mixology

ASTROLIQUOR for September 7-13—What the stars say you should drink!

My Fellow Inebriates,

Here’s your booze horoscope:

Aries, even if you’ve been feeling your age lately, this week brings new energy. Whatever age you were happiest, that’s the way you’ll feel. Hark back to relatively mature times and you may find yourself sipping a Grey Goose martini. But good luck if you long for less mature times—you could end up shotgunning beers at the park. With apologies for gross stereotyping, this is a kick-ass way to feel young.

Taurus, this is the week to complete important negotiations. The terms won’t get more favorable, so sign the documents already. The sooner you get this boring task done, the sooner you can hit that box of white wine that’s been giving you come-hither looks. Mix it up with some Galiano (after you finish the financial stuff).

When things are tough, Gemini, the stars advise hitting the bars and finding a stranger to listen to your troubles. A real psychologist would just cost you money ($100 and hour? or four bottles of Smirnoff?…you do the math), plus they’d have all sorts of rules about bringing flasks to the office, etc.  Who needs professionals? Any stranger with a sufficiently high blood-alcohol level will be happily regaled by you.

Life feels hard right now, Cancer, but you just need some perspective. The world is full of real problems, and you…well, your worst hardship is having to settle for a mocktail when you want a cocktail. But the stars are recommending mocktails to you this week. What total BS. The stars are zillions of light years away, and arguably their recommendations are therefore zillions of years old. Read no further; go and get drunk.

Leo, you suddenly realize you’ve been living behind a façade. Look at yourself in the mirror…who the hell are you anyway? Getting to know the real you may take time and involve a stack of gooey self-help books, which sounds like totally boring busy-work. Instead of engaging in an uphill battle to know thyself, learn to love the fake you—then mix yourself a glitzy gin-and-Goldschlager to celebrate the joys of artificiality.

You’ve worked so hard, Virgo. You’ve slaved away and put everything you had into a project at work, only to receive faint praise. Nor are you happy with the results. As for what your boss thinks…you might need a cardboard box. You certainly need a supply of Hypnotiq, Blue Curacao, and Malibu. Because when you’re blue, there’s nothing like a blue drink.

Libra, you are fretting about small things. Cut yourself some slack. With all your worrying, you’ve barely noticed that you have a well-dressed admirer. The stars (which don’t like being wrong) say this potential flirtation features an Aries, an Aquarius, or a Gemini. Talk about hedging your bets, stars. But they also call for shots of Bailey’s and butterscotch schnapps, so you can’t very well argue.

Your personal life is out of control, Scorpio. Since this is fairly normal for you, there’s no need to sweat it. Distract yourself by rearranging the furniture or discovering what you get when you combine red wine and rum in equal parts, then toss some random fruits into it (the booze, not the furniture). Maintain a permanent vat of this on your coffee table and you’ll never want for visitors.

Sagittarius, you get a break from being designated driver, which calls for a big Stolichnaya-Jagermeister bender. But don’t get so hammered that you won’t realize it when a drunken friend tries to get behind the wheel. Peel that moron out of his/her car, moralize drunkenly, and call a cab. Drinking is awesome—we don’t need it spoilt by idiots.

A charity hits you up for money, Capricorn. If you don’t agree with its message, don’t feel pressured to give. If you do agree, by all means give, but save some cash for the liquor cabinet. Maybe you can volunteer time rather than money? Otherwise you won’t be able to afford this week’s celestial recommendation: Vana Tallinn. Plus you’ll meet cool new people volunteering (maybe an interesting Leo). But watch out for “frenemies” this week!

Aquarius, are you by any chance an organ donor? Consider filling out a card this week; practically everything barring your liver should be usable. If that’s a little too morbid for you, why not donate blood? Unless it’s full of rum. Come to think of it, maybe you could just be nice to people this week…which you usually are anyway. Hmmm, what do the stars suggest, then? Just go and get a haircut or something.

Pisces, this week features unlikely meetings with people you thought you’d never see again. If you’ve been hankering for social connection, this is a good thing. If you’re in the witness protection program, this is a bad thing. Accordingly, be careful whether you stay in or go outside. If you have a partner, life may get turbulent this week. Smooth it out with as much Kahlua as you can absorb.

Who says cotton candy’s just for kids?

