goodbye, blue note

yet another westside institution is closing its doors - tonight is the last night for the blue note. they are going out partying with the rusty griswolds and a bunch of old friends.

i've had a lot of shots of jagermeister there. a moment of silence, please.

my grandfather will never eat butter pecan again

saw this on posted by broadway carl and found it noteworthy, all political affiliations aside. our president is a superstar.

i wonder how this plays into the stimulus package?

that's a spicy pickle!

some of my fellow pharmacy school classmates and i went on a field trip to the lloyd library, which is a super cool one-of-a-kind collection of botany and herbal texts.
on our return to clifton, we stopped for lunch at spicy pickle. i was pleasantly surprised with its unique sandwich combinations and tasteful deliciousness. the corn and green chile bisque was quite good; flavorful, not overly spicy, with a touch of cilantro. my sandwich, the yard bird, was chicken, bacon, spinach, green apples, and bleu cheese with honey mustard. unexpected and very fresh, and on ciabatta! quite gratifying.
i even tried a bite of the "soon to be famous" spicy pickle, which tasted like...a pickle. unexceptional pickle aside, spicy pickle may be my new favorite chain sandwich shop, trumping potbelly.

in the new mastercard commercial...

http://www.starkist.com/charlie/priceless.html

why in the hell is charlie tuna eating tuna casserole??!! and coyly offering it to others??

that's messed up.

i'm just not that into restaurants at movie theaters

i would like to start by saying urban sprawl is not my favorite thing and i try to avoid visiting places (west chester) that seem to be intent on swallowing land with parking lots and o'charley's (i have no idea how to make that plural. not even going to try). this includes florence, ky. but since my girlfriends live there, i must go. that's how i ended up at the florence showcase, which offers the glamorous lux level. on the lux level, food and cocktails are brought to you before and during the movie. i pictured something like the cinema grill, but it is actually seats with trays that pull out or something. i'm not entirely sure how it works, because while we had planned to get lux level seats (which are $10 more than regular tickets), they were sold out.
instead we watched our movie (he's just not that into you) and ate afterwards at chatters, the restaurant inside the theater.
chatters is very similar to an airport bar, mediocre over-priced food included. i had the applewood blt on sourdough. the bread was good. overall it was acceptable, but the fries had a kind of funny taste. the cocktails were expensive for what they were. a couple of my girlfriends ordered martinis at $9.50 a pop. my absolut kurrant and tonic was $6, which is a bit more reasonable.
the whole experience was a little strange, especially since there is not a bathroom in the restaurant and you have to walk past the ticket taker to find one. i don't think i'm a fan. i am curious about the lux level, but i don't know how i feel about paying $20 for a movie ticket and then buying food on top of it, even if the food is a bit more filling than nachos and snow caps.
and p.s., "he's just not that into you" was better than i thought it was going to be, based on the critics' reviews. kind of cute and bubbly. everyone gets what they deserve in the end, good and bad.

the emancipator

there's nothing like an evening of beer-drinking german fun. hence our attraction to the tapping of moerlein's emancipator, held friday night at donauschwaben. emancipator was brewed to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the repeal of prohibition. jim effler, who creates the artwork for moerlein's labels, was there signing posters and selling beautiful prints of the bottle artwork.

the place was packed. parking was a challenge. the guy directing traffic (while holding a beer) told brian and i to just pull up under the pavilion, which we did not do. instead brian dropped me off and circled until he found an actual spot.

first of all, i would like to say emancipator is simply DELICIOUS. tastes light until your belly tells you otherwise. caramely. smooth. frothy but not offensively so.

it's a doppelbock. i know hardly anything about beer, so i consulted beer advocate. doppelbocks are "typically even stronger and contain enough malty goodness that they’ve been considered a meal in a glass for centuries. generally they have a very full-bodied flavor and are darker than their little bock brothers and sisters and have a higher level of alcohol, too" (7% in this case). i also learned from the german beer institute doppelbock means "double bock" (go figure) and is also known as fastenbier ("lenten beer") or starkbier ("strong beer"). monks would drink the heavy beer during the lenten fast, because monks believed that liquids not only cleansed the body but also the soul. they would make "plenty of liquid instead of solid bread from their grain, and then drink it in copious quantities...the more, the holier". (love that part of the story)integral to beer drinking is the stein, or steinzeugkrug, which is german for stoneware jug or tankard. stein-use apparently evolved in germany as a result of the black death and a desire for more sanitary conditions (read about it here). of course there were beer steins for sale, including ones made by rookwood. (if you're interested in buying some really gorgeous, intricate steins, the ones pictured were presented by george hibben, who can be reached at 513-367-2150)

we recommend you don your lederhosen or dirndl and sample some emancipator. you won't regret it. well, maybe the lederhosen.

yours, mine, and ours

kind of a brady bunch on steroids, yours, mine, and ours marries lucille ball to henry fonda. she has 8 kids, he has 10. hilarity ensues. you get the picture.as you can imagine, the food needed to feed this army is going to be pricey. breakfast preparations include 5 pounds of bacon and 3 dozen eggs. on a trip to the commissary (luckily dad is in the navy), 3 carts of food, including double digit quarts of milk, totals $126. god bless 1968.

which got me to thinking about a couple things.

1) inflation and the rising cost of food. it's scary. i'm not an economist or a financier and i have anxiety.

2) will we ever see big families like this again (>6 kids), since it is so expensive? why did people stop having so many kids - dual career parents, cost, no need for workers in the family business? one thing's for sure, if everyone started having 6 kids again, the restaurant business would go to hell cause no one could afford it.

thoughts?