To help celebrate my 42nd birthday, we thought we'd have a few people over for drinks and pizza. Because of the significance of the number of years I've been alive, we thought Pangalactic Gargle Blasters would be a nicely appropriate refreshment.
We were immediately stymied by the complete unavailability not only Ol' Janx Spirit, for which there is no distributor that serves Nebraska, but found Arcturan Mega Gin to be also difficult to obtain, frozen or not. There also seems to be an embargo against importation of Fallian marsh gas and seawater from Santraginus V. (Oh, those Santraginus beaches. Oh, those Santraginean fish.) And given the utter absence of Algolian Suntiger tooth outlets, actually harvesting one seems likely to be beyond the resources of major world governments, not to mention I'd want to have them by later this afternoon.
Undeterred, we undertook to reverse engineer the drink, given a working knowledge of its general effect as well as the experience of drinking it, namely that it's similar to having one's brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick, and starting with materials we know to be readily available on an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.
A brief survey of foregoing attempts was unsatisfying, each recipe failing to capture the mood and spirit of the original creation. One seems much too concerned with the slice of lemon, while another is likely to be overly gold-bricky. Some versions seem to assert that all you need to make a Pangalactic Gargle Blaster are some colorful-but-tacky liquors with none-the-less exotic names, like Blue Curacao or Mike's Hard Lemonade, and a shaker. We think, though, the recipe must be more subtle.
Pangalactic Gargle Blasters, we know, have the following characteristics:
Given this, here is the recipe we came up with. To make one Pangalactic Gargle Blaster:
Rub the rim of a pint glass with lemon, and dip it in the salt (like you were making a margarita). Place several ice cubes in the glass.
Pour in the tequila, gin, and creme de menthe. Don't bother floating it; it won't work with the ice in the glass...
Top off with ginger beer. Drop in the sugar cube. Squeeze in the juice from the wedge of lemon.
Add an olive.
Drink...but...very carefully...
I put this together for our New Year's Day breakfast: very tasty. The cakes are light and exceptionally tender, but still have a good structure. I served them with maple syrup, but they'd probably be good with a tangy preserve, orange marmalade, or the like, too.
Start by preparing the sweet potato. This can be done ahead of time. Quarter it, and steam the pieces 40-45 minutes, then slip out of the skin and mash thoroughly. Allow to come to room temparature.
Combine dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl, using a fork or whisk to mix.
Combine wet ingredients in another bowl, stirring to combine.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry mixture, mixing only until the dry ingredients are moistened. If your sweet potato was particularly big, your batter may be too thick. If so, thin it with a little milk. Be careful not to stir too much, or your pancakes may become tough.
Allow the batter to rest while you heat a griddle to medium high, or about 350. Brush the griddle lightly with oil.
For each pancake, ladle about 1/4 cup of batter onto the hot griddle. Allow to cook 2-5 minutes per side, or until golden brown. Serve hot with butter and warm maple syrup.
Makes about 30 pancakes.
Five dishes to serve at your vegetarian Thanksgiving feast:
This recipe is based on Barbara's instructions. She usually just wings it, measuring nothing, navigating by sight, smell, and feel.
Ingredients:
- Corn bread (8x8 baking pan), prepared and cooled
- 1 Tbsp olive oil
- 1 large onion, chopped
- 2 celery stalks, chopped
- 1-2 Tbsp mayonnaise
- 1 tsp poultry seasoning or to taste
- 1 cup vegetable stock (more if needed)
- 1 egg
- Salt and pepper to taste
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Sautee onion and celery in olive oil (or any vegetable oil) until softened, about five minutes.
Crumble corn bread into a large mixing bowl. Add onion and celery, mayo, poultry seasoning, veggie stock, egg, salt, and pepper. Mix thoroughly with your hand (or a wooden spoon if squeamish). Mixture should be very moist, but not soupy.
Transfer mixture to baking pan that is large enough to hold it with some space at the top. Smooth and flatten the surface of the mixture. Bake at 350°F for about an hour. Serve hot.
