Bastard's Batch of Booze

Cross-posted here.

Limoncello is a typical liqueur from Southern Italy- the centers of Limoncello production are centered around the Gulf of Naples and the Gulf of Salerno. Best served chilled, limoncello is a perfect after-dinner digestivo- though I would never criticize anyone for drinking it before, or during dinner, or on a lazy summer afternoon, or to chase away a winter chill, or... sorry, I was distracted by the prospect of a nice, chilled glass of limoncello.

While limoncello recipes are plentiful on the internet, here's my personal method for making it. First, thorougly wash, then peel fifteen or sixteen lemons (depending on the size of the lemons, and whether the market is selling them in lots of three or lots of four) with a vegetable peeler, making sure you are not getting any of the white pith (which will make your limoncello bitter). Place the lemon peels in a clean gallon jar and pour a gallon of pure grain alcohol (I have to drive to Connecticut to obtain the stuff) over the lemon peels, and cover. Let the mixture sit for at least a week (I leave the jar in a dark, cool corner for three weeks), then prepare a simple syrup by heating two pounds of sugar with a quart of water, and simmering until the mixture is slightly thickened. Strain the lemon peels out of the alcohol, and add the syrup to the infused alcohol (I use a couple of one-gallon pitchers for this stage of the production). Dilute the resultant syrup/alcohol mixture with water until the desired strength is reached (I use a 50/50 ratio, making the resultant liqueur about as strong as a typical vodka). Strain again, and bottle the stuff. Keep away from small children and open flames. A few hours before serving, place the bottle in the freezer to chill. If necessary, dilute individual servings to taste... the stuff is strong.

Here's a still life which incorporates the ingredients of this delicious treat. Look at that forlorn lemon, which has been robbed of its golden integument. Also, note that the contents of the gallon jar, with an alcohol content around 95%, have a clear golden color, while the glass of limoncello in the center has a milky translucency. This is the same effect one sees when one mixes water with absinthe- as the percentage of alcohol decreases, the oil from the lemon peels forms a microemulsion in the glass:




Yeah, that's a gallon of pure alcohol in the jar... WOOHOO!


La dolce vita, served by the glass.

Scaling Up Production

For years, I have made limoncello, a liqueur typically associated with Italy's Amalfi Coast. My routine was to drive to Greenwich, Connecticut in order to buy pure grain alcohol, which was illegal to sell in New York State. A few years ago, sales of grain alchohol were made legal, something which I discovered by accident in a local liquor store. The liquor store owner told me that he had found out that 'grain' had been made legal by leafing through the catalog of one of his distributors- there was no major announcement.

Earlier this week, I placed a special order for a case of Everclear grain alcohol, so I can make two two-gallon batches simultaneously. I felt pretty badass as I carried this case, with it's 'Danger: Flammable' warning on the side, to my car:

Tonight, on my way to work, I stopped at a store I call the 'food TARDIS' (it's bigger on the inside than the outside- it looks like a small, unassuming storefront, but it has a cavernous basement filled with amazing produce at low, low prices) and bought a variety of citrus fruits- lemons, oranges, and limes in order to make a multi-citrus blend to supplement the traditional limoncello. The long-range summer forecast is 'boozy'.

Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Living a Lie?

I've been making limoncello for years- for a change of pace, I decided to change my game a bit, and make an experimental batch of multi-citrus infused liqueur, a Fivealivello, if you will. Not willing to commit to a large batch if things didn't work out, I only used one bottle of grain alcohol to infuse a mixture of orange, lemon, and lime peels. Wow! The final product has a bit more of a bitter hint in it, and a lovely fragrance of limes... I may be onto something here. I certainly won't stop making limoncello (the old standby), but this new blend is something else entirely... my eyes have been opened to a new reality- a boozy, citrific reality.