My Fellow Inebriates,

You’d think there’d have been something interesting in the backpack my parents used throughout their day at the Pacific National Exhibition, but its contents were in fact so boring that no one bothered to clean it out. Still, it seemed sensible to check for some booze. Could they really have managed eleven hours of kiddy rides, farm animals, dog shows, and carny people without a flask? I didn’t think so.

But apparently they had drained the flask while walking the fairgrounds. Typical. I clambered right into the pack and found nothing but old popcorn and pink cotton candy. This latter item my dad immediately grabbed. He needed, I kid you not, something that wouldn’t require chewing for breakfast before a 10 a.m. root canal, and he thinks oatmeal is really gross. (I do too, but have you ever tried adding a tablespoon of Jack Daniel’s to your bowl? Try it.)

Most people, when they see cotton candy, do one or even several things:

  • They salivate, imagining a much yummier product than it actually turns out to be.
  • They wonder how many insects have gotten swirled up into the floss.
  • Their teeth hurt. They they wonder if they need a root canal.
  • They wonder which is worse: denying the kids a quintessential carnival treat, or letting them consume a bag of sugar, additives, and stray bugs.
  • They wonder how a bag of it can cost five freaking dollars.
  • They wish cotton candy contained at least a little alcohol.

Okay, maybe most PNE visitors don’t think that. For those who do, there’s a post-fair solution. Get the kiddies into bed and whip up a Cotton Candy Martini.

Now, you can’t get cotton candy just anywhere—at least not near LBHQ—so if you’re going to pull off this drink, you’ll have to visit a fair. Perhaps a relatively mainstream one like the PNE, or maybe a nasty little midway with multi-nippled circus geeks gobbling chicken heads and gropists throwing knives at each other. Either way, be sure to escape with some candy floss.

One other piece of foresight is necessary: have some sub-zero (sub-32 if you prefer) Smirnoff in your freezer. After a day of freaks with meter-long armpit hair offering you deep-fried Mars bars, you’ll want that vodka to be ready. And Smirnoff is only really tolerable when it’s near-freezing.

If, unlike my parents, you have any sort of respectable bar, you’ll have all the other items, or at least improvisational ones. Grenadine? Coca-Cola? Vanilla rim sugar? Sure…. Not at my house, perhaps, but I hope this stuff is at yours. Here’s the recipe:

  • 8 ounces of freezing Smirnoff vodka
  • 1 tablespoon of cola
  • 1 teaspoon of Grenadine
  • A chunk of cotton candy (about 2″ x 2″)
  • 2 small chunks of cotton candy for garnish
  • Vanilla cocktail candy rim sugar

Rim the glasses, load your martini shakers with ice, toss in the first four ingredients, and close tightly. Shake it like a carny wigging out on paint thinner. The cotton candy will disappear like a pickpocketed wallet. Strain the concoction into your sugared martini glasses and garnish with tufts of cotton candy. UNLESS your dad ate all of it for breakfast before having a root canal.

Mixing like Zaphod Beeblebrox (sorta)

Today’s local paper carries an opinion piece about blue raspberry–flavored foods. “When did blue raspberry become a thing?” asks Angie Quaale of the Langley Times, noting that food is not generally supposed to be blue.

Indeed, a blue hue often reliably indicates that food is off. Even blue food that’s ostensibly palatable, such as blue cheese and that weird potato-like thing that Arthur Dent sampled in the hull of a Vogon ship, gives plenty of consumers the dry heaves. Yet here we have a marketplace where blue raspberry everything shimmers and sparkles at us. You name it: Jell-O, kids’ lunch snacks and juices, and popsicles, the very product Angie tags as responsible for the incursion of blue raspberry into the marketplace.

More troublingly, Angie says blue raspberry is artificial.

I didn’t know this, my fellow inebriates. I just thought scientists had gone ahead and engineered blue raspberries. Why not? The other day the family ate yellow tomatoes and red peppers, and earlier at the bowling alley Miss V gobbled down a handful of blue M&Ms.

If they can make blue M&Ms, why couldn’t they engineer a blue raspberry? The two feats seem about equivalent, don’t they?

I pondered this briefly before deciding to make a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. It’s supposed to be kind of bluish-green and taste like Jack Daniels with peach schnapps and blue curacao plus some orange juice. But you know the sorry state of our liquor cabinet, so I substituted gin for, well, all the ingredients—even the one item we had (best to save the OJ for the kiddies). Curiously enough, my Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster wasn’t bluish-green but clear. Given Douglas Adams’s description of the drink as “like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a gold brick,” I’d say my version was close enough.