The World of Insufficient Light

For some reason, Facebook decided I was really interested in non-alcoholic liquor replacements and started spamming me with advertisements for them. I did a little research and found a coupon that let me get two bottles from Ritual Zero Proof for $50 with free shipping, so I tried the Whiskey Alternative and Rum Alternative. (Their gimmick is that in addition to being no-alcoholic, these are only 5 calories per serving.)

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Overall: At least with this brand, it makes for tasty, interesting mocktails but it’s not actually a good substitute for the real thing if you’re going for a specific flavor set. (Actually, it makes me want to make up distracting names for all the mocktails so that nobody confuses them with the originals. Try a Disappointed Sailor, a Charlie Peanuts or a Turbo Lime Wedgie.)

Facebook veered out of Korean breakfast sandwiches and street food into right-wing angry-making suggested posts for a while, and then they hit the news for destroying democracy again and suddenly I was back to cooking videos. One of the more popular sets to appear on my feed is Vincenzo’s Plate.

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Overall: I’ll likely try a bunch of his other recipes if the videos catch my eye, but this guy is entertaining and the two recipes I tried definitely work.

Roasted Garlic Bread Chips – These are sold in the States as “bagel chips”, and I credit the Greeks for acknowledging that they aren’t bagels in any way, just bread with holes in. They’re tasty, though, as little toast crackers with a strong garlic flavor.

Drizzled Milk Chocolate Wafer – This had to live in the fridge after getting a bit melted in the mail. It’s a KitKat bar. Like, not even a “Greek version” with a weird flavor or something. It’s just a KitKat bar.

Paprika & Tomato Potato Chips – I had expected these to be the “pizza” flavor again, but they actually do taste more like tomatoes and paprika! (They’re otherwise normal ridged potato chips.) It’s cool to try a potato chip flavor that’s actually new to me.

Grape Must Mustokouloura Cookie – Pretty good, though I’m not really sure what flavor the grape must was imparting. (Grape juice is also in the ingredients, but this doesn’t taste like grapes at all.) It reminded me of a soft, fat gingerbread. Jethrien likened it to pfeffernusse. Good, but I wouldn’t go out of my way for it.

Pomegranate Jelly Candy – This is a jelly candy in the sense of fruit slices, though the pomegranate flavor seems more like imitation cherry to me. Tasty!

Almond Milk Toffees – Whereas these are super soft toffee, with a mild almond flavor that’s mostly just an accent on the creaminess. Also tasty!

Almond Baklava – While this was insanely sticky (the honey-syrup got all over the inside of the wrapper), it was also shockingly good for shelf-stable packaged baklava.

I think the big question with this entire experiment: If I went to any of these countries, would I be able to find these exact snacks being eaten by the locals?

As one of my birthday presents, Jethrien and ARR got me three months of “Universal Yums” boxes, a subscription service that sends themed packaged snacks from different parts of the world. My box of Turkish treats didn’t include Turkish Delight (boo!) but had some interesting options:

Otto Nuts Salted Roasted Chickpeas – Taste shockingly close to roasted peanuts, but the texture is more crumbly after the first bite and reminds me more of halva. I can see how this would be a common snack to cover with various seasonings.

Today Coffee-flavor Snowball – This is very similar to the common American snowball snack cake. It’s a chocolate cake filled with oil-based “cream filling”, covered in frosting and coconut. It might be a bit higher-quality than the American version, but more importantly, it has a really good coffee flavor, and that forgives a lot of sins. This was the winner of the batch.

Ulker Krispi Tirtikli Baharat Spice Chips – Wheat cracker-chips that taste very similar to the American “pizza” flavor used on various chips. (Which, as has been noted, doesn’t particularly taste like pizza.) The bag actually calls it “taco flavor”, but it’s not really that either. Garlic, onion, oregano, vague cheesiness, something kinda tomato-y. Not bad, but you can get the same experience from Pizza-flavored Goldfish crackers.

Tatsan Vanilla Tahini Halva – I object to the “vanilla” on the label, given that it contains no vanilla and doesn’t taste like it. It tastes like sweetened sesame because that’s what it is. This particular halva is a little on the dry side and the texture is a little gluey; it’s clearly the cheap stuff. I’ve been spoiled by high-quality halva (my mother loves it), preferably coated in good chocolate. (I didn’t bother sharing this with the rest of the family; Jethrien thinks halva feels and tastes like sand.)

