as to actually seek the stuff out. But maybe enough to actually willingly finish the five tiny cans still in my fridge.

Listen to a little Marvelous 3.

A few weeks ago, some cohorts and I went to Drink, a popular cocktail spot on Boston’s waterfront. It’s an excellent place. The bartenders know pretty much all there is to know about cocktails, and they’re all very friendly and engaging. So I told one of them that I was interested in an applejack-based cocktail that wasn’t a Jack Rose, because I’ve had those a bunch. The dude mixed me up an apple brand old fashioned, which includes the brandy (obvs), bitters, ice, and cinnamon simple syrup. It was wicked tasty.

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that Jersey flows through my veins, and Laird’s distillery, of sunny Scobeyville, NJ, is one of the bigger producers of both applejack and apple brandy in the country. Combine my love of Jersey with my desire to unleash the power of apples, and you can imagine how excited I would be to include apple liquors in my drinking repertoire.

So I bought a bottle of apple brandy, and some aromatic bitters, and endeavored to recreate this delicious apple brandy old fashioned. I utilized the wonder of the toobz to look up a recipe to work off, and I found two distinct ones: one that calls for the cinnamon simple syrup, and one that called for maple syrup. Intrigued, I was forced to try both last night.

Garnished with a pear, of course, because I didn't have an apple.

The verdict? I’m an awful mixologist. When they say “two dashes of bitters,” what does that even mean? You dash the bottle, and less than a femtoliter comes out. So maybe I included too much bitters? And I was supposed to steep a couple cinnamon sticks in the simple syrup as I was making it, but who keeps cinnamon sticks around? So I used an indeterminate amount of ground cinnamon. And I probably shouldn’t have used undoubtedly expired Shaw’s brand maple syrup. Anyway, both of these drinks got me good and messed up, but they weren’t necessarily great to drink. They were good! But maybe I would try to trust a pro the next time?

So my aunt and uncle got me a Crock Pot for Christmas. It’s the perfect kind of gift: something that I would probably never think to get for myself, but once I got it, I thought of a thousand different things I wanted to do with it. (Plus, it came with a cookbook with a couple hundred recipes.) I decided on something easy breezy to give the thing a spin, so I bought a pork shoulder and made some pulled pork.

Mm mm

I don’t want to belabor a term here, but eating this pulled pork was like getting smashed in the flavor bone with a taste hammer. It was SO GOOD. This was only a trial run, so I used some barbecue sauce that I bought at Shaw’s, but I’d like to do it homemade next time, so if anyone has a sauce recipe, let me know in comments. I’m thinking I’d be interested in more of a Carolina-style sauce.

I just saw this commercial, and I thought “holy smokes, this is such a simple idea, how come no one, myself included, came up with it sooner” . . .

. . . until I realized that all of those other Mentos fruit flavors are effing rubbish, and I would really only be tossing out the rest of the flavors in favor of strawberry, which, fortunately, comes in its own standalone pack already.

Which reminds me of that episode where Homer is looking for chocolate ice cream in the freezer, but all he finds are a bunch of cartons of Neapolitan with just the chocolate ice cream scooped up, and he says “Marge! We need some more vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream!” I couldn’t find a clip, so watch this one instead.

And wait, what am I doing writing a Mentos post and not including this.

If you read only one story about mince pie today, make it this one. Seriously! Here’s a teaser:

Imagine, by way of analogy, that Americans abruptly and collectively lost their taste for cheeseburgers. Imagine the cheeseburger demoted to the same rank as eggnog, ritually consumed only on, say, July 4th. Suppose furthermore that the vestigial cheeseburgers served on America’s birthday were prepared without meat. Now suppose that a condition of cultural amnesia set in such that we all forgot, within the space of a decade or so, that cheeseburgers had ever been considered the iconic centerpiece of our nation’s diet.

Now go read about mince!