Virginia Slammer

So there are times, when I’ve gone a long time without posting, that I am tempted to just turn this thing into a food blog.  I could probably post at least a couple of times each month if I were satisfied with the sort of writing I see on nearly every food blog – rote repetition of the facts, pictures (sometimes pretty), and often some sort of rating system for the experience if it is had outside my own kitchen. 

 

But there’s a problem with doing that…

 

Those sorts of blogs bore me to fucking tears.

When I read a blog, I want STORIES.  Whatever the subject matter is, I’m only going to become a regular reader if you take me somewhere.  Most of my favorite blogs are, much like my own, basically very long-format autobiographies, written in entertaining little snippets. (I once described Tina Fey’s book Bossypants as “a very entertainingly-written book about a pretty mundane life” and meant it as a very high form of praise.)

But sometimes I still want to share something I’ve come up with, and a picture posted on Facebook just won’t do it.  So if I’m going to go the food-blogger route, I will at least give you some sort of context/story to go with it.  It’s the least I can do.

 

On that note, I present my recipe for the Virginia Slammer.

A friend in Toronto hosted a Trailer (not so) Trashy dinner party tonight.  I REALLY wanted to go, especially since I have an extra-long weekend.  But snow and the crapload of stuff I need to do around the house intervened, so I’m relegated to participating in spirit.

Now, I feel the need to reiterate that this party was happening in TORONTO.  And that I am, in general, the token Southerner in the group.  It wasn’t just that I WANTED to go…I felt somewhat like it was my DUTY to go.  And I ain’t even that Southern.

The point of this party was not to eat Frito pie and Hostess cupcakes – it was to eat classed-up versions of these things.  Given my natural affinity for all things alcoholic, I naturally assumed the best way I could contribute would be to come up with a classed-up trailer-trashy cocktail (although admittedly, MadMup’s Twinkie Cake might have been just the right note to strike on this particular evening).

One question remained: which cocktail?

Unfortunately, most of the “cocktails” enjoyed in actual trailer parks are either twist-and-pour Kool-Aid + booze type things or involve Jaegermeister.

I refuse to put Jaeger in anything.  I have been known to actually enjoy it straight, but it makes for ludicrously disgusting cocktails.  I will never understand how it became frat boy catnip.

But then…then I remembered a little beverage from my bartending class in college called the Alabama Slammer.

Okay, so my memory was also jogged while watching the BCS Championship game at my local BW3, when the bartender started trying to sell them to anyone who even LOOKED like they were likely to utter the words, “ROLL TIDE”.

For those of you who either a) don’t drink or 2) have blissfully lost any and all recollection of an Alabama Slammer, it is usually comprised of:

Amaretto

Sloe gin

Southern Comfort

Juices (generally orange, may also involve sour mix)

It is a disgusting, overly sweet, overly pink concoction.  It often has a flavor reminiscent of Hawaiian Punch.

So, for my more sophisticated take, I attempted to upgrade each of these ingredients:

Instead of amaretto (an almond liqueur), I opted for homemade orgeat syrup.  Still almond-flavored, but tastes more like an actual NUT than some chemical extract with TONS of sugar.  Also contains orange flower water, which has a lovely floral note if not over-used.

Since sloe gin is rarely made with gin anymore, it’s basically a berry liqueur.  In its place, I used the liquid from my homemade cocktail cherries to get some fruitiness.

Southern Comfort…oh, where do I start?  SoCo was originally made from whiskey, infused with “fruit and spices.”  It is now made from neutral grain spirit, infused with “fruit and spices and whiskey flavoring.”  Instead, I used bourbon.  Actual, straight bourbon.  I figured the spices from my cherry liquid as well as the fruitiness would cover the rest of the flavor profile, and MY drink might actually TASTE A BIT LIKE WHISKEY.

Finally…orange juice.  This is going to be a very sweet, very fruity drink.  I opted to use bitter orange juice instead of regular.  I find it has a better orange scent, but a nice sour/bitter backbone to balance the drink.

I also added a slurp of cherry-vanilla bitters (also homemade – this is why nobody can ever follow my recipes) and a dash of orange bitters.

