Bartender Geek

Have you ever had a maraschino cherry?

I mean, a REAL one?

A sour marasca cherry preserved in syrup?

It's amazing.

The "maraschino cherries" that we get, well, in all honesty, you can taste a little bit of similarity in them. You can actually taste that, if you took a "maraschino cherry" and somehow made it into something GOOD, this is what it would be.

How do I put this? A maraschino cherry is a cherry almost, but not entirely, unlike a maraschino cherry.

I hand't posted about this earlier, because I was kind of hoping that we'd solve the -1. . .

So, the Friday before Christmas, that is, the 21st, was Lis's work's Festivus party. (See, they decided that "holiday party" was a lame term, because you need to be celebrating A holiday, not just the CONCEPT of "holiday", but they didn't want to do a Christmas party, because of all the non-Christians, and a "Christmas/Hannukah/Yule/Kwanza/Saturnalia/Whatever Party" is just too confusing. So they did a Festivus party instead. I don't think they did the Feats of Strength or the Airing of Grievances, but they DID set up mini-golf throughout the entire office, and have a Yankee Swap. They also had a potluck.

As you may expect, it is usually my job to prepare things for Lis to bring to work potlucks. Oh, if I don't want to do it, she is perfectly capable of making very yummy things on her own (she makes a mean Kahlua fudge, and she's been known to make baklava), but it's normally my job. Naturally, I want to make sure that Lis looks good when I make potluck treats for her. If I'm short on time, I can make my Chocolate Dream Pie, which is really good, and very easy, but if I've got the time, I'd much rather make a cheesecake. Because I make an AMAZING cheesecake.

A couple years back, Lis bought me a truly top-of-the-line springform pan for cheesecake-baking. It has a glass base with a metal rim which is carefully machined to fit exactly into the springform sides, which are made of some sort of high-tech material, and coated with Teflon. It's a really good springform pan -- doesn't leak at all, releases easily, and easy to wash.

I sent Lis off to work with the cheesecake, on the base of the springform pan, since that's the point of springform pan bases -- you serve the item on them.

The cheesecake was a huge hit. None of it was left.

Neither was the base of the pan. Someone must have thrown it out. How someone throws out a heavy tempered glass disk, I don't know. I mean, it doesn't LOOK like trash. But it's gone.

So I'm going to have to replace my best springform pan.

The thing is -- as annoyed as I am about the loss of the pan, that's overshadowed by my happiness that Lis's co-workers loved the cheesecake so much.

I am thankful that, for all the weirdnesses and problems North America has had over its history, we still managed to develop a holiday dedicated to eating a meal with family (chosen and/or biological) and reflecting on reasons to feel gratitude.

So, Lis wants me to make something sweet to eat. I have one pie crust (for a single-pie crust) left over from the double-pie crust recipe I made a couple days ago.

So, I've got a pie crust.

I've got basic baking staples in the house, but I'm going to have to go down to the supermarket before I cook, anyway, just the one down the corner (Lis has the car today).

What kind of pie should I make?

In other news, my father was in a car accident last night and broke his collarbone. He's okay, except for the broken collarbone, but still, just in case you're going to shul tomorrow, his name is דוד בצאליל בן שרה (David Betzaleil ben Sarah).

We went to Topsfield fair -- I got a list of the cooking contest categories. One category is cheesecake, and Lis says I have to enter next year.

For everyone else on my friends list: Topsfield fair also has competitions for over twenty categories of beer, a dozen categories of wine, a half-dozen categories of cider, four or five categories of mead. C'mon, folks -- I've HAD some of the stuff you brew -- I KNOW that some of you can pick up a couple blue ribbons at the state fair. You have GOT to do this -- I want to see at LEAST a dozen blue ribbons and maybe another dozen red ribbons on my friends list next year.

Besides, don't you want to tell people that your mead won a blue ribbon at the state fair? (And some of the subcategories got almost no entries -- I don't think there was even one entry for French-style perry, for instance. I don't think there were THAT many melomels, either -- and I KNOW some of you do kickass melomel.)

Also, Fantasy Wargaming finally showed up. It sucks much less than I remember -- it's actually very good. I'm kind of disappointed . . .

Lis and I are in Montreal, to help papersky celebrate her book.

Montreal is a great city. Montreal is a city which believes that french fries need gravy and cheese on them. In this, as among other things, Montreal is right.

Thesis
In the British Isles, "breakfast" is eggs, sausages, bacon, toast, coffee, juice . . .

Antithesis
In Continental Europe, "breakfast" is a croissant or other roll, and coffee.

Synthesis

I've been several days behind in blogging, which I am sorry for. Not just because you don't get to read what I'm doing, but because writing it down helps me remember and enjoy.

