In the Headlights

Hangover Helper

If you're drinking tonight, you know what you need to do to avoid a hangover.  So why don't you ever do it?

I can take the moral high ground.  I'll be working.

Eat before you start drinking.  Don't worry about calories.  You'd rather gain an ounce or two than make an utter fool of yourself.  Besides, maybe it will keep you from being so ravenous when you drink.

Drink water.  Drink a bottle of water so that you're not thirsty when you start drinking.  It's easy to down a couple of cocktails if you're thirst, especially if you're trying to socialize with strangers, or are anxious about your date.  Bad idea.

Alternate each alcoholic beverage with a glass of water or soda.  It will halve your alcoholic intake for the night, and keep you from getting dehydrated, which is the main cause of hangovers.

Limit yourself to one ounce of alcohol an hour.  Your body can clear that much. Drink more and the products of alcohol metabolism (especially acetaldehyde) can accumulate, leading to a hangover.

Drink clear alcohols (vodka or gin) rather than colored liquors.  And don't mix--stick to what you start with. 

Consider prophylactic analgesia (taking a pain killer before you need it).  The problem is that non-steroidal anti-inflammatories can irritate your stomach, which will be irritated by the alcohol as well.  Acetaminophen, though touted as safe, is dangerous for the liver, especially in high doses, and mixed with alcohol.

Do something other than drink.  Play charades.  Dance.  Arm wrestle. Play Scrabble.  Make love. Preferably with someone you know. It's time away from alcohol, and it will focus your attention.

There are a lot of ideas about what can be done to preven hangovers.  If any of them worked, we'd all know about it by now.  But hope springs eternal.

Look here for other ideas.

Meanwhile, have fun, be safe.

Happy New Year!

[Image from Drowned in Sound]

New Year's Eve Cocktails

Here are some drinks to serve (or drink)at a New Year's party.  Most of them will knock you on your keister in short order. And the ones that mix hard liquor and champagne practically guarantee a headache. Make sure you have a designated driver.  Hangover avoidance tips later.

French 75

1.5 ounces gin
2 ounces lemon juice
2 teaspoons confectioner's sugar
Mix gin, juice and sugar in a wide mouthed wine glass. Fill glass with chilled champagne or sparkling wine.  Garnish with a lemon twist.

Rum Sparkler

1 ounce dark spiced rum
1 ounce Ruby Red grapefruit juice
Dash of grenadine syrup
Chilled Champagne or sparkling wine

Shake rum, grapefruit juice and grenadine with ice.  Strain into a champagne glass and fill up with Champagne or sparkling wine.  Garnish with strawberry slice on the rim.

Spiced Apple Martini

2 ounces vodka
1 ounce cranberry juice
1/2 ounce spiced rum
1/2 ounce butterscotch liqueur
Splash of ginger ale
2-inch peel of a Granny Smith apple
2-inch peel of a delicious apple

Mull the apple peels into the bottom of a well-chilled martini glass.  Combine vodka, cranberry juice, spiced rum, butterscotch liqueur and gigner ale over chipped ice and shake well.  Strain into glass.  The mulled apple peels will serve as the garnish.

Poinsettia

1 ounce Cointreau
1 ounce cranberry juice
Champagne
Orange slice

Pour cointreau and juice into a flute and lightly stir.  Top with champagne and garnish with an orange slice.

Peppermint Martini

2 1/2 ounce vodka
1 ounce White Creme de Menthe
1/4 ounce Peppermint Schnapps
Pink peppermint stick

Pour liquid ingredients into a shaker with ice.  Shake and strain into a martini glass.  Garnish with a peppermint stick.

Deck the Halls

2 ounces vodka
1 1/2 ounces white Creme de Cacao
1/2 ounce green Creme de Menthe
Candy cane

Combine liquid ingredients over ice and shake well.  Strain into a well-chilled martini glass.  Garnish with a cherry at the bottom of the glass and a straight red and white candy cane in the glass.

[Via the Florida Times Union]

[Image from Paul Viola Graphics]

Farina Pudding

Living by myself, but being somewhat frugal, I often find myself buying a half-gallon of milk, and then finding it separating and at its sell-by date before I am done with it.  I know it's still drinkable, but I don't push it much past that before I cook it.