I wound up with:

It’s pink.  It’s fruity.  But it’s a HECK of a lot more drinkable than the original, and it’s a rather deceptively stiff drink.  I might tweak the proportions a bit (and possibly add a dash of Angostura) but I think I accomplished what I set out to do.  I made an Alabama Slammer that’s just a bit more classy.  Thus, I’m calling it the Virginia Slammer: not quite as trashy as it could be.

 

Correction: When I went to mix a second one, it became clear that what it needed was a dash of, not Angostura, but tobacco bitters.  NOW it’s trailer-trash-errific!

Home Sweet Deck.

After that last post about my hideous neighbors…I figured maybe I ought to say a few words about what I LIKE about my apartment. 

 

1.  It has two bedrooms.  No, seriously.  My last apartment didn’t even technically have one – it was an “open concept” one-bedroom.  Which meant: kitchen/dining room and living/bedroom.  Fine for me, but inconvenient when having guests, since this also meant I didn’t have a couch.  The “guest bedroom” was an air mattress, inflated at the foot of my bed, after all of my living room furniture was pushed out of the way.

 

2.  The bathroom is within the confines of the apartment proper.  Again, not a luxury I had in my last apartment, where my bathroom was out in the hall.  This meant walking to the shower or going to pee meant entering common space.  You have no idea how much you value the privilege of walking from the bathroom to the bedroom naked (or semi-so) until you can no longer do it.

 

3.  It does NOT have an overbearing landlady who lets herself into it without warning and peers around her curtains at my visitors.

 

4.  My building is only one apartment deep.  This means I actually have east-facing windows AND west-facing windows, ergo my apartment has excellent sun exposure throughout the day and breezes blow straight through it when the windows are open.  I have never lived in an apartment that had decent air circulation without mechanical intervention.

 

5.  I have a dishwasher.  Granted, I have to open the fridge door to open it all the way, but dishpan hands are a thing of the past for me.

 

6.  This is the big one…I HAVE A DECK.  Growing up, the deck was something I took for granted.  It was the site of crab feasts…dinners when the house was too stuffy to stand…it was where my family met one of my college boyfriends for the first time, and where my brother once suggested that maybe I would enjoy photography (he was right).  My apartment in grad school had many things going for it: a small gym, hot tub, in-ground pool, tennis courts, nice little trail through the woods for running.  But in my last couple of years of grad school, I told myself that my next apartment would have: a) a dishwasher, b) a washer and dryer, and c) some sort of balcony/deck. 

Then I decided to move to Toronto.

On my limited budget, I had to make some sacrifices.  My little basement apartment did come with laundry privileges, but not a dishwasher.  But I made damned sure I would have some outdoor space for my grill.  I use my grill year-round, as long as it isn’t buried under snow (and even then, have been known to melt a ring around it when desperate).  My Toronto landlady offered the use of their very large grill, hooked up to the natural gas line.  I opted to use my tiny Weber Smokey Joe, because I.  REQUIRE.  CHARCOAL.  Landlady hated this.  She had a severe aversion to smoke or lighter fluid fumes, so I used that as an excuse to buy the chimney starter I had been wanting for ages anyway.  TA-DAH!  No lighter fluid!  Every time I lit that damned thing on a nice day I heard windows being angrily slammed shut, but there wasn’t anything she could do to stop me, because IT WAS WRITTEN INTO THE LEASE.

And, lest you think I just said, “I need outdoor space for my grill…”

Nope.  I specified that it was charcoal.  Bitch had full warning, and didn’t have a leg to stand on.

However…I still had to climb the stairs out of the basement…cross their gargantuan 3-season deck (complete with patio heater which made it more like 3.5) and stand out in the freezing cold to use the spot they had given me.  So my grilling frequency was less than optimal.  It’s hard to throw your meat on the grill, then go work on side dishes, when you spend at least a minute in transit negotiating doors.

So when I looked at this apartment, I saw right past the smell of Pet and ugly-ass cabinets, because there was a big sliding door leading out onto…a proper Deck.

And not some shitty balcony built of cinderblocks that feels like a concrete cage.  This is the biggest deck I have ever seen attached to an apartment of this size.

I have room for a patio set.

I can store my recylables and my bike out here.