June 21 was several things. First, it was the longest day of the year, being the solstice. Second, it was Lis's birthday. And, third, we realized that it was exactly my one-third-century mark.

It was also the first day we went into Florence.

Bucine, where we're staying, is like an hour outside Florence, so it's easy to hop on the train, spend the day, and come back. Which is one of the things we've been doing. On the 21st, we did said hopping with my sister, mother, and father. We couldn't figure out how the heck the ticket machine worked, so we ended up riding without the ticket, which is a gamble . . . if you get caught, it's a five euro fine. As it happened, we got caught, and our tickets cost 10 euros apiece, rather than 5 euros. Oh, well.

My sister was hungry enough to be grumpy on the way in, so we stopped at a cafe when we got into Florence, and had pastries and fruit and coffee and juice and stuff. After doing so, we all felt in much better moods, not only Leila. Healthy blood sugar levels are a good thing.

Then we began wandering about the city together. We headed toward the Duomo, and just walked around that area, admiring the gorgeous cathedral, and eventually (after looking at the outdoor spot with dozens of famous statues, including the reproduction of Michalangelo's David (the original is in the Acadame museum, but the reproduction is in the original space where it was put) headed off to the Uffizi Gallery, where we had timed tickets for 12:45.
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So, we left Boston at about 7 pm on Thursday night, arriving in London at about 7 am Friday morning. On about a six-and-a-half hour flight. The numbers do not add up due to rounding. And me forgetting exactly when the plane took off and landed.

I probably got about an hour of sleep on the plane, but we knew that we weren't going to sleep until bedtime London time. As annoying as it is, Lis assured me that the best way to beat jetlag is to just deal with it as an all-but-allnighter the day before, and try to keep to your intended schedule as best you can.

I hate travel, as I've mentioned before, and my skin was crawling by the morning. It took us about an hour to clear customs. And then Lis found a luxury spa thingy in the airport, and we paid £12 (see? British keyboards have a £ key. And a $ key. Hunh. What symbol is missing? @ is somewhere I didn't expect. . . oh, I see. There's an extra key over here by the left shift, which has \ and |) for a shower, which may seem like a lot, but was worth every penny. After I took a long, hot shower, brushed my teeth, and changed my clothes, I felt human, and ready to deal with London. We went to the Tube with our luggage (we travelled all carry-on, largely so that we could get around the city easily before we dropped off our luggage), and got into London about ten or so.

The weather was BEAUTIFUL. I mean, GORGEOUS. About 20, 21 degrees centigrade, 68 or 70 farenheit, blue skies, gentle wind -- I mean, you cannot design weather that I would like better.
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+ I made sufganyot today. I've never had them before, so I don't know what they're supposed to be like, but the things I made were pretty good. See, Internet + Cooking + Me is kind of bad -- I look up a recipe, find six or twelve, look at them, notice the commonalities, and then make up my own version. I know that you're supposed to follow a recipe the first time you make something, especially if you've never even seen the item you're making, but I had descriptions of them, and they sounded good, and the things I made kind of fit the description, and were good.

- I failed to make some sort of baked good or something for Lis's work potluck tomorrow. Because I was making sufganyot instead.

+ The oil lamp we made works. And it's stable enough that Lis said I could leave it unattended for fifteen minutes at a time. And it was fine.

+ I relatively competently dealt with a financial issue (paperwork stuff, phoning someone, getting copies of forms kind of thing)

- I forgot to make an appointment to get the car's oil changed.

+ I bought some of the stuff that Lis needed at the store.

- I forgot some of the stuff that Lis wanted at the store.

{} Anna's funeral is tomorrow.

Sufganyot are a jelly-filled fried thingy. They're a traditional Hannukah dish, where "traditional" is defined as "made up and popularized within the last century or so by people who wanted to make a statement that they were TOTALLY DIFFERENT from their parents and grandparents."

And they're yummy. See, "things fried in oil" are a traditional thing to eat on Hannukah, because a) miracle of the oil thingy b) baby, it's cold outside, and so we should eat lots of calories c) our arteries are failing to clog fast enough. And the main "thing fried in oil" tradition of the Ashkenazic Jews was, and is, latkes. And so, when the Zionists were settling Israel, one of the messages they wanted to send is that "we're totally different from the kinds of Jews from whom we're descended, so we won't speak Yiddish, we'll pronounce Hebrew differently, and we'll have different holiday traditions." But you can't dump latkes without replacing them with something else, and preferably something better.

I'm not going to say that sufganyot are better than latkes, but they're certainly good. Or at least, the things I made that are sufganyot-like are good.