Long Day, but Good

Today was the first day of the new season of the children's program for which I have coached for many, many years. Despite a brutal work schedule, I woke up after two and a half hours of sleep and traveled down to midtown Manhattan from the 238th St station in the Bronx on the 7th Avenue local, the "1" train. I always feel a bit amused when I travel down with my gym bag, like someone who's privy to a secret knowledge that most people aren't in on. I can't find the post now, but I chuckled when I read an article by a guy who participates in Historical European Martial Arts, who wrote about seeing other fighters on the subway, men and women with big gym bags and visible bruises- fencers, kung fu practitioners and the like- and feeling a kinship. For the record, a young lady exited at the same station I did, bearing a large bag which looked like it carried several fencing weapons. Yup, part of the secret society of fighters...

I also had another secret, I was bringing a 16oz bottle, originally filled with Snapple diet iced tea (I don't usually buy this, I wanted the bottle), full of homemade limoncello with me to give to my old friend Frankiebello. Somewhere around 116th St, I stopped telling myself, "You're carrying enough booze to get everybody in the car drunk." Yeah, sometimes a couple of secrets are good to harbor for a short time.

When I got to my destination, the kids were just lining up in their age groups, so I had time to shoot the breeze with my fellow coaches, most of whom I have known for a long, long time. I gave the bottle of booze to Frankiebello, who didn't immediately realize what it was. He gave me a quizzical look and joked, "So this is where our relationship has come to, you are giving me a bottle of diet Snapple?" When it dawned on him what I'd given him, he quipped, "Should I drink some of this before class?" I assured him that I never consider gifts to have strings attached, and that the bottle and its contents were his without any conditions.

The orientation went quickly, so we had an unexpected class of boys six-to-eight. There's usually four to six of us in the dojo, so we can accommodate unexpected groups if there's a problem in another area. We had one scheduled class, but what a doozy it was- over forty six-to-eight year old girls. There were five coaches on the mat this morning, so we split the group up into manageable groups and taught them ukemi, something which has been on my mind ever since my co-worker broke his arm in a fall. After a bit of grounding in falling techniques, I threw them all using tai otoshi, which is just scary enough to be exciting for the kids, who love to go flying as long as the landing is soft. I then taught my sub-group the basic grips, then went over the classic o soto gari, which is typically the first throw students learn. After the instruction session, we had the girls play randori with us. The key to playing randori with a bunch of grade-school kids is to balance throwing them with letting them throw you- you want them to get acclimated to falling, while building up their confidence so that they want to play. I still love it every time I look across the mat to see a tiny little pixie with a look on her face which says, "Yeah, I can take that guy..." The class was a lot of fun, but we had a hectic time organizing all of those kids- our athletic director assured us that they would split up the group into more manageable sized groups. Our student body is skewed young- if we do our job well, the older kids will get involved with school sports.

After class, I had to head to one worksite to help with the tail end of one of our fundraisers- basically making sure the property is vacated and the site is locked up. In a few hours, I'll be heading to another site to do the closing honors for another fundraiser. I left the house before 8AM today, knowing that I'd not be returning for almost twenty-four hours. I always joke with the upstairs neighbors that, this time of year, I am the ghost who haunts downstairs. As tired as I am, I have to say that I am perhaps the happiest ghost on the planet.

An Experiment which Far Exceeded Expectations

Before heading down to mom's house in Virginia, I packed the car with some contributions to the holiday culinary efforts, primarily a couple of bottles of homemade booze:

On the right is a bottle of my typical homemade limoncello, a strong, clean citrus liqueur made with pure grain alcohol, lemon zest, and sugar, diluted to proper drinking strength, approximately 50% alcohol by volume. That bottle of light pink liquid on the left is a new thing for me, my take on a not-too-well-defined folk liqueur known as cherry bounce. There are recipes for bounce made with bourbon, brandy, vodka... a whole plethora of different base alcohols. For my first batch, I used rum, which was suggested for bringing out the fruitiness of the cherries, and added a pound of sugar to counteract the tartness of the cherries. As far as the cherries are concerned, I picked two gallons of cherries on the job, the first of which I used to make homemade maraschino cherries, the second of which went into a gallon jar to be macerated in rum.

I wasn't sure how well the experiment would turn out, but I have to say that it was an unqualified success. Next year, I plan on repeating it, and using other cherries to make different variants- using whisky, brandy, and the like. This experiment far exceeded my expectations, but that doesn't preclude further experimentation.

Couscous Party Tonight!*

This evening, I'll be headed to Brooklyn to attend a couscous dinner party hosted by my great and good friend ***REDACTED***. I have to admit (in a totes hetero way), that ***REDACTED*** is an extraordinarily handsome fellow- I've been razzing him for years that he's Morocco's answer to George Clooney. Hilariously, he related an anecdote of a cab ride in Shanghai (relax, people, he's no Thomas Friedman) during which the cab driver razzed him about looking like George Clooney... when the cab pulled up to the hotel in which he was staying, it stopped in front of a poster for the movie Ocean's Twelve which prominently featured a picture of Monsieur Clooney. Of course, the cabbie had to take photos of my friend in front of the poster, prompting passersby to follow suit. After hearing the story, I told my friend, "Don't feel too bad, think about all the times people ask George Clooney if he's ***REDACTED***." **

In the context of my last post, you can surmise that I'll be bringing a large bottle of limoncello to the party, so a pan-Mediterranean vibe can be achieved (my friend is Muslim, in the same sense that I'm a Catholic- there's a cultural connection, but the rules largely went out the window years ago... he fasts for Ramadan, but enjoys a glass of wine now and again)***


* We're gonna have a couscous party tonight... TONIGHT!
We're gonna have a couscous party alright... TONIGHT!
We've got nothing better to do,
Than hang around and eat a lot of couscous.
Don't talk about other foods, we won't wanna eat.
We've gotta say, couscous can't be beat!


** A joke I cribbed from my paternal grandfather, who was a dead ringer (down to the bowties) for John Houseman.

*** Another friend from Morocco will also be in attendance- he's a big, tough gent but a total lightweight... two beers and he's giddy as a schoolgirl. I can't imagine what a tipple of 100 proof booze will do to him, but I imagine he'll be hilarious.

Big Plans... Big Plans

I have to work a graveyard tomorrow, by which I mean tonight... my plan today is to put the finishing touches on my new batch of limoncello (so I can bring some to ***FUTURE POST***), getting bombed as I do repeated "taste testings". I'll get my drunk on in the early afternoon, and sleep it off, then brew a pot of yerba mate to fuel the all-nighter.

I love it when a plan comes together- especially when that plan involves booze.

Playing with Juniper

There are a couple of juniper bushes on one of my jobsites and they are festooned with pale, pine scented "berries". As gin-and-tonics are my go-to summer drink (besides, of course, beer), I have decided to play around with them, making an infused vodka reminiscent of jenever, a spirit I came to enjoy when I traveled to the Netherlands a few years back. Maybe a good analogous drink would be Old Tom gin, a sort of "link" between jenevers and modern gins. I've been looking up recipes on the interwebz, and I think I'm ready to infuse a batch of booze. I've been making limoncello and other citrus infusions for years, and this year I started a batch of nocino... why not try a batch of gin?

I'm still pondering what "botanicals" to put in this mixture. I have the juniper, lemons and oranges are easily come by, I live by bunch of Indian groceries where I can buy coriander and cardamom seeds in bulk, and I actually have access to lavender in the gardens at work. It'll take a couple of days to accumulate my ingredients, but I think I'm going to do this thing.

Anybody got a recipe for homemade tonic water?

A Nutty Experiment

There are a couple of black walnut trees on the property of my principal workplace. I typically leave the nuts be, because they are so difficult to crack, requiring special equipment to do it correctly. This year, I made the decision not to let this bounty go to waste- I decided to make nocino, a traditional Italian liqueur made by steeping unripe walnuts in grain spirits, for the first time. This recipe (technically for a French liqueur de noix- same difference, da vero?) looked promising, so I went to work.

In a short period of time, I was able to pick a bag of unripe nuts, enough to make a nice batch of liqueur. Here's a picture of my nutsack:

The thick husks of the unripe walnuts have a lovely green color and a strong aroma reminiscent of citrus fruits. They look much like pears until you cut them open to reveal the characteristic shape of the developing walnut:

The nuts, cut into eighths, went into a jar with the requisite spices, and then I poured in the pure grain alcohol left over from my latest batch of limoncello (about half a cup) and some cheap vodka- David Lebovitz' quote on this matter is worth repeating: Use the absolute (not ‘Absolut’) cheapest vodka you can find. It’s lunacy to use something pricey when the least-expensive swill yields similar results. And believe me, French peasants ain’t cracking open bottles of Stoli to make this.

Now, the wait begins... from what I've read, it's madness to even consider opening the jar until two months have passed, and an actually enjoyable product should result by Christmastime. By that time, the walnut stains on my hand should be gone.

Why Did No-one Inform Me of this Dark and Stormy?

I have a friend who is into both "pirate" culture and "cocktail" culture. Needless to say, we have interests in common. In the course of a conversation we had Labor Day weekend, the topic of "Dark and Stormy's came up. Last week, she gave me a pre-mixed Dark and Stormy in a can, put out by the good people at the Gosling's distillery. I had given her a bottle of homemade limoncello last month- I know my target audience, booze enters into our conversations fairly often.

The pre-mixed Dark and Stormy was good... made with actual rum, rather than being a crappy malt beverage like Four Loko or Zima. It was a bit on the sweet side- my commercial ginger beer of choice is Jamaica's D&G. I like my ginger beer spicy. That being said, I would not pass up the cans of this product at the store.

When Christmas rolls around and I make a bunch of sorrel punch (I make sure to add plenty of rum to it when I make it), I'm going to have to give her a bottle.

If Only I'd Known

Via Tengrain, I found out too late that today is National Absinthe Day. I have a bottle of Kübler in the apartment, a gift from my brother Sweetums (who lives in a cute suburb of Zurich). I take sparing drinks from the bottle, because I don't often have the time and inclination to go through the whole absinthe ritual. If I want to watch a batch of booze go cloudy due to a microemulsion, I'll just mix up a batch of limoncello, which reminds me that citrus fruits are cheap this time of year, so it's time to start a batch... luckily, grain alcohol is now legal in New York, so I don't need to drive to Connecticut to buy the stuff.

At any rate, I found out about National Absinthe Day while at work... if I'd known earlier, I would have had a nip of it before heading out to work... strictly as a cultural thing- when he first came to this country, my mom's mom's dad had a brief run with a smuggling ring that brought absinthe in from the old country. For the record, my mom's dad's mom had a tiny still explode in her kitchen during the Prohibition Era, family lore has it that she was scraping mash off the ceiling for weeks.

I'll drink to that.

Recap of Mom's Visit

Mom left my place this morning in order to visit one of my aunts on Long Island. I'd have liked to have joined her, but I had to go to work tonight. She's on the fence about whether she'll return to the City of Y______ on Tuesday or go straight back to Virginia.

Before she left, one of her neighbors, who has never visited New York City, admonished her to "be careful". This amused mom to no end because she is a New York City (specifically a Bronx) girl, and she knows that New York is one of the safest large cities in the U.S., indeed the world. I can imagine how freaked out her neighbor will be when mom mentions that she took a subway ride down from the Bronx to midtown Manhattan. Both she and I can't figure out why so many people have such a distorted view of New York City.

I took mom to work on Friday so she was able to meet three of my two-legged co-workers and Fred and Ginger. She immediately took a liking to all of my co-workers, bipedal and quadrupedal. While onsite, we met two women from Colorado, and I gave them an impromptu tour of the vicinity. One of the women is studying Waldorf pedagogy in New Jersey. I told her that we ran some craft-oriented events which she should check out from a "Waldorf" perspective. I didn't tell her that everything I knew about Waldorf pedagogy can be attributed to the fact that I am a huge Nena fan, but I realize that the lovely Nena Kerner started a Sudbury school, not a Waldorf school. I don't know why I conflated the two... my mind gets kinda fuzzy when I think about Nena Kerner. Whenever I take someone to work when the site is closed, I run into lovely people I take on the unofficial tour- it never fails.

Over the course of her visit, mom and I went out for pizza (the stuff in Virginia is sub-par at best) twice, the first time to a local spot and the second time to the Yonkers location of Pepe's (the cold winter has kept the clam boats from going out, so we had a spinach, mushroom, and gorgonzola pizza rather than one of the famous clam pies). We consumed two bottles of vino, a bottle of Valpolicella and a bottle of Prosecco, and I gave mom the last bottle of homemade limoncello to take home, so I'll have to head up to Connecticut to buy pure grain alcohol, an errand which the abominable weather had kept me from doing these past two months.

On Thursday night, we went out to dinner with some of my long-standing friends, people that she hasn't seen in a long time. She always loved to have her kids' friends over to our house when we lived at home, and being able to hang out with them was a particular treat for everybody.

Mom got to meet a bunch of my neighbors, who all told her that I have a "satisfactory" grade on my neighborly report card. We visited the old neighborhood that mom moved out of seventeen years ago, and dropped in on our old across-the-street neighbor, who was crying tears of joy to see us. We were very close, she and mom had similar values and attitudes. I'm going to have to disagree with Morrissey on this one.

The highlight of the visit was mom attending yesterday's closing exercises for the program for which I volunteer as a coach. She got to see some of the older coaches who she hasn't seen in years, met the newer coaches, and fell in love with the kids in the program.

For me, the important thing was that mom got to see me interact with multiple social circles: friends, neighbors, co-workers, volunteer colleagues, random strangers. One of these days, I'll convince her to start a blog so she can meet the bloggerhood.

A Crack in the Stack, then Craic Out Back

This day began as, to use the vernacular vulgate, an ass day. I had a slow drip of water into my apartment which turned out to be from a crack in the stack pipe, the large drainage pipe for the building, in the apartment upstairs from mine. This problem was diagnosed last week, a call to the landlady that there was a drip of water through my ceiling and mold in the basement laundry room ceiling had led to a call to a plumber. At 9AM on my day off, I had to be up to open up my apartment for the plumbers who would be knocking holes in my wall and ceiling to access the faulty pipe. Thankfully, what was supposed to be a five or six hour job ended up being a two hour job, so having the water shut off was no big deal. I spent the morning shooting the breeze with my landlady, a nice lady to be sure.

This evening, my upstairs neighbor and I went to our nextdoor neighbor's house for drinks and a light dinner on the backyard deck. He's a Westmeath man who has been living in Yonkers for twenty years, after a stint in London. My upstairs neighbor's ex came by, and I learned (after a couple of years) that he and my nextdoor neighbor had known each other for years, ever since my nextdoor neighbor worked in a video store (this will tell you how long ago this was) in Cavan which my upstairs neighbor's ex used to patronize when he was a boy. It was funny to hear them relate old anecdotes about people and places they'd known in common, including an uproarious story about a nefarious cross-border smuggler going to the video store to rent a movie, any movie, and getting handed a movie in about a minute, then when the gardai showed up the next day to interrogate my neighbor, getting a story about how the nefarious smuggler had dithered over what movie to order for at least half an hour... a few weeks later, the nefarious smuggler was offering my neighbor a thirty inch TV gratis.

The beer flowed, and I had brought a bottle of my homemade rocket-fuel strength limoncello. It was a hilarious, boozy night, but one which turned serious as we talked about family in those stretches between jokes. We all have similar values, and family was a common thread throughout the hours of conversation. As I noted, the day started off as an ass day, with a crack in the stack, but it ended up as a class day with craic out back.

PUPPIES!!!

I typically have Mondays and Tuesdays off from work, so I decided to take a drive to Connecticut to purchase grain alcohol in order to make a batch of limoncello. The day being Cinco de Mayo, I decided to stop in the village of Port Chester to get lunch from one of my favorite Mexican restaurants. On a whim, I called one of my uncles and asked him if he was interested in a having a couple of tacos for lunch... need you ask what his answer was?