A favorite is farina pudding, or cream of wheat.  A lot of people think they don't like cream of wheat, but I doubt that they've had it this way.

You can start with the liquid to cream of wheat ratio from the box.  Start with milk.  It's best with whole milk, but I use 1% and it works fine.  Measure the cream of wheat, and put the milk in a heavy-bottomed pot, and put over high heat.  Have a wooden spoon handy, you have to stir this until you take it off the stove. 

Ingredients:

4 cups milk
3/4 cup cream of wheat
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract or a piece of vanilla bean

Additional sugar, cinnamon.

For four cups of milk (the box says 3 3/4.  So sue me.) I add 1 tablespoon of butter, 1/4 cup of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla.  Better is taking about two inches of vanilla bean and chopping it into 1/2 inch pieces and stirring that into the milk.

When the milk starts to bubble, turn the heat down and add the cream of wheat slowly, sprinkling it over the surface of the milk and then mixing it in before adding more.  It will take 4 or 5 times to stir in all the cream of wheat.  If you pour it all in at once it will be lumpy.

Stir until it begins to thicken and remove from the stove.  It will continue to thicken.

When it is the consistency of loose oatmeal, put some in a bowl. 

I like to sprinkle the top with cinnamon sugar:  Take some sugar.  Add some cinnamon.  Mix.  I like mine a medium brown color, quite cinnamony.

I tend to eat off the top layer, then add more sugar and then eat that off.

Sometimes when I take it off the stove, I will mix in some raisins.  That's optional.

When the rest starts to cool, put it in a storage container and refrigerate it.  It will make a thick pudding, which is just as good cold as hot (and I still add the cinnamon sugar).

I'll get four breakfasts out of this amount.

Chihuly's (Stein)Way

You may think of Steinway pianos reverentially, as large, black, sonorous and very expensive and serious musical instruments. 

You may think of Dale Chihuly's artwork as glorious or bizarre, of him as a genius or madman, but either way, famous for his colorful, huge blown-glass artwork. Here's what he did with a Steinway.

Steinway and Sons can make the classic black pianos, or they can allow artists free rein in using their grand pianos as canvases.  If you decide you'd like to design your own Steinway, you can, just make sure you put aside enough to make payments on your private jet.

Odd Jobs

Nancy Rica Schiff has written about some very strange occupations.  I found this list on the Bell South homepage.  The dream job you've been looking for might be right here!

Here are twenty of the oddest.  I will only include explanations those that aren't somewhat obvious (descriptions from the site).  If you want to know more, click on the link.  My comments are in italics.

1)  Coffin maker

2)  Potato Chip Inspector

3)  Wax Figure Maker (think Mme. Tussaud's)

4)  Foot Model

5)  Golf Ball Diver

6)  Doll Doctor

7)  Egg Inspector

8)  Knife Thrower's Assistant

9)  Foley Artist: Use random items and whatever else they can find to create and record the noises used to make the sound effects in films, such as heavy footsteps, rolling thunder and creaking doors.  (Think "A Prairie Home Companion's" Tom Keith.)

10)  Solfeggist:  Listen to recorded music and monitor notes in indistinguishable compositions.

11)  Snow Researcher

12)  Wig Maker

13)  Gross Stunt Producer

14)  Mermaid

15)  Whiskey Ambassador (My next career)

16)  Dog Food Tester (uh oh)

17)  Bonfire Builder

18)  Dice Inspector

19)  Ethnographer

20)  Gum Buster

[Image via Neatorama]

Strangers with Candy

Perhaps it was reading about her in her brother, David Sedaris's books that made me so sure I'd be crazy about Amy.

I watched Strangers With Candy last night, and now I'm not so sure.

Her brother writes about how the beautiful Amy delights in dressing herself up to look not only ugly, but repulsive. She certainly gets to in this movie.  She looks positively contagious.

The movie is a prequel to the hit Comedy Channel show.

Amy Sedaris plays Jerri Blank, a 47-year-old high school dropout, junkie and hooker, who spends her formative years in the pen.

When she gets out, she heads home, and finds her mother dead, her father in a stress-induced coma, and her stepmother and stepbrother running the show.  When she first sees her father, he responds to her, and her alone, leading his doctor to declare that she should return to the age when she last saw him, and do something to make him proud.  Only this could bring him out of his shell.

So she returns to Flashpoint High, where the skills she learned in the joint serve her well.  She winds up making a couple of friends, and decides that she must win the science fair to make Daddy proud.

Amy Sedaris is known for being over the top, and this movie is that, pretty much all the way through.  There are some hilarious bits, but I think this is a movie for people who find over-the-top to their taste, and I am finding lately that I am not among them.

I find that this stretching the boundaries of taste over and over bores me, rather than amuses me.  I don't think the fact that I dozed off a couple of times made me lose much of the plot, but it probably is an indicator that I wasn't raptly attentive.

Bottom line, I thought the movie had possibilities, but it was hit or miss, and missed a lot.  I had high hopes going in, and now find myself vaguely discontented, my anticipation having greatly outweighed the actual experience.  As it is with so much in life.

[Image via Green Cine Daily]

[Bust cover via Feministing]

The Blue Bowl

by Jane Kenyon

Like primitives we buried the cat
with his bowl.  Bare-handed
we scraped sand and gravel
back in the hole.
                  They fell with a hiss
and thud on his side,
on his long red fur, the white feathers
between his toes, and his
long, not to say aqualine, nose.

We stood and brushed each other off.
There are sorrows keener than these.

Silent the rest of the day, we worked,
ate, stared, and slept.  It stormed
all night, now it clears, and a robin
burbles from a dripping bush
like a neighbor who means well
but always says the wrong thing.

This poem made me teary.  I must must be tired, or in one of those moods.

On a happy side, today I spotted a ginger cat in the garage where I feed Handsome Stranger, a neutered feral cat.  Ginger is feral also;  Red and I caught him a few years ago and took him to the vet to be neutered and have a physical and his first set of shots.  When he first found him, Red put him in the bathroom (so he couldn't hide under furniture) so he could show him to me.  When I got home, I went in there to find him, and couldn't find the cat.  In a bathroom.  Until I looked up, and there he sat in a corner triangular soap dish, about five feet from the floor of our walk-in shower.  He weighed about ten pounds at the time.  It was obvious he was not going to be happy as a pet cat, so we turned him loose.  He hung around for a couple of days then disappeared. 

It's good to see him back, and looking healthy.  Maybe he'll stay as company for Handsome.

["The Blue Bowl" via Poetry 180]

[Illustration from Amazing Pets.co.uk]

Amadeo Chocolate Bomb

The Amedeo Chocolate Bomb 

If your friends like chocolate, you should prepare an Amedeo Chocolate Bomb for them, and you will rise to the position of Queen of Chocolate within no time at all. Although hardly touched by the spoon, a stream of chocolate lava will gush out of the 6 cm in diameter and 4 to 5 cm high cylinder. The eyes are overwhelmed; the palate will faint.

The Amedeo Chocolate Bomb is a variation of the French "Moelleux au Chocolat". In Italian, it is sometimes called "Cioccolato del Prete" or "Cappello del Prete". See also the recipe in German and the Google translations into Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

Ingredients for 8 Portions

·       250 g dark chocolate (unsweetened or semi-sweet)

·       250 g sugar

·       250 g butter

·       125 g flour

·       8 large eggs

·       some olive oil

Procedure

The preparation of an Amedeo Chocolate Bomb is so incredibly simple that even novices can try it: mix all the ingredients together and divide the mixture into small heat conducting dishes (aluminium or a similar metal; see example). Disposable aluminium containers are another alternative.

In detail:

1.     Before you do anything else, heat the oven to its highest possible temperature.

2.     Heat the chocolate and butter in a water bath. Remove from the heat and whisk quickly to form a homogenous mass.

3.     Whisk together the sugar and the eggs.

4.     Mix in the chocolate and butter mixture.

5.     Gradually add the flour. Avoid clumps forming.

6.     Cover the baking trays with a thin layer of olive oil and then divide the chocolate mixture between the 8 trays.

7.     Quickly place the trays in the oven so that as little heat as possible is lost.

8.     Baking time: 8 to 11 minutes (see explanation below).

9.     Leave to cool.

10.    Before serving, heat in the microwave for 10-15 seconds.

Everything about this recipe is foolproof – except the setting of the baking time. As this depends on the heat output of the oven and varies from one device to another, it must be determined by a proper series of tests.

