Water into Wine(flavored)

We live in exciting times, as far as food goes. Or, more correctly, as far as "food" goes, as I'm not sure some of the things I am often excited about in the grocery store actually qualify as "food", technically. I'm not talking about things like exotic fruit from the far side of the world or a soup you've never tried or a new sauce for chicken. I'm talking about things like Peeps milk, or Cheelows, or the return to popularity of exotic Jello molds and desserts. And, yes, I'm also talking about Wal-Mart's wine-flavored water enhancers.

Earlier this week a friend posted an article about them on Facebook, but the article didn't seem to know that Rose Wine isn't the only flavor. When I made an actual trip to Walmart on Friday night (because that's the kind of fun we get into around here on a Friday night), I discovered that they also make a Berry Sangria flavor. As a person who drinks water all day long at my desk, and a person who likes wine, I decided that I needed to try these.

But also that I needed some actual wine to compare them to, in order to properly evaluate the flavor.

I'm told that day drinking wine alone in your apartment on the weekend is a sign of several different but severe problems, so I immediately rationalized two good excuses:

1) I have to drink this in order to properly blog about it. I am performing a service for my few dozen readers. Taking one for the team. Some kind of sports metaphor. I'm not day drinking alone on the couch. I'm [SPORTS METAPHOR HERE] for my friends and readers.

2) If you have wine with a cheese plate, you're not drinking; you're fancy. The $5 and under cheese bin at Kroger was happy to help me with this, so I assembled a cheese plate with some crackers and accompaniments (by which I mean jelly, to keep the cheese from sliding off the cracker) and prepared for my taste test.



Said preparation consisted of letting the cheese sit out for an hour and getting out two glasses.

Like I said, fancy.

I decided to start with the Rose Wine flavor, as that was the one discussed in the article.



(If you're wondering why the wine glass has a bicentennial design on it, all of my barware comes from a matched set that was in my Nanny Maggie's house. No one else wanted it, and I have successfully move it three times now without breaking any.)

I wasn't sure how much flavoring to add to just one glass of water (at work I have a water bottle, so I'm flavoring a much larger quantity), so I figured for a proper test I would go ahead and add flavoring until it was about the same color as the actual rose wine spritzer I bought at Walmart.

(Yes, I bought wine at Walmart. As I said, fancy.)



Before sipping, I attempted to savor the bouquet, but the rose-flavored water had no smell at all. It really did taste like wine, although without the noticeable bite/sting of alcohol. I'm not saying it tasted like good wine, mind you. It tasted more like I imagine the wine that Schmendrick makes in "The Last Unicorn" tastes; weak, non-offensive, but definitely something wine-flavored. If you were blindfolded and given a glass of this, I'm fairly confident you'd be able to guess "wine" as the flavor, but not a specific kind of wine.

Satisfied that I had properly evaluated the rose flavor, I slammed the remainder of the glass of rose and cleansed my pallet with several bites of cheese and crackers. Then we moved on to the Berry Sangria flavor:



Like the first test, I added enough until the colors matched:



and then sipped the actual wine, and then the water, to compare.

The berry sangria water has a faint smell of berries. I wondered if maybe I hadn't added enough flavor to the first one, or if maybe I was tipsy from the first round. (Confession: I drank all the wine from the first round, but only a couple sips of the water.) Even more importantly, though, it definitely tasted like the sangria. Out of the two flavors, I would say this one is definitely the better choice if you want to sit at your desk and pretend that you are slowly drinking your day away.

Or if you just like the taste of wine.

It's also good for that.

Weekend Adventures

This weekend was the best of times, and it was the worst of times.

Actually, it was mostly pretty good, except for some scones that I ruined this morning because I was being sloppy and not paying 100% attention to what I was doing. And by "ruined", I mean "not perfect", not "inedible". I was on the phone while I was mixing my dough, and I misread the recipe and put too much milk in. That made my dough too wet, and when the scones baked they spread out instead of staying in a mounded up muffin shape:



They taste fine, but they're more like a scone cookie than a scone.