I CAN GRILL.  Just a couple of feet outside of my doors and windows, which means I can do it in nearly any weather.  Especially now that I have a down vest for the dashes outdoors in the colder months.

I have a view, not of the next complex over, but of a nice little patch of woods surrounding a drainage culvert.  Nature provides a buffer between me and the medical center/retirement complex on my street.  It looks kind of like this:

I can garden.  Not a lot, but I have tomatoes.  I have radishes and lettuce.  I have rosemary, thyme, oregano, parsley, and two kinds of basil.  My garden looks kind of like this:

I.  HAVE.  FLOWERS.

I have little lanterns with tealights in them.  I have an extension cord that allows me to blog by candlelight.

I have delicious, Lake Michigan breezes from the west, and strong afternoon sunlight.

I have:

That’s right.  MUTHAFUCKIN’ PRODUCE.

And this weekend, as summer comes to a close, I have UVa football streaming on my computer as the sun goes down and I grill my dinner.

No matter what’s going on in my life…no matter how stressed I am at work or at home…no matter how messy my kitchen or bedroom are…my deck is my oasis.  Nothing seems to matter when I’m out here.  As long as the plants get watered and the gnome gets paid…

 

Everything is going to be okay.

To be continued.

So it was brought to my attention, by a new reader of The Alchemist, that a certain long-running plotline was never resolved.  Namely, “whatever happened to the VGLM???”

 

He got married about two weeks ago. 

 

After obsessing over him for far too long, getting over him and becoming fairly good friends with him, I kind of lost touch with him my last year in Toronto.  We had evolved into a weird mentor-mentee kind of relationship, since he’s one of the few people I know that spent nearly as long in grad school as I did.  Some of us have to take longer so that we can participate in outside activities that keep us sane.  He’s not a prolific Facebooker, and that last year I had moved on to a teaching position, meaning I had moved out of the lab space I shared with him.

 

So a little while after I moved, I found out via Facebook that he was engaged.  <sad face>

And she appears to be lovely.  <sadder face>

And they seem to be starting a lovely life together.  <slow tear>

And according to her profile pic on Facebook, they both looked stunning at the wedding.  I do find it slightly disturbing that, in the pic she chose to use, she looks gorgeous…and they’re both smiling…and they’re not actually looking at each other.

 

But to each their own.

 

I prefer the pic I took of two other good friends at their wedding last weekend, where they couldn’t take their eyes off of each other during their first dance as they sang to each other quietly.  But whatevs.

 

In other news: The cinderblocks were removed the day after I complained.  Also, the Bitch Downstairs with the Baby has moved out.  Hopefully my new downstairs neighbors will have less of a fondness for extremely loud bass on Sunday mornings, and for storing dirty diapers within noseshot of my deck.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

When I took my current job, it involved a major move on almost no notice.  When I came for my interview, I took it as a good sign that the department had put together a packet (read: binder) of information for me…guidelines for all of the majors at my university that require chemistry…information about benefits…a folder from the local chamber of commerce with information about the school system, things to do, etc…and a flyer tucked in the back advertising a house for rent.

 

I inquired about said house, and the landlady sent me pictures.  The place was ADORABLE.  It looks small, but is a 4-bedroom house with a recently remodeled kitchen, a finished basement, and a garage.  Two of the bedrooms are upstairs, and thus could easily be closed off and/or used for storage, while I use the ground floor and basement as a perfectly me-sized house.  And it was…<drumroll>…$700/month!!!

 

Of course… “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

 

Did I mention I was hired a mere two weeks before classes started?

 

And I was moving from Toronto.  A place where the rental market is HIGHLY competitive (my absolute unwillingness to compete for a shitty downtown apartment is precisely why I wound up living for 4 years in a tiny-but-marginally-less-shitty apartment in the suburbs), and thus one must act fast to lock down a good place.  At this point, I want the house.  I am doing everything I can to try to get deposit money to this woman so that I can guarantee I have it.  My stuff was already packed…I just wanted to find a home and move into it and get on with my life.

Even though she explains that the utilities bills will stay in her name, and be sent to her in Colorado.  So I will be expected to mail my checks to her in time for her to mail checks to the utility companies by the due date.

