Monday, July 30, 2012

Pairs Well with Mr. Clean

Have you ever wanted to know what might happen if you (or, more to the point, your significant other) dropped an open bottle of frizzante wine on your kitchen floor? Look no further, friend, because I have the answer and it is this: you actually don't want to find out. Trust me.

Frizzante wines have tiny bubbles that are developed during a partial second fermentation. These bubbles mask the wine's sweetness, provide a refreshing tingle, and cause the beverage in question to ROCKET out of the bottle when dropped on its design-award-winning bottom. For those of you who have been in my house, the coverage extended approximately to shoulder height on the nearest two walls with waist height spray on all cupboards, furniture and appliances, and stray droplets observed as far away as the bathroom and entryway. There was even enough left over to refill my glass while I cleaned up (impressive!), though not enough to keep it full for the hour it took me to do so.

*sniff* I'll miss its bubbly pink personality... its effervescent style... its delicious, delicious flavour... I swear, I nearly shed a tear for the loss. I'm not a very sentimental person, so that's saying something.

In fact, I'm almost ruthlessly unsentimental. Around my house, tough jobs like thinning out carrot seedlings, recycling preschooler "artwork" and throwing out holey gotch or that last teaspoon of [insert food product here] fall exclusively to me. Not that anyone should have reason to be attached to their decrepit undergarments or the final molecules of Italian salad dressing clinging to the bottom of the bottle, but the continued presence of such items in my home speaks to the distinct possibility that the power of oxytocin knows no bounds in some people.

One might hope those same people will, in future, be more careful with the wine.

Monday, July 16, 2012

El Macho Gazpacho

I've been on vacation. Not a staycation, not an oblication, but a real live vacation. Because I am a natural-born overachiever and kindly philanthropist, I volunteered my excess brainpower during my time away from work to thinking Grand Thoughts that could change the very course of humanity. Unfortunately, lazy slug that it is, my brain summarily rejected my proposal and instead seems to have gone on vacation itself - with no clear date of return indicated.

So the thoughts I thought while on vacation were not *quite* so grand as one might have hoped. (Nor were the thoughts I thought today back at work - brain? Braaaain?? Please come home now. Mommy's scared.) I thought things like, 'hot enough for ya?'; 'dang, got sand in my crack'; and 'yayyyyyy! ice tweam!' Heck, I even said those things - that's how on vacation I was.

Y'know what else is a fun thing to say on vacation? Gazpacho. Ordinarily, gazpacho sounds disgusting to me. But since my brain wasn't around to think smart thoughts like "Cold soup? Yuck" on my behalf, I ended up ordering gazpacho at a restaurant one day, purely because it was fun to say. The waitress came near me and gazpacho just slipped from my unmanned head straight out of my mouth. Just like that: gazpacho. Whee!

And y'know what? It turns out that gazpacho is more than just cold soup with a fun name - it's also really tasty. In fact, it's not much like cold soup at all. It's more like... salad. Blended salad. Delicious! I'm not even shitting you. You should try it sometime.

Having said that, it seems to me that not all salads would be equally well-suited to blending into a gazpacho. I think the trick would be to ensure you didn't include things like meat or cheese or hard-boiled eggs in your salad before you blended it.

You might think this would be obvious to most people, but I actually know a guy who made himself a blended chef's salad; he said the little slippery chunks of ham just about made him puke. Totally not his fault, though: his brain heard he was getting his wisdom teeth pulled and said, "Nuts to this place, I'm going on vacation. See you in a month." Next thing the guy knew... gazpacho.

Happens to the best of us, Jerry. Happens to the best of us.