Determining the Baking Time

The baking time has to be measured in such a way that the core remains fluid, but the outer shell is so firmly baked that the Chocolate Bomb doesn’t collapse when taken off the tray. Of course, the Chocolate Bomb must not be cooked for too long, because then it will be baked through and you will have a brownie and not an Amedeo Chocolate Bomb. In cross section (see picture), the diameter of the ideal Chocolate Bomb is 30 % outer shell, 40 % fluid core and a further 30 % outer shell (or 25%-50%-25%). Precision is therefore required and can only be obtained through a series of tests.

Bake only 4 of the 8 in the first round. Take the first one out after 8, the second after 9, the third after 10 and the fourth after 11 minutes. (If you have a 330°C pizza oven, 6 minutes are often enough.) Leave the trays to cool for 30 minutes (see picture). Free the Amedeo Chocolate Bombs from the surface of the trays using the blunt side of a knife. With a quick tilting hand movement, tip the Amedeo Chocolate Bombs off the trays and onto a plate. The ideal Amedeo Chocolate Bomb is one that is still firm and has the largest fluid core.

Serving

If desired, warm the Amedeo Chocolate Bomb for 10-15 seconds in the microwave before serving. For the gourmets amongst your friends, serve with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and two small, fresh peppermint leaves. Adding cream is considered a faux pas.

Gloria sent us this recipe, which came from Dr. Bernd Sebastian Kamp's medical website, Amadeo.

I love molten chocolate cake, and this one seems to, well, take the cake.

Go here to convert grams to ounces.

What Is the World Coming to?

British tabloid The Sun reports on a survey:

Men would rather watch TV in bed than have sex, a survey claims.

They also spend more time reading, talking and working under the sheets than romping.

Telly topped the list with sex in sixth spot.

Even playing computer games came higher than nookie on the list of men's most frequent bedtime antics.

But women listed sex higher on their list--second only to reading in a bed company's survey.

Body language Flic Everett said: "It doesn't surprise me that women want more sex than men.  It's a myth that men have a bigger sexual appetite."

"But Brits are becoming more adventurous and sex is no longer a bedroom-only activity."

Must mean that the Brits are having so much sex before they get to bed that they're too tired to indulge.  Yeah.  That's it. 

[Via The Sun Online]

[Image from diskussionsforen.ch]

Heartfelt and Sincere

From Avenue Q, the puppet musical featuring adult puppet situations and graphic puppet sex.  The musical features puppets that closely resemble our friends on Sesame Street, so it's strange to see a big orange hairy monster leading the men in the cast in songs like "The Internet is for Porn".

The show revolves around a racially mixed young couple (he's human, she's monster), and their neighbors on the avenue:  Christmas Eve and her fiance, Brian, Nicky and Rod, Trekkie Monster and Gary Coleman.  Coleman is the superintendent, good-natured in spite of how far down he's come since his days as a child star.  The puppets are handled by incredibly talented humans dressed in grey so that they blend into the background, allowing the puppets (and the three human characters, Brian, Christmas Eve and Gary Coleman) to hog the stage.

Princeton just graduated from college and has high hopes for his future;  Kate Monster is an assistant kindergarten teacher who dreams of opening a monster school.  The show explores racism, drinking, sex, infidelity, homosexuality, unemployment and much, much more in a scant two hours.

When Kate wants to make up with Princeton after he is unfaithful, she plans to meet him at the top of the Empire State Building, with hilarious results.

These characters are so engagingly, well, human.

When they all join in "It Sucks to be Me", you know they mean it.  I know I wanted to join right in, and so would you.

Avenue Q won the Tony for Best Musical in 2004, beating out juggernaut Wicked.  So you know you should see it if you get the chance.  Very educational.

[Image via TheatreChannel.com]