Barbara says, if it's too moist after baking, just kind of crumble and mix it around with a spoon, and put it back in the oven for a while.
That's good eats.
It seems odd to have to think about going back to work in the morning. Saturday night, we had a number of choices, but we decided to go over to Marin and Brian's. We expected hors d'oeuvre night, but it turned out to be Indian food night instead. I proudly placed my vegetarian sausage balls (a recipe inspired by the vegetarian sausage balls served on Christmas days over at Shannon and Curt's) on the table next to sag, dry potatoes cooked with mustard seed, tomato chutney, Gujarati-style green beans, and naan.
Despite my recipe yielding five dozen sausage balls, and it being Indian food night, there were none left to take home for breakfast. (Aside from being generally popular, Caitlin found a deep appreciation for the savory nuggets and made a pretty good dent in them herself.)
Everything was delicious, and at midnight, with Elvis Costello
finishing up Austin City Limits and U2's Achtung Baby starting to play
on the stereo, we cracked a bottle of Domaine Ste. Michelle blanc de
blanc. I'm not a big fan of (little c
) champagne as a rule, but
this was tasty. It was dry without being astringent, with hints of green
apples. Barbara and I chose this as the bubbly to serve at our wedding
reception eight years ago; it was good then too, but I don't think the
happy occasion is coloring my assessment too much.
I'm working on the back end for the search feature of this site. As
usual, perfect
is the enemy of good enough
. I'm writing it
in the form of a pyblosxom plugin, and, as long as I don't try to make
it too good, it'll be finished Real Soon Now™. Mostly, I want to
encapsulate the SWIG generated python API on swish-e. There are things
(search objects, error handling, iterating over results) that scream to
be more pythonic, but I'm fighting that urge in favor of getting it
working.
I've also ripped I bunch more discs onto juke. It's working great,
though there's one little problem I haven't figured out yet. The first time
I press play
after starting rhythmbox, I get two error dialogs:
ALSA device error
, and Unable to pause playback
. After
dismissing the dialogs, if I press play again, everything works as
expected. Still looking into this...
Sunday, we spent the afternoon with my brother, Steve, along with his girlfriend, Amy, and his kids, Emily and Taylor. We grazed on cheese, crackers, dips, and chips all afternoon, chatted, and set up his new computer. I installed Firefox and Thunderbird, and managed to transfer Amy's email data from Lookout Express on her old machine to Thunderbird on the new one...a good thing, too, since the old machine was clearly on its last legs. The power supply fan, when it managed to spin at all, mooed like a cow.
I was a little surprised to find that Thunderbird couldn't import her Outlook data directly. It has an Outlook Express import mode, but I couldn't get it to work with files I was bringing over from the other machine on my thumbdrive. To successfully import the data, I used DbConv to convert the Outlook .dbx files to mbox format, then imported them using Thunderbird's Eudora import mode. I'm glad I could get it to work; I was sweating that my much-evangelized free software was not living up to my evangelism.
I spent part of today looking into the WMF vulnerability. I've been surprised at the level of the rhetoric being used by security specialists. I've hardened the Windows box under my care using this information.
QuickieBiscuit Mix, but Bisquick or whatever will work just as well.)
Gimme Lean
Allow sausage to thaw. Preheat oven to 350°F.
Crumble (well...smoosh really) the sausage into a large mixing bowl. Add the other ingredients and mix by hand. The mixture will seem dry at first, but will come together after a few minutes and form a big ball.
Form mixture into balls about an inch in diameter. Place on cookie sheet and bake for 15-20 minutes, until they just start to turn brown. Serve hot. (I made them in two batches. Putting them in a bowl covered with a towel kept them warm.)
Yield: around 60 balls.
[Sat Dec 23 23:24:46 CST 2006 Update: I used to use Boca sausage patties in this recipe, but I've switched to Gimme Lean. It's less expensive and just as tasty.]