Oh, and she had talked to someone else about renting, but determined it wouldn’t be a “good relationship.”  She always rents by word-of-mouth, to temporary faculty and such, she doesn’t rent to “just anybody.”

 

O…K…

 

Still, I want the house.  So I explain that I live in Canada, and all of my funds are Canadian, so I’ll need to figure out how to get a deposit/first and last month’s rent/etc. to her.  IN COLORADO.  I ask if she has a PayPal account…
"No.  And I refuse to get one.”

 

O…K…

 

And she launches into an e-mail tirade about how she needs to know my move-in and move-out dates so she can draft a lease to send me, and all she gets from me is all of this information she doesn’t need to know about my finances, and yadda yadda yadda.  She also leaves not one, but SEVERAL messages to this effect on the machine of the friends with whom I am staying.

Also, one of the stipulations of the lease agreement will be that the neighbor kids are not allowed to play in her yard.  She has the biggest yard in the neighborhood, and the kids all want to play there, but the neighbor mom has sued her once already when one of the kids got hurt on her property.

Oh, and a previous tenant had been told he couldn’t paint one of the bedrooms.  She had done it in some sort of (horrible sounding –ed.) denim finish for her son.  She still hopes to come back to, at the very least, retire to this home and wants nothing changed.  In fact, there will be a clause in the lease that prohibits me from making any changes.  Former Tenant apparently mentioned to a neighbor that he was going to paint this bedroom anyway.  But, “word got back to me that he was going to do it and I put a stop to it.”

So…you’re saying that your neighbors will be spying on me and/or suing me.  At all times.  Eeeeeeeeeeeeexcellent.

 

Um…what.  The fuck?

 

This is about the time that I say, “I don’t think this is going to work out.  Perhaps we should go our separate ways.”

“I agree.”

End of story, right?

 

Nope. 

A few days later, I have another e-mail from her.  “I feel like we got off on the wrong foot.  I have been looking at the real estate listings, and all of the apartments are either in bad areas or too far from campus.  I feel for you…you are young, and I am willing to try to work this out.  We just need to work on better communication.”

 

Um, bitch?  You crazy.  I don’t think so.

 

“Thanks but no thanks.  I’ll take my chances finding a place on my own.”

 

We finally go our separate ways.

I move to my town, and set up shop in a hotel so I can start work and house-hunt.  There is a complex that I have been told, multiple times, only rents to faculty, staff, and professional students.  The sign in front of said complex says, “Now Renting”

So I give them a call.  They say that there is one apartment that just became available.

Again, coming from a competitive housing market and now literally homeless, I ask when I can come see it.

This is the point where I feel it is relevant to point out that this is the only apartment complex I have found that I am ELIGIBLE to live in.  Everything in this town falls into one of the following categories:

1.  Student housing (too old for that shit)

2.  Retirement housing (too young for that shit)

3.  Low-income housing (too rich for that shit)

4.  Home ownership (too smart for that shit)

So basically, if I don’t want to get stuck owning property in a small, dying Michigan town…I NEED THIS APARTMENT.  So I look at it.  It smells bad and the cabinets are older than my mother, but it has a nice layout, a dishwasher, and a nice big deck out back.  The property manager assures me the previous occupant has JUST moved out, and they haven’t had a chance to clean it.  It will not smell like Pet when I move in.

I say I will think about it.

But by the next day, I’m pretty sure there is nothing else for me in this Godforsaken town.

I call back and say I will take it.  Again, I am used to a MUCH more competitive housing market…the manager seems taken a bit aback by my desperation.  She does not understand that I AM LIVING IN THE HOLIDAY INN, Y’ALL.

No one should have to pay seventy bucks a night for a roof over their heads.  I don’t care if they do clean it, make your bed, and leave you wee lotions while you’re at work.

So it’ll be at least a week before my apartment is ready.  <sigh>

Finally, I sign my lease and take possession of my new home.

And it smells like fucking Pet.

At first, I thought I could get used to it.  But I spent about an hour in my new home before I started to get an asthmatic reaction to the lingering allergens. <sigh>

So I dash off an e-mail to my property manager: 

Me: Dude, I can’t live like this.  Like, asthma.  Seriously.  Can you clean the carpets again, or maybe get them replaced?

