Hows my little bookworm 2012 edition?

 Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins Ever since reading the first book of this series I've been trying to figure out what book two would be about, in fact, I've asked a bunch of my friends who have read it and all I usually got was a long hmmm, well, I don't want to ruin it for you. After finally reading this book I understand what they meant about that. So I'm not really going to ruin any surprises for anyone. For fans of the first book this is a must read, I will warn though, this book is just a bridge to the third book, which is much easier to predict what it will be about. Catching Fire was really interesting and full of several twists, and a very abrupt ending. I'm very excited to read the third book of this series.

Maus by Art Spiegelman This book was fantastically different. I don't want to call it a graphic novel, because its more like a nicely bound comic book. It is an interesting story of survival of a Jew in Nazi Germany. The best part is the Jews are mice, the Nazi are cats, and everyone else is a pig. It is a captivating story of survival in this awful time to live and I enjoyed the story, but when I closed finished the book (and there was definitely more story to tell) I didn't realize it was part one of two. Which for some reason I'm not excited about reading two books like this, but one is fine. If I had known it was in two parts I wouldn't have bought it in the first place. The drawings aren't very exciting and easy to skip over, just like this book.

                                     Chasing the White Dog by Max Watman
Chasing the White Dog was wisely recommended to me because of my interest in all things fermented. I have a special spot in my heart for whiskey (and how to make it) so I had I was very excited about this book. Its a really interesting documentary about moonshine, its history and where it stands now. It starts off talking about how the author made his own still and and attempted crafting his own white lightning. His forays into making moonshine sound a lot like how I would go about it full of disaster, caution, and humor. The historical parts are all really interesting, from George Washington to prohibition and onto modern moonshine cases. Of course a moonshine story isn't complete without a reference to Popcorn Sutton and NASCAR, both get some space in the book. I would recommend this book for anyone who is interested in prohibition, moonshine, or liquor production. I found it fascinating and I think most of my faithful readers would as well.

Hows my little free hat?

So here is a long shot of hope to my friends of the world. About a month ago I won a free hat! During our adventures in Boston my favorite Miz. Fuller took us to a Goorin Brothers hat store and we found ourselves +2 hats on our way out. Later I liked them on the Facebook and noticed they gave away a hat every Friday (as if Friday's weren't already great enough).

This particular Friday they challenged their faithful fans to write about an adventure with their Goorin hat. Since thus far my adventures have been quite limited as my hat was quite new. So I embellished some past adventures I've had at work and beyond for this story:

My first Goorin adventure was in Cambridge, MA. It came after a stop at Harpoon Brewery where we bought a growler of their delicious beer. We then carried the growler all over the city sight seeing and our last stop was Goorin Brothers for my first Goorin purchase. But the adventure won't end there. My Next adventure with the seaworthy hat is big. With my seaworthy hat I am going to wear it proudly at work where people will exclaim, "Gee Tony where did you get that sharp hat." I will tell them proudly as we are talking about the wines I have crafted, Goorin Brothers! and I will tell them of the many adventures I have had wearing this hat. Such as, I hand-picked 3 tons of grapes on the hottest day of the century wearing this hat, This hat protected my dignity when I was caught skinny dipping in the pond, This hat fell into a vat when I lost my footing on a ladder and nearly added my own musk to this wine, This hat protected me when the press exploded and shot skins and seeds at everyone, no one was hospitalized, This hat earned me 15% more tips, This hat stayed on my head as we willed a funnel cloud to pass over our heads, This hat has contributed to at least one thousand 'private moments', This hat saved me from showing my early receding hairline...early, This hat was there when I stumbled down the slippery slope when I was collecting Maple Sap, I didn't spill a drop, This hat was the only thing about me that looked good after I survived a trip to Las Vegas, This hat was there for me when I needed a darker place to nap after all of these adventures and the untold adventures as well. My friends will love my wine, my hat, and my adventures, they will return to hear more, see my hat, and they will be wearing their Goorin telling their stories long after my time has passed.

Sure enough out of 70+ stories they chose mine! I thought for sure I would loose to the one about the dogs but I didn't! 

So to my new friends at Goorin Brothers, thank you for giving me a free hat, armed with my bit of knowledge about how social marketing works I will make sure this $100 hatgift will broadcast a personal marketing scheme money can never buy. In fact It's already begun, my faithful few blogging friends will read this, not to mention the automatic upload to facebook. I meant it when I said I will proudly tell my customers at the winery where I got this hat. I'm no longer a fan of Goorin Brothers but an ambassador to the brand.

Thank you, and you're welcome.

Hows my little southerner?

Last weekend Laura and I ventured off to the dirty south to visit the family in Peachtree City, GA. We had a great time adventuring around the area and loved playing with their kids. Playing with little one is exhausting work, especially since their energy never seems to deplete and mine drains very apparently. It was really great to catch up with the Davis family again, we always have lots of fun and make some very great and enlightening conversation. We did a lot of fun things while we visited, we celebrated Laura and Ali's birthdays, we found a couple of geocaches, visited Calloway Gardens, saw the greatest show on earth, walked around Atlanta, and took a tour of CNN.

