Tuesday, February 18, 2014

day off!

Nothing better than a weekday off where it's beautiful outside and you pack a ton of fun into the day. 8 hours when I could have been mostly sitting on my ass doing paperwork or whatevs and instead I had lunch at Magpie with Charles, walked to the mall and got some awesome lipstick, met Scott at Lowbrau where we unexpectedly ran into friends and chilled for hours. I had a Faction Pale, a Mikkeller chipotle porter (the spice seems to have mellowed out but it's still delicious) and then David Steinberg started going off creating cocktails for us. It was fun to give feedback since he was either making them up on the spot or making ones that he has been working on for Block. One of mine had Averna and bourbon and something else I don't remember. Or maybe that was it. If I wrote that on Foodways someone would say I was a total idiot and I'm like tell me something I don't know, bub. VA had something that had Violette in it that was this awesome grey color.

I got a taste of Rhum Agricole (the clear kind) for the first time. What an interesting, complex spirit. We also looked up presidential trivia as it related to drinking in tribute to President's Day. I ate the duck fat fries AGAIN. Fun!

3 comments:

beckler said...

My stats tell me I am getting well over 100 hits a day re: the ghost town of comments.

Anonymous said...

Waiting for the next jimboys- gate apparently.

Jedboy

Snufkin said...

I've been seeing articles pop up in the past few months about Rhum Agricole and the French Islands in the Caribbean, which has been pretty interesting to follow because a lot of their food and culture tends to defy the regional stereotypes most Americans have. And one of the coolest things I've ever done was visiting one of the old school distilleries out in the country side of Guadeloupe, where they had a big manual still powered by oxen to crush the sugar cane juice for distilling. Definitely a lot more subtle than your average mass produced rum, especially because it's not as sickly sweet thanks to using the juice instead of molasses. I just hope that it doesn't get so popular that you start to see some of the god awful variations which are now around thanks to mojitos and caprihnas (and Cachaça is the same process as Rhum Agricole) getting on the menus of places like Applebee's.

Also the whole history of rum in general and its role in trade/colonialism/slavery is so crazy and while people are talking more about the origins of the beverage, we also seem to have a lot of textbook critics trying to change what's taught in history by using more generic terms like the Triangle Trade.