MessyMissy’s Place

I grabbed my rollerblades out of the closet this morning, so that I could blade the river trail after work today. As I went to toss them onto the truck seat a piece of plastic fell to the ground.  I didn’t think much of it, they’re old blades and I figured that I could just stick the piece back on wherever it had come off. Well that was not to be. the entire heel piece was apparently shattered somehow while they were in the closet.  No rolling around for me.  I guess I have to either go get some new ones or start running around.  Now I’m sad.

Really craved something and then when you did get it or something similar and you really weren’t satisfied.  Then it goes into the “what the hell” mode where you’re really annoyed cause that thing just didn’t taste, smell, look… whatever.

Yeah, that just happened.

As you may or may not remember, I made a lemon cordial at the same time as I made the lime and cherry cordial.  I’m very pleased with the Lime and meh about the Cherry.  The Lemon has a LOT of potential, but I think it’s going to need to age a bit before it comes into it’s own.  It’s like the Banana was before it sat for a month or so. I think once it has a chance to age a little we’ll see some of the promise fulfilled.

I’m definitely going to have to invest in some flavored fuzzy water to go with these.  I think I’m going to have to make a Chocolate Cordial as well and an Orange.  I’m getting all drooley just thinking aout these.

I think it just threw a rod…  Good thing it’s Friday!  Have a great weekend everyone!

So I managed to pull it off… I made a double batch of the Lime cordial and I’ll be a monkey’s aunt if it didn’t turn out better than the last batch!  I’m really excited about it!  I tried some straight and with the Lemon Codial and then finally with some Sierra Mist…. I wasn’t disappointed at all! It kept the freshness of flavor and has a very bright body.  Yay for cordials!

I’m trying my hand at some more cordials.  I’m thinking this batch should turn out pretty good, though I’m concerned that I may have added the simple syrup too early and it may cause the flavor to not be what I want. Apparently adding it too hot can cause some degradation in the flavor overall. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.  I’m sure it’s nothing a bit of aging won’t smooth out.

Speaking of smoothing out.  The banana I made back in February is really coming into it’s own.  I had some last weekend and it’s really mellowed.  I still need to get some Creme de Cocoa so that I can make it more of a chocolate banana though. Can you say, “Yum”!

Anyway, this batch I made:

• Cherry
• Lemon
• Lime
• Amaretto

I made a double batch of Lime this time, we really liked it a LOT.  It was really refreshing and went well with so many other beverages!

The amaretto is going to take about 4 – 6 more months to finish and is one of my more abitious project, but I’m hopeful it’ll turn out.  It’s just a long time to wait… then I’ll have to tweak it to get it as close to DiSarano as posible, which is my ultimate goal. Well it’s good to have goals!

Have a great weekend, Tally ho!

slowly closing
the night’s sweet embrace slipping away
ever clawing reality fighting for life
drown it in the oblivion
make it sleep, never to wake

So you’ll remember, maybe, back in January I made some cordials or liqueurs (whichever you want to call them).  Well I finally did the final decant and wow and I pleased with what I’ve got!  The Lime was wow!  I mixed it with some lemonade. Holy cow!  I took a sample down with us when we visited our friend Nic, who is now my favorite mixologist, and made some stellar concoctions with them.

From the Hazelnut Liqueur was made a mudslide-esque drink, which was delish! We made a few iterations from it, but ultimately the Mudslide type was the best.  The Hazelnut has really matured, but it still seems a bit harsh.  I’m going to store it a bit longer and see what happens.

The Banana Liqueur was turned into a chocolate banana drink with the Creme de Cocoa. Another phenominal result.

Since they turned out so happy, I think I’ll keep going down this lane. I may have to start distilling if I’m going to keep this cost effective though.  I guess we’ll just have to see where that takes us.  I do have a distilling book and I found out there is a class on distillation on campus, so I may just have at.  I don’t know.  It’ll either be that or I’ll try my hand at cheese. Distilling just seems so much more useful though.

I finally got around to finding the alias that was causing my issue with the “cp” command in Linux.  I modified my .bashrc and simply commented out the line that read:

alias cp=’cp -i’

I also took the opportunity to add in some of my more favored longer commands, which has really been nice.  Like sometimes I just want a program to just build itself, so now that’s what it does.

alias build=’./configure && make && sudo make install’

I don’t use it for many things, but it’s just nice to shorten up some of the things I have to type.

Bryan and I have found a new breakfast spot that we absolutely love, Portable Feast & Friends.  The restaurant is on Turner Street in Old Town.  We’ve gone there the last 3 Saturdays and every time the quality of the food is superb and the staff keeps my coffee cup topped off.  That is one of the things I MUST have in the morning… Lots of coffee.  Not only does the coffee flow freely, it’s great coffee!

The Creole Skillet

I’ve only gotten two items off the menu so far.  A Blackstone and the Creole Skillet.  The first time we went I got the Creole Skillet, which comes in 3 varieties; ham, bacon or veggies. As you may have guessed I got the veggie version.  It was to die for.  Not only was the flavor combination, fantastic it was beautiful! Bryan got the Grilled Breakfast Panini, bacon of course, and devoured it.

The next week Bryan got the Bacon version of the Creole Skillet which he said was phenomenal as well, but then again he’s addicted to bacon.   He wants a bacon man with and bacon house.  I settled on the Blackstone. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the Creole Skillet, but that may be because I really wanted the skillet, but decided to be adventurous and try something else from the menu.

The Blackstone

This last weekend we went back and I had the Creole Skillet again, unfortunately I don’t remember what Bryan had… I was too busy devouring the skillet. They were also trying to decide on whether or not to bring in a new cheesecake and asked us to try a sample. Now I haven’t had cheesecake since the great cheesecake melting disaster of 1994, but I put on a brave face and ate it. It was really quite good. It was a chocolate cheesecake with pecans, caramel and some kind of a crumble. If the rest are that good I may… may I say… lift my personal cheesecake ban. We’ll just have to wait and see. Overall, I would highly recommend Portable Feast & Friends to food eaters everywhere!