Laura's Mom made her favorite, German Chocolate Cake.

Scott and Brandee Made a fantastic Guinness Chocolate Cake, I want to eat this again. And again.

Avery and Alia have these awesome things called Huggle Pods, I want a big one for our living room, it might be cooler than the LoveSac.

Daffodils in February? Pretty!

The Ringling Brothers, and Barnum and Bailey Present: The Greatest Show on Earth! I love the circus. I love it so much, I had a great time and was very excited about the whole thing.

These guys were my favorite, they had pogo stick things on their feet and jumped around doing flips and glowing like crazy. I want a pair.

I told Laura to look excited and she sure does...

CNN's World headquarters is HUGE! They have the worlds longest freestanding escalator, which you ride up into the globe to start the tour. The tour was really cool because we got to learn how news is made, see the studio and some anchors sitting around doing their hair on set. In the newsroom every desk has three computer monitors, I was drooling hardcore. Fun Fact, CNN fact checks every bit of news (that is not opinion) with two sources before airing it.

Centennial Park is really cool, Laura's fake smile here is because we spent like 15 minutes reading names on some bricks to find the first step in a multi-cache and failed.

Mr. Pemberton, inventor of Coca-Cola. His invention has contributed to millions of cases of diabetes and obesity globally. 

I was so excited about seeing footie pajamas that tried on a pair of women's (it was all they had), they were too small in nearly every way, sometimes being tall sucks. I'm now determined to find myself some footies.

On our flight back home I had our corkscrew that I carry around for wine opening emergencies confiscated by TSA security. It was lame because I've gotten it through at least three other airports before this one. Oh well.

When we opened our garage door when, our wandering neighborhood cat ran out and meowed like crazy. Understandable, he was trapped in our garage for over four days! We found this note taped to our back door. Laura felt awful and fed it, I got mad because our garage now smells like cat pee.

Hows my little dinner wine?

This weekend (more on that soon) I was asked, what wine should we have with dinner? I've been thinking frequently about this subject over the last several months and I probably stammered out some sort of rocky reply about not knowing anymore and all this other stuff that may or may not have made sense/was worth listening to. So today I set out to send an E-mail to Scott letting him know in a concise easy to read response summing up what has been on my mind recently regarding the subject of food and wine, this epic was what I pulled out:

A few weeks ago I attended a wine conference were I sat in on a presentation about wine's taste perceptions. It pretty much turned my idea of the rules of drinking wine on their head. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it since then. There is a misconception that if you enjoy and prefer a dry red wine you are a sophisticated individual. This is not only false but it's a terrible accusation against people who like sweet wine and are sophisticated people. There is also this giant misconception that a particular wine pairs better with a particular food.

In the past if you've read a description of a wine on the label and you saw words like 'big, bold, or huge' you would probably pair it with a creature with similar sizing descriptors, like a cow. This is wrong. Mostly because if you don't like cow, or a bold pinot noir they won't pair well at all, ever. The fact is most people like sweeter wine, historically wine has been sweet, and the trend is reemerging (just google 2011 moscato sales) So there is no reason that if you order a nice piece of cow at a restaurant that you shouldn't get a sweeter wine if that is what you prefer, in fact, you will probably enjoy your meal more because you are drinking a wine that you like with a food that you like. This concept seems deceptively simple but that is all there is to it.

So when you're going out into the world and trying new wines, especially at a restaurant let the server know what you like, and they can probably give you a good idea of a wine to drink, they should never tell you that this wine will go terribly with your meal, because assuming you end up liking both things, your meal and wine will accompany each other greatly.

If you really want to think about it, you could eat mashed potatoes with fish, chicken, steak, a burger, or hot dogs. Wine is just another component to your meal, it's not an ingredient creating your meal, just like mashed potatoes you can have your favorite wine with any meal. Next time you have guests over, have a little something for everyone and don't worry so much about what you think will go best with it. In the end, you or your guest could hate their meal and love the wine, and if that's the case, cross your fingers that the company is good. Two out of three isn't bad.

This principal also applies to a wine's rating. Last year there were over 5,000 wines that were awarded 90+ rating (which seems like quite a few to me). There is absolutely no reason to take these scores as gospel, because they are all based off of someone's opinion. Sure this person may have tried more wines than you and could rattle off interesting facts about any wine, but that doesn't mean their rating of any wine will match up with your preference of wine. Everyone has different ideas of what they like, which is why someone can find so many shades of blue paint. You wouldn't buy robin's egg blue just because the paint store says its the best shade of blue, you might like midnight blue better and would probably buy that instead. Wine is the same principal.

I hope this PSA helps disrobe the unreasonable shroud of snobbery and mystery wine has around it. Remember, drink what you like, don't be afraid to try new things, and embrace taste!

Hows my little kitchen rat?

Last Sunday I really felt like doing some sort of cooking activity that kept us busy all day. I came up with an idea of soup in a bread bowl. This was appropriate because we have resolved to make more soup and more bread, perfect! I started off the day by making some hockey pucks posing as cupcakes, which I thought were muffins until I found there was a icing recipe. They tasted alright but they didn't make the good breakfast that I was expecting with muffins.