I decided to make scones because I had leftover whole milk from one of the things that went well this weekend: I made cheese, in my kitchen. Following a recipe in Food Network Magazine, I made ricotta cheese in three easy steps.

1) I brought milk, cream, and salt to a simmer in a nonreactive pot.



2) When it was simmering, I added lemon juice and vinegar, and stirred until it appeared fully curdled.



I thought I did that part wrong, because when I started stirring all I could smell was vinegar. All of a sudden, though, the curds got bigger and it smelled creamy, like cottage cheese. Excited by sudden success, I...

3) Poured it into a strainer lined with paper towels and let it drain.



I poured it in too fast, so the paper towels got pulled down into the strainer a little more than they should have. A long, slow pour would have kept them in place, but it wasn't really any trouble. The recipe said to let it drain for five to thirty minutes, depending on how firm you wanted it, so I went for thirty:



Homemade whole milk ricotta, with no additives or preservatives. My mom asked how much it cost, but the ingredients only came to a dollar or so more than buying a similar sized tub of ricotta at the store would have been, and this way I get to say that I am a cheesemaker. I used most of it to make a calzone today, and it was damn good.

Today I also used my new camera, a Lomography fisheye camera that I saw on a clearance table yesterday while Kristin was looking at sunglasses. I'd looked at the camera before, when we were in that store last spring, but sixty dollars seemed like a lot for a trick camera. Clearance prices, on the other hand, suddenly seemed tolerable, so I bought it and then today I walked around town with it.

There were some hits:













and some misses:





The misses aren't terrible photos, but they just don't really make the most of the format and the fisheye effect. I bet if I was closer to Ayres (the second picture) or the saloon they would look more dramatic, but as it is this just makes the space in front of them look huge and the building look far away and unimpressive.

On the other hand, the same effect made the closed lawn at World's Fair Park look enormous:



so it can be a good effect in the right circumstances.

Obviously, I need more practice, but I think it's off to a good start.

That Time Kristin and I Went to the Fair (2 Years Ago)

Sometimes I go do something, and take a whole bunch of pictures, and somehow never get around to writing anything about it. I realized the other day that this happened when Kristin and I went to the Tennessee Valley Fair together. In 2010.

My whole goal in going to the fair wasn't to go on rides, or play games, or even to eat fried things on sticks (although that last part eventually happened). Instead, I just wanted to take some photos of shiny lights and colorful midways.

Mission accomplished:







Especially this one, which was the picture in my head that I wanted to take when I decided that I wanted to go to the fair:



I don't remember if Kristin even wanted to go to the fair, but I didn't want to drive, so I somehow convinced her to go and to drive. I might have offered to buy her ticket, which happens sometimes when Kristin doesn't want to do things I do, but it's entirely possible that she bought her own ticket and was excited to go. It's been two years, and I can't really remember.

I do remember that we were mistaken for a couple. Kristin and I tend to bicker and snap at each other a little, because we are both often cranky, especially in the presence of crowds. We were having some snippy discussion in line while waiting to get tickets, and this lady turned around with a big smile and said, "Awwwww, is this your first fair together?"

"Yes?" I answered. And, so far, our last fair together, although that's not been a deliberate choice. We just haven't felt like going to the fair again.

"My boyfriend just hates doing stuff like this!" she continued. "I just have to drag him out of the house."

I was about to explain that, "Oh, we're not dating," (I wasn't going to go straight into "because I'm gay" because we were out in the public at night in Tennessee, and that's not always a wise choice), but Kristin giggled, wrapped her arms around my arm, smiled sweetly, and said, "I have the same problem."

"Oh, that's so sweet!" random lady continued, while I thought about maybe pushing Kristin under the carousel, just to watch her die.





"Isn't it?" Kristin said, smiling at me with beatific adoration. I had been kind of a cranky bitch earlier about something or other, and this, clearly, was my payback.

"Do you want me to take your picture together?" random lady asked.

"NO," I answered. Random lady somehow chose not to interