Archive for the 'Food and Drink' Category

The Inevitable Thanksgiving List

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on November 27, 2008
in Cheese Sandwich, Food and Drink, Lists and NaBloPoMo
. 4 Comments

I couldn’t possibly post today without making a list of all the things I find pleasantly tolerable in my life — you know things I don’t completely hate or whatever. Fine, fine. Things for which I am thankful. It is Thanksgiving, after all, and I do love lists.

Our new president-elect

Coffee, Diet Coke, wine, gum, and all the other substances that get me through the day

Good friends both near and far

Sane, supportive, and sensible family members

All the friendly folks of the internet who come by here and make my usual self-involved nonsense into something more like a conversation

A good job in a good department and the motivation and possibility to find an even better one

Sweatpants

This batch of double-chocolate chip cookies I just made

Healthy living (in spite of all the aforementioned)

The wealth of good books and good music that seems to have dropped into my lap lately

The finally completed sidewalk that now stretches the whole length of my street, making walks a thousand times more pleasant

The good students

I hope you are having a lovely Thanksgiving, wherever you are. I hope there is plenty of pie and wine. And while you’re here, if you wouldn’t mind: tell me what makes your Thanksgiving list this year!

Thanksgiving Break: Already off to a Whiskey-Soaked Start

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on November 21, 2008
in Cheese Sandwich, Food and Drink and NaBloPoMo
. 2 Comments

It was finally cold today! Let me tell you, internet friends, how freaking excited I was to wake up this morning to temperatures low enough to warrant tights, boots, and The Paris Coat: very freaking excited. Not only do I like my winter wardrobe better than my summer one, I can also almost always be guaranteed better hair and makeup results in New Wye’s drier winter weather. Let’s face it: I just feel prettier in winter. This leads to a good mood all day as I stalk around campus in my tall boots, scarf flapping behind me, high on my own sense of crispness and self-satisfaction.

Last winter, it was only cold enough for a coat and boots maybe once — thus I realized that today could be the high point (wardrobe- and weather-wise) of the year. I have to be prepared for the possibility that it could all go downhill from here.

So when I got home from the store tonight with a brand new bottle of whiskey and began to make dinner and a cocktail, it should have come as no surprise that disaster would strike. Trying to put the whiskey on the shelf with wet hands, I managed to drop the bottle on the hard tile floor, helplessly watching as it shattered in slow motion. I had that brief moment when, after you drop something and before it hits the floor, you think to yourself maybe it won’t break.

Oh, it fucking broke all right. Whiskey pooled on the floor, soaking quickly into my sneakers and through my socks (luckily I had changed into my scuzzy Chucks when I got home and The Precious Boots thus escaped unscathed), and broken glass seemed to fly everywhere at once. I managed to stop the dog from “helping” me clean up before he either got drunk or ate any glass, and then managed to calmly finish making dinner while mopping, drying, and trying to sweep/vaccuum up all the glass. Then of course I had to run out to the liquor store again, where I’d just been an hour before (I was all, hello, liquor proprietor, déjà vu much?) to replace the bottle. A necessary step after all that nonsense, I think you will agree.

In other news, it’s officially Thanksgiving break, and I have grand plans: grading student essays, revising/editing a couple of my own essays, and dog sitting a certain little chihuahua. The beauty is that all of this can be accomplished while cozily ensconced on the couch in sweatpants with a huge mug of coffee. Also, as it is break, I am free to make that coffee Irish any time I want.

What are you doing for Thanksgiving, my fellow Americans? And to those who don’t celebrate Thnksgiving, what are your weekend plans? I must know!

“Mmmm, sweatpants.”

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on November 20, 2008
in Cheese Sandwich, Food and Drink and NaBloPoMo
. 3 Comments

I have just come home from a dinner out with the ladies — it’s almost break and we needed to have an evening of fun before everyone dispersed for Thanksgiving. The evening involved an unspecified quantity of risotto balls, Manhattans, and a delicately seared tuna. Oh, indeed.

And you know how silly I get in any situation involving top-shelf cocktails and risotto balls. (Yes, risotto balls.) All the fine liquor and fine food is commingling in my stomach to make an intoxicating, nutrifying elixer of happiness, sloth, and gluttony.

I’m feeling much too satisfied and cozy now to do the chapters of reading I am supposed to be doing for tomorrow and yet I must do them, right? After all, it would be horrible if the teacher showed up unprepared for class, wouldn’t it? Or would it? Must focus. Focus. FOCUS.

Nah, must change into sweatpants. SWEATPANTS.

And the Best Part is the Leftovers

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on November 8, 2008
in Food and Drink and NaBloPoMo
. 2 Comments

We have exactly one Korean restaurant here in New Wye, and it is not even in our town — it’s actually in Neighboring Town, in a tacky strip mall full of thrift stores and discount-hoochie-fashion emporia. Nonetheless, the place is damned good.  Once you get past the fact that the decor consists of, apparently, whatever random items were left behind by the previous tenants (including but not limited to fake silk roses with plastic dewdroplets on the petals, plastic angel wall sconces, and that dark brown fake wood paneling you used to see inside arcade pizza parlors in the early 1980s), you can begin to perceive its awesomeness.

I think their plan is to cater mainly to the small-but-growing Korean population in the area: all of the signage is in Korean, except for the small text on the storefront underneath the large Korean characters, which informs passersby simply that this is “Korean Restaurant.” The menu is mostly in Korean, with only a few important key words translated into English — basically you can pick a protein, but you might not know how it will be prepared.  There are none of those stupid chili pepper graphics on the menu warning you that something will be spicy (thank dog — I have a whole rant about those dumb chili-pepper graphics, but that will have to take place at another time).

When I was deciding what to order, I was faced with the fact that there were two items on the menu called “squid and pork,” both the same price, who shared only three common characters in their Korean names.  The waitress explained to me that they were different kinds of squid — “cousins.”  I just asked her for the one she liked best, and what I got was amazingly tasty.

Here are some of the various things on our table (mine was the top left — check out those tentacles!):

Squid & Pork, Hot Stone Pot, Pickle, Green Onion Pancake

Squid & Pork, Hot Stone Pot, Pickle, Green Onion Pancake

I hope we’ll go back soon!

Case of the Scintillating Acid Flashback

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on September 17, 2008
in Cheese Sandwich, Food and Drink and Gumshoe
. 4 Comments

Saturday morning, while puttering around the internet, I thought I was suddenly either going blind or experiencing my first real acid flashback.  What was in store for me? Either tragedy and woe or mind-bending hallucinations and fun, but who could say?

I felt like I had stared at a bright light for too long and was being afflicted by those spots you sometimes see afterward, like, say, when a camera flash causes momentary bright spots in your vision.  The only problem was that I hadn’t been looking at any bright lights.  Nonetheless, there was a bright spot directly in front of everything I looked at, and no matter how I blinked or rubbed my eyes it wouldn’t go away.  It stopped me from being able to read, watch TV, or even properly look at anything at all, so I resigned myself to lying down on the couch with a blanket over my face for a while to see what happened.

As I lay there with my eyes closed, I could get a better look at the spot that was afflicting me as it sat there against the black backdrop of the insides of my eyelids.  Upon closer inspection, it turned out not to be just a spot, after all.  It was boomerang shaped and made up of a thousand tiny diamond facets, each one twinkling in a different color.  The two facets at the central point of the boomerang were fluttering like tiny diamond wings and changing color.  What the fuck was going on?

At this point, part of my mind was sort of academically interested but emotionally disengaged, all “Oh, how fascinating; I wonder what this portends,” but the other, much bigger, part was screaming “No, seriously, WHAT the FUCK?”

I was a little worried about the state of my rods and cones, to say the least, and thoughts of strange brain malfunctions began to creep in as well.  Was it a tumor? Nerve damage? Was I finally answering the Cylon song that only I (or only my eyes) could hear?

I waited and waited, keeping my eyes tightly closed for at least an hour, watching the sparkling boomerang, and trying to find some corner of my mind in which the experience of an unplanned-for hallucination would be at least somewhat amusing.  Finally, I noticed the sparking, kaleidoscopic boomerang shape slowly drifting toward the right side of my vision, and, after another ten or so minutes, it finally disappeared beyond the bounds of what I could see.  I spent a while nervously working up the courage to open my eyes again, and when I did, I could see just fine.  (I decided, nonetheless, that I’d better rest my eyes some more, so I then took a nap for the remainder of the afternoon.)

Now, Reader, if you are familiar with these symptoms, you may have already solved the Case of the Scintillating Acid Flashback, but I still had not.  That night at the movies (Burn After Reading, which I almost skipped due to the eye issues, but which I am glad I did see and which we all loved), I told my strange story to all of my friends, and one of them eventually had a possible answer for me — her ophthalmologist had recently described these symptoms to her and had called it an “ocular migraine”: a migraine without any headache pain.  Well, huh.

I came home and looked it up and was shocked to find this article on scintillating scotoma, with a picture of almost exactly what I had seen earlier that day (mine was prettier, though).  I think I might have actually screamed out loud a little when I saw the illustration.  That was it!  That was exactly what I had experienced, and the knowledge that this was associated with a migraine helped to explain the mild headache and nausea I’d felt for the rest of the day (but had basically disregarded at the time, as I feel that way a lot).  Migraines!

Well, as you can imagine, I spent a while reading up on migraines themselves, too — not just the “ocular” kind — and it eventually occurred to me that what I had thought of as just “my usual headaches” were probably migraines, but without the aura: pain on one side of my head that is intense and pulsating and gets worse with movement or activity and lasts for several hours or up to 2-3 days.  Yes indeed, that describes my headaches!  At times I had thought the headaches were brought on by too much indulgence in alcohol or cigarettes, but how could I explain having them when I hadn’t indulged at all?  “Why do I feel hungover if I haven’t been drinking,” I would ask myself.  Suddenly, shit was beginning to become clear.  I have probably been having migraines for YEARS now.  Like TEN years. WHAT THE FUCK.

(The weirdest thing, though, is why I have been, up to now, having the headaches without the aura (the visual/perceptual symptoms preceding it), and why I’ve now had the aura with only mild headache pain to follow? This remains unclear!)

As you’ll predict, I also learned a bit about possible migraine triggers, and in addition to such triggers as being a Lady and experiencing the Special Ladies’ Time for Ladies, triggers may include: alcohol, caffeine, cigarettes, chocolate, and cheese.  So, basically my entire way of life is a long series of migraine triggers.  That news did not please me, but, realistically, I think that I can just try to moderate the things on that list that I already know are triggers (cigarettes, red wine, maaaaaaybe coffee?) and go from there. (Yes, I do plan to ask my doctor for advice, too, just haven’t yet.)

At any rate, it doesn’t seem like I am going blind or having an acid flashback, to which I say “YAY” and “BOO,” respectively.  I mean, when are all those years of hallucinogenic drug experimentation finally going to start paying some fucking dividends, I ASK YOU?

Nonetheless, I am quite pleased to have this (possible/probable) explanation for what I experienced on Saturday.  What a lucky coincidence that my friend had just learned about these ocular migraines from her doctor, or I might not have figured it out at all.  The knowledge of what was (possibly/probably) going on in my brain made it a lot less stressful for me when this happened again yesterday afternoon.  In fact, I saw the twinkling spot of light start to grown and scintillate in front of my eyes and I felt the weird tingly dissociation of my limbs, and just decided to lie down and close my eyes again — this time I fell asleep and had quite the pleasant nap.  Again, only a mild headache followed the visual effects. Maybe one day they will become fun?  Recreational? Scintillating, in more than the literal sense?

Case Status: Pending, also Sparkly