PM: We will have the carpets replaced on Monday.

Can I get a whoop whoop for good customer service???

 

So I spend one night sleeping on an air mattress on the exposed carpet padding in my dining room.  Then go out of town for the Labor Day weekend…and come home to fresh carpet.

A year later, my apartment still smells weird, but it is the weird chemically goodness of brand-spankin’-new, heavily StainMastered carpet. Meanwhile, I have settled in.  I swabbed down the linoleum in the kitchen and the bathroom with vinegar (to remove the last ammonia-riffic traces of what I have to hope were Pet accidents).  I have bought under-cabinet lighting and a kitchen cart to make my ugly kitchen functional.  I have hung pictures and posters on my walls…put up window treatments for privacy and hominess…changed the window treatments and sheets in the bedroom because I realized I couldn’t hang my favorite poster with the ones I had…cleaned out and actually started to furnish and decorate my back bedroom/office/sewing room.

 

Then the neighbors changed.

Over the course of the last few months, I have had to deal with:

1)  Screaming matches downstairs, followed by slammed doors as both of them leave to presumably tell their friends what an asshole the other person is.  48 hours of continuous howling by their neglected dog ensues.

2)  Perfectly nice-seeming downstairs neighbor knocking on my door when I was home sick and unloading a sob story about his cheating girlfriend with WAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION…all as a prelude to asking if he could borrow my phone.  Dude, KEEP THE PHONE FOR ALL I CARE…JUST STOP TELLING ME THINGS I DON’T NEED TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR HORRIBLE LIFE.  A few days later, watched the guy she was cheating with move into the apartment…when the ex had just moved into the building next door.  Bitch, have some class.

3)  Unnecessarily loud comings and goings, often around 4am when I am trying to sleep with my windows open.  A typical conversation proceeds as follows:

“Please don’t pee on my car.”

“I’m not going to.”

<sound of peeing on what one can only assume is the maple tree right outside my window>

IF YOU ARE IN MY PARKING LOT, SURELY YOU HAVE A FRIEND THAT LIVES HERE.  AND SURELY THAT FRIEND HAS A FUCKING TOILET. 

Oh…my bad.  You might have to climb TWO AND A HALF STORIES to get to a toilet that flushes, and you just have to pee.  The tree is certainly the best option.

4)  The morning symphony of birds singing…breeze rustling the leaves of the trees…and wretching somewhere in the distance, presumably in my parking lot.  Because indoor wretching should not carry through my open windows.

5)  My next-door neighbors (also faculty, and lovely, quiet neighbors, expecting their first baby) moving out because the people living upstairs from them appear to be the source of 3) and 4).  Apparently, there has been wretching on our stairwell, but on stairs I (blissfully) never need to ascend or look at.  Said neighbors are apparently not limited to peeing on trees and (not) cars…they also like to pee off of their balcony.  ON THE THIRD FLOOR.

6)  Unusually large numbers of unusually large flies in my apartment.  Specifically, around my patio door and kitchen window.  I go outside and look down…to find an entire box of dirty diapers stored just outside Downstairs Bitch’s patio.  WHO STORES DIRTY DIAPERS IN A CARDBOARD BOX???  OUTSIDE???  WHEN THERE IS A DUMPSTER LESS THAN 50 YARDS AWAY???

7) Two cinderblocks, carefully stacked just below my fire escape.  Because this is apparently an acceptable alternative to remembering to take your keys.

8)  A completely random, approximately 19-year-old drunk kid opening my front door this afternoon because he thought it was his buddy’s. 

“Um, HELLO??? GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!”

<door closes>

I deadbolt it.

<door knock>

I open door.  Nobody there.  I slam door shut and deadbolt it.

<door knock>

I open door (honestly expecting an apology, if not from Random, from one of his friends).  Nobody there.  I call upstairs, “Are you guys having fun?” as one of Random’s friends says, “you are a retard.”  Slam door.  Repeat.

<door knock>

FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE.

 

What I REALLY want to yell is, “I hope you’re in my class this fall, asshole.”