My uncle and his wife own a couple of Irish water spaniels. I'd describe the Irish water spaniel as looking like a chocolate lab with dreadlocks. When I arrived with lunch, I was happy to learn that one of their dogs had given birth to a litter of puppies, one of which was present, along with a half sibling. Get prepared for some serious cuteness overload!

Look at the face on this little guy... isn't he precious?

He's a comical little fellow, don't you just want to scratch his belly?

Longtime readers will know that I am partial to cats, but I have always liked these smart, active dogs.

Schedule's Been Topsy-Turvy

One of my co-workers asked to do a switcheroo with our hours this weekend, so I found myself doing graveyard shifts. The good thing about graveyard shifts is that the workplace is quiet and peaceful, the bad thing is that they really throw a monkey wrench into one's "internal clock". Yesterday was a gorgeous day, warm and sunny, so I didn't want to sleep the whole day away. I made a point of waking up in the early afternoon and spent a couple of hours sitting on the front stoop chatting with neighbors, re-reading Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim , while drinking homemade limoncello from an old mustard jar (insert "approach to al-Mustardsim" joke...). I figured that I could get snockered, and sleep it off for a few hours before getting up for work (that's how I roll, baby). Sheesh, this sounds like the song Friday, if it were sung by a drunken pseudo/quasi-intellectual.

It's been a quiet night, and the local college radio station I listen to has been playing some fantastic stuff (check out the archives, people). I'd never heard of the band Return to Mono, but the song Framebreaker made an impression on my befuddled "it's 2:45 AM and you haven't got yerba mate" brain:





I've got just an hour and a half to go before I can hit the sack. This evening, I'm planning on hitting Tagine on 9th Ave. to see Secret Science Club goddess Dorian Devins (one of a pantheon of two!) perform some standards. I think I'll need a pot of strong Moroccan coffee to keep me awake.

Grabbing Nuts

Last year, for the first time, I made a batch of nocino, a liqueur made from unripe walnuts. I'm not exactly convinced that last year's batch was all that great (I think I used too many cloves), but my mom liked the stuff. This year, I'm going to make another batch, with fewer cloves and perhaps more vanilla, maybe a couple of coffee beans.

Anyway, today I stopped by the job early so I could gather some of the black walnuts from the two large walnut trees onsite. When I got to work, I shocked my co-worker by telling him, "I'm here to grab some nuts." Poor guy was the only other person present, so I think he was sweating a bit until I explained that I'd be harvesting some walnuts to make a liqueur. He was less perturbed when I returned with two bags of walnuts and asked, "Can you smell my nuts from where you're sitting?" Unripe walnut fruits have a pretty strong, almost citrusy, aroma.

I adapted my first batch of nocino from this recipe, but this time I think I'll halve the clove content and add a couple of coffee beans to the mix. Last year's experiment wasn't a complete success, but a promising start. The limoncello, in contrast, has always been a huge success, right from the start, and I have two gallons of the stuff just waiting to be bottled.

Avec Ma Mère

At the end of last year, I moved from one apartment to another, my landlord having sold the three-family house in which I rented an apartment... I moved all of six blocks. During the same timeframe, my mom sold her house in Northern Virginia. My sister, her husband and their sons relocated to the D.C. area earlier in the year when my brother-in-law retired after a career in the Air Force (my sister and her husband are both rocket scientists, literally). Mom moved in with them while she searched for a nice, low-maintenance townhouse in the general area, and she finally closed on a place a week and a half ago. Her furniture and other belongings were delivered on the 15th.

I drove down to her new place today in order to help her unpack and move stuff- I told her that I'd rather not move the fragile stuff, but the heavy stuff wouldn't be a problem. I talk a good game about being a 'bull in a china shop', but I'm really not that clumsy, I just would rather tote boxes of books than to gingerly place the good stemware in a cabinet.