Mastic Toffees – Mastic, I have learned, tastes like pine sap with a minty overtone. I honestly found it vile and had to spit it out. Jethrien (who also likes gin and other heavily herbal flavors) apparently liked it.

Toffix Melon and Lime Chews – Exactly what it says on the pack; they’re a chewy candy that tastes like melon and lime. Good for clearing the taste of mastic out of your mouth.

Bebeto Sour Watermelon Gummies – Exactly what you’d expect, they taste like watermelon candy and they’re pretty good. They aren’t particularly sour, though. ARR gave these the highest marks.

Lush Mosaic Cocoa Cream Cookies – The “cream” part and the picture on the package imply the filling is gooey; it’s not. These are pretty (with a choco-vanilla swirl pattern on the outside), but taste like any other crunchy butter cookie, with a little chocolate Oreo filling inside.

My parents have generously taken ARR for another week of “summer camp”, so Jethrien and I decided to try out the second of the tasting flights she got me for my birthday. This was the “Regions of Scotland” flight.

• Glenfarolas 15 Year Old – This was the closest to the scotches I’m used to, and I’d be interested in drinking it again. It has an amazing nose, and a very “creamy” taste with a long, lingering burn.
• Lagavulin 16 Year Old – That’s a big glass of peat smoke, that it. Smells like a peat fire, tastes like a peat fire, lingers smokey. Jethrien liked it; I thought it was too much peat.
• Talisker 10 Year Old – Not really that fragrant; the taste is a reasonably amount of smoke without a lot of peat but some pepperiness. Not terribly memorable, really.
• Dalwhinnie 15 Year Old – This has a fruity nose and a dark honey flavor. The finish is very spicy, perhaps a little too much. Interesting, and different from most scotches I’ve encountered.
• Glenkinchie 12 Year Old – This was described as “stewed fruits and fresh grain” and that was both accurate and unusual. It was another flavor profile I wasn’t expecting (and “grain” not like beer, but like the smell of a wheat field), with a gentle and subtle finish.

Overall: I feel like this exposed me to things that people can do with scotch that I was unaware of. Most of my previous awareness of scotch was limited to the “creamy caramel” scotch and the “OMG peat” scotch. Really, now I just want to keep trying more.

Background: My sister and her husband are living in Germany for two years. When they flew in for Thanksgiving, they brought me an assortment of German food packets. Also cookies and sausages, but I didn’t think to take pictures of those before we ate them all.

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Oh, and special thanks to Google Translate, without which I wouldn’t have been able to successfully make any of these.

• Six-year-olds are not really ready to do a Purim spiel, even if it involves a battle with a giant snake.
• Citizen’s Cider with infused ginger is very good and was a big hit. Ironbound Hard Cider is middling and not worth getting again.
• When small children other than my son are involved, assume that I’ll need more hard cheese than otherwise. I’d forgotten how much cheddar children without dairy allergies will happily gobble.
• ARR is unquestionably my son: When we got late into the party, he asked if it was time for everyone to leave yet. I gave him a glass of juice. He perked up and was good for another hour.
• ARR is unquestionably Jethrien’s son: The last twenty minutes or so of the party involved him reading quietly on his bed while one of his friends played with action figures nearby. (Also, he took down an entire Magic Tree House book in an hour on Sunday morning when he didn’t want to help me do chores.)

Jethrien and I had a whole week to ourselves while ARR was at “camp” with my parents. (Having a glorious time and eating all the things, by all accounts.) We tried to make the most of it by having a bunch of date nights.

Tuesday: We tried to go to Broa, but it was inexplicably closed. Instead we tried Gringo's (near Grove Street). It’s good and we had fun, but it's noisy and the food at Orale is better. I did have the most ridiculous taco ever, a fried chicken finger in what was effectively a waffle cone with cilantro and maple syrup. (And I appreciated that the taco plates are small, which meant Jethrien and I could get several and try them all.) Their salsa selection was lovely and even the spicy ones were good; their guacamole selection was lacking.

Wednesday: Mithrigil’s performance at Sid Gold’s Request Room. She did a fantastic job; she sounded great and her banter was well-put-together. The food there is decent, if a bit heavy (it’s bar/comfort food), and I do like their drink selection. I wish it hadn’t been like swimming through soup to get there; I suspect the turnout would have been better if people were more willing to leave their houses.

Thursday: Crazy Rich Asians is a hoot, and Jethrien noted that it was nice to see a comedy for adults, without vomit or pratfalls. (They also clearly expected a heavily female audience, as the beefcake is even more front-and-center than the last Thor movie.) I did need to read an explanation of the mahjong scene afterwards, as I know nothing of mahjong and it was clearly deeply symbolic.

Friday: The Archer, a bar/restaurant that won us with the promise of game meats. We had duck poutine, venison cheesesteak and smoked wild boar pasta; all of them fantastic. We can’t take ARR here but I’d totally go back.

Saturday: Didn’t get out of bed until almost 11am.

ARR returned on Saturday afternoon, so I spent a chunk of that evening being climbed on. On Sunday I helped Mithrigil move into her new place, then we hosted a mini-party for B and J’s daughter’s first birthday. On Monday I took ARR to Liberty Science Center, then I took an afternoon nap to recover while he and Jethrien wrote a book. (The Arthur exhibit had several fake books, and we were disappointed that we couldn’t read “The Zombie Substitute Teacher.” So now they’ve written it.) Jethrien and ARR came to my office for lunch on Tuesday and then went to an afternoon of school orientation stuff, and his first day of Kindergarden was yesterday.

So, Jethrien already did a really complete, detailed report of our trip to Iceland. The only thing I really have to add is regarding meats, because during that trip, I ate a bunch of animals I hadn’t before.

• They love lamb; smoked lamb is a common cold cut, lamb is the base of the meat soup, lamb is in the hot dogs. One tour guide noted there are about 500,000 sheep in Iceland, or about a million during lambing season.

• The other really common cold cut was ham, which they have a dozen varieties of. I have to wonder if that’s an imported love, because for all the sheep and cows and horses we saw, I didn’t see a single pig.

• Horse tastes a lot like beef, though it’s a very tough meat. Neither of these things is surprising.

• Langoustine are the tiny lobsters which taste, unsurprisingly, like sweet and tender lobster. I had them deep friend, roasted with garlic butter, and in soup, and they were consistently delicious.

• Minke whale (which is not endangered, for the record) tastes like one of the gamier red meats, though with a slight fishiness.

• Puffin reminded me a lot of duck. I specifically had it in a smoked, not-quite-jerky form so it was really tender.

• Ling is a cod-like fish, and tastes like it.

• Icelanders LOVE mayonnaise. It’s the meat-condiment and dipping sauce of choice.

• Also, Icelanders apparently like both British-style sandwiches (hard boiled eggs and iceberg lettuce go on everything) and French-style (the single slice of ham and cheese with, of course, mayo). They do a lot more of the seeded rye breads than white breads, and apparently eat a lot of nuts.

We can tell what part of this trip was most important to me, eh?

I got to sleep until after 9am, which is a birthday blessing all by itself. The rain and a cold front had rolled in, so while the previous two days were 90 degrees and very humid (ARR apparently spent much of them in my parents’ backyard and pool), it was suddenly 65 degrees out and raining miserably. Not that this mattered for out mostly-indoor plans, and ARR was apparently already so worn out he took a nap.

My sister’s fiancé was in town with her, so my mom put us all to work, moving all of the furniture out of the living room to replace the rug and rug pad with the new ones she’s had sitting in the dining room for two months. Bill’s presence made that much easier, given that I’m pretty sure my dad and I couldn’t move the marble-topped table without one or both of us hurting ourselves.

We saw Deadpool 2, which was not quite as good as the first one—they repeated a bunch of jokes, they leaned on some overused tropes, and some of the shock value of how good the first one was had worn off. Still fun, and I did like that the after-credits scenes addressed the cheap plot device that is fridging.

My mom made the now-traditional seafood feast, with some of the biggest damn king crab legs I’ve ever seen. Also part of the dinner were shrimp, pesto pasta, corn on the cob, broccoli, green beans and watermelon salad. Then came the rainbow cookies and the newly-modified version of my favorite birthday cake. (It’s a three-layer chocolate cake filled with raspberry jam, with chocolate icing and whipped cream all around the sides. The modified version uses marshmallow frosting around the sides to make it ARR-safe.)

My sister had some cooking-themed gifts for me, including a fun looking BBQ sauce and rub, vegetable roasting spice mixes, and cedar grilling wraps, the latter of which I’m hoping to try out this week.