 

Today I started doing three things: writing angry letters to my landlords, and deadbolting my door, no matter how full my hands are when I come home from Meijer.

And thinking seriously about getting the hell out of this town.  Damn 2-year contract…

Letters From the Front: Hookah-ed.

Pennsic, in general, has many traditions…many social events…lots to do.

 

Blood Moon, in particular, has…well…two.

The first time I started this series, I wrote about Scotch Broth night.  That’s one.  And a lovely, family-friendly ritual it is.

 

The other one?

<sigh>

The other one is called Hookah.

And no, it has nothing to do with smoking.

Hookah is the one “party” Blood Moon throws.  But it’s more of a neighborhood block party than a ParTAAAAAAAAAY party.  The ground rules for Hookah are as follows:

1.  We cannot Hookah unless it has rained that day.  The first rain is generally a guaranteed Hookah occasion, but I usually miss that one since it always seems to happen in the first week.

2.  The Hookah is announced to neighboring camps via a few ringleaders that run around the fringe of our camp singing the Hookah Song.  It goes something like, “Hookah, dookah, dupity do!  I’ve got another Hookah for you…”

3.  The Hookah is filled with…<sigh>…Pat O’Brien’s Hurricane Mix.  It is syrupy sweet.  It is reasonably strong.  It is bright red.  It is the sort of thing that nightmarish frat parties are made of.

4.  The Hookah keeps getting refilled until we run out or everyone passes out.

Yeah, it’s that kind of party.

 

I’m not sure how far back Hookah goes as a tradition…all I know is that the Old Hookah was made by Brother, and my first Pennsic was the first year of the New Hookah.  The New Hookah looks like this:

That’s right.  It’s a giant jug with giant jugs.

There are two pieces of tubing coming out of the top of the Hookah – in the words of Brother, “So you can Hookah with the one you love.” (The previous incarnation only accommodated one user at a time.)

Operation of the Hookah proceeds as follows:

1.  Two willing victims are found.

2.  The Hookah is hoisted above a third party’s head. (Preferably by its giant jugs)

3.  Said willing victims drink, via the magic of siphoning action, from the tubes until they can’t take it anymore.

4.  Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.

 

It’s basically a fruity, non-carbonated keg stand for two.  The new, double Hookah introduced another aspect to the ritual: that of competition.  Whoever has the least staying power is in charge of how long of a drink the other person gets.  If you crap out too quickly, your partner will be highly disappointed in you.

I never crap out too quickly.

The Hookah has claimed many victims over the years.  Those victims clearly have no grasp of hydrodynamics.  Either that, or they have no idea how to use their tongue.

Those who allow Gravity to determine the rate at which they drink are condemned to also become its bitch by the end of the night.

 

The stories of Hookah are legendary…I will spare you the gory details.  I have only experienced Hookah once, but have never been its victim; the vast majority of our camp cannot make the same claim.  I take the occasional hit, but keep my mug filled with something more palatable.  I, like my brother, appreciate the Hookah more for the social aspect than for the beverage itself.  The Hookah draws in our neighbors, and the occasional passerby.  And, in the case of the one year I was there for it, also led to a long, snaking backrub chain.

 

THIS IS, BY FAR, THE BEST PART OF HOOKAH.

 

I enjoy drinking. 

I enjoy socialization.

I freaking LOVE BACKRUBS.

By the end of my first Hookah, all I know is that I am running a decent buzz…and I am more relaxed than I have ever been IN MY LIFE.  The new girl in camp always seems to attract the most backrub attention, so I had a distinct advantage that year.  I swear I didn’t go 5 minutes without somebody rubbing my shoulders…and that person was always different.  I actually didn’t drink that much because I was TOO BUSY GETTING BACKRUBS.

 

This is the sort of thing that makes it hard for people who haven’t been to understand what an incredibly relaxing vacation Pennsic can be.  You never have to be anywhere.  You can drink whenever you want.  AND SOMEONE IS ALWAYS WILLING TO GIVE YOU A BACKRUB.

 

People pay hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars for spa vacations that do the same things.  But I’d be willing to bet that those spa employees don’t make you laugh half as much in the process as my Clanmates will. 

Hookah, dookah, dupity do…