Of course, we didn't accomplish a thing this evening, after I got the grand tour of the new place, mom and I just shot the breeze for hours over a leisurely dinner and a couple of belts of homemade limoncello that would make a passable rocket fuel... gotta talk to my sister and my brother-in-law about that.

Tomorrow, the work begins, the unpacking, the stowing away, the gathering of the moving boxes. My hope is that all of the grunt work gets done so mom can just rearrange the small, but not necessarily minor, stuff at her own pace. Wednesday, I'll move all of the boxes into the garage before driving directly to work in NY's suburbs, so mom doesn't have to lug the recycling that far when it's cardboard collection day.

The important thing is that mom doesn't have to couch surf anymore, she gets along well with all of us kids, but I'm sure she's happy to have her own place. Mom is tough as nails, and very independent, so this autonomy means a lot to her.

Doing the Roastation

Today marks the second day of temps in the 90s... I am pretty much doing the roastation. Thankfully, I haven't had to do any cooking lately, because I made a shitton of rice-filled grape leaves, having had a banner week of foraging success. What better than a cool, light meal washed down with a glass of limoncello on a hot summer day?

I'd love to be able to hunker down indoors all day, but I've got to hump on down to Brooklyn for learning while intoxicated. Of course, the subway trains are (under proper circumstances) air-conditioned, but the stations will be pretty infernal on a day like this. The one benefit to a day like this is that everybody will be wearing as little as possible (I'm like that year-round, typically breaking out the shorts in March and packing them up in November). Yeah, it'll be hot in the city tonight:





Gotta love Billy Idol, with that peroxide 'do and that sneer, though I prefer Monsieur Idol's earlier work, as frontman of Generation X.

Thankful

Here's hoping everybody stateside had a good Thanksgiving. I didn't make any travel plans- last year I had a wonderful Thanksgiving in Italy with two of my brothers, but this year taking a trip just wasn't in the cards. I spent the holiday at the home of an old high school friend, his wife, and their not-quite-one-year-old twin sons. My high-school chum's in-laws came up from the Florida panhandle for their grandchildren's christening, which was last Sunday. Sadly, my old friend's parents, also old friends, didn't come around because his mother was fighting a bad cold. A couple of other old friends were also spending Thanksgiving there, along with their two adorable children.

I got to my friends' house around 2PM, whereupon my friend joked, "Here's the plan: first you're going to get drunk, then you're going to eat turkey, then you're going to sober up, then you're going to eat pie. Than you can go to work." Sounded like a reasonable plan to me... I pretty much kept to that trajectory, starting off with a couple of beers. I also busted out a bottle of homemade limoncello, because my friends from Florida have a lemon tree in their backyard that yields lemons the size of softballs, so I figured I'd inspire them to put those big beauties to good use.

Besides having a turkey, my friends served a farm-made ham made from the haunch of a heritage-breed pig. They are dedicated customers of an upstate farmer that they met at one of the local farmers' markets. They'll probably get another of his spectacular hams for Christmas, and they will definitely get one for their annual New Year's Day feast, which also invariably features collard greens, black-eyed peas, and cornbread. While the turkey was delectable, the ham was otherworldly.

I ate like porkers and drank like hell, but my one saving grace was having a couple of just-under-twenty-pounds twins to exercise with. They both love to be bounced around, with one of them loving to "jump" with adult assistance. They are on the cusp of being able to run around, they just need to work on their balance.

Everything went according to plan... I had a nice buzz on when we sat down to dinner, and was sober and sipping the first of two cups of coffee when the pies, a pumpkin pie and an apple pie, were set on the table. I'm not a big fan of apple pie, but this pie was spectacular- my friend's father-in-law was kind enough to reveal his secret, use tart apples, cut them up and dust them with sugar and cinnamon, and leave them in a colander for the excess moisture to run off- voilà, an apple pie with no hint of sogginess in the crust.

I'm now at work, it's quiet, and the cats are as well-fed as I am. I'm looking forward to a nice, quiet night, and I'll be home before the door-busting consumption frenzy begins.