The rest of the day we spent making our soup and bread bowls, in traditional fashion I failed on the bread bowls and Laura's soup shined brightly.

 We waited for a good two hours for the bread to rise and all it really did was spread out, sort of a let down considering we were making bowls. As I typed this I'm thinking maybe we should have put them in bowls to rise. Eventually I thought that they would rise in the oven like a cake, cupcake, or muffin even but instead we ended up with four bread scones.

Laura was the soup lady and she made us a tasty tomato soup from scratch. It was really cool because it tasted just like the soup from a can, but way tasty and easy! I think we will be making it again.

 The bread ended up being really tasty and and we learned that when using wheat flour one needs to add gluten to the mix for better results. Next time!

While we were waiting on the bread we also broke out our pasta roller and got our noodle on. Its a pretty neat process so I figured my fine followers would like to see it. We made some very not spinachy noodles, but they were green.

 It starts as a chunk of noodle bread, and gets flattened by our flattening device.

 We learned after our first time that you need to separate the noodles and liberally apply flour to keep them from fusing back together.

 Our instructions say, build the noodles into nests and freeze. This was our interpretation of that.

Laura made us a yummy sausage meal to accompany our noodles on a different day.

MMM!

Hows my little Bostonian?

 

Well friends, another weekend and another pin in our map! This pin belongs in the wonderful city of Boston Massachusetts. I think I can safely say, I love Boston. A couple of weeks ago I found a killer deal for two tickets from Chicago to Boston for $250 round-trip. A frenzy of phone calls and excitement led to a booking and a new adventure to visit my long lost friend Sarah Fuller and her wonderful dude John.

The trip started on a really exciting note, on our drive up to Chicago I smashed my car into a HUGE! deer carcass. Somehow because of a crazy combination of lighting and hill we didn't see it until we were basically on top of it. SMASH! After a lot of fur, blood, carnage, and a lost license plate we drove home and switched cars to continue our adventure. We had to, mine stunk so bad we could hardly stand it.

We arrived the following afternoon and started adventuring immediately. We were introduced to the lovely and convenient 'T' early on and walked ourselves through town. We got to see some ducks, statues, churches, a killer public library and a drink on top of the tallest building in town.

Pit-Stop for a kickass cupcake. mmm!

The fun continued on that evening to a unique event called 'The Donkey Show'. I'm not sure I will look at butterflies the same again. Contrary to what you're thinking this show is actually a theater performance based in a 70's Dance club (and we danced) and based off of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Most of the characters who wore clothes did so in drag. I didn't understand the plot at any point, which I attribute to never seeing any version of the performance, written or otherwise. I did understand that aside from John and I every other dude there had to be also into dudes and understandably so. Regardless, I loved it, the whole glittery mess.

Laura is actually not in pain, nor angry.

Everyone woke up hungover the next morning, new adventures through the city was the fix. We had a really fun and packed day. We started with a trip to Harpoon Brewery and got to drink beer fresh from the tank, which was a first. Harpoon is the best brewery I've never heard of, and I've heard of a Yuengling. Brewery tours are best when the beer is good and the tastings are hearty, this was no exception. We bought a growler to go and carried it with us (full, mind you) to all of the rest of our adventures of the day.

After Harpoon we got excellent some Boston sea food staples which miraculously cured Laura of her brown bag sickness.

Next we went to the Boston Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was a very interesting experience, as an art major I really never want to say I hate art, but sometimes the shit that gets into a museum blows my mind. There were some really cool and interesting pieces hidden amongst the other art. I really liked this movie that had 9ish screens and you basically immersed yourself into the film with changing surroundings setting the place. I got a nice greeting from the guy in front when he told me "I can check your beer into the coat check for you".

After that we took our beer to Goorin Brothers Hat store. I loved it. Dark wood and hats everywhere. Laura and I both left with something new for our heads.

After that we drank the best Hot Coco I've ever tasted. Ever.

We took it easy that night remembering our previous night and looking ahead to everyone's big day next. We had a fantastic dinner of pizza, wine, and smiles aplenty.

Day three was epic.
It started off with a jaunt through Harvard looking for a geocache which was one of the coolest ones I've done. Mostly because of how public it is.

Next, Laura and I were ushered around Boston via John and the red line painted and paved through Boston known as the freedom trail. We walked all over the damn city with a private tour of a battleship and capped it off with a march up (and back down) 294 stairs to the top of the bunker hill memorial. We learned a lot about Boston's history and of America's as well. John proved to be an excellent tour guide filling the walking portions with his knowledge of events that unfolded around this historic city.

Handcock's headstone looks like a penis.

Ride in opposition.

We finished our grand adventure off with a great meal, followed by a fantastic dessert, and some tired legs.

It was so great to catch up with Sarah again and I miss her. The great thing about great friends is that even after not really hanging out for years you can step in right where you left off and things are good, really good. I loved Boston, its got nearly everything I miss about city life, people, useful public transportation, interesting and lively history, endless meal options, great places to drink, a large body of water, a few hills, and no corn anywhere. Would I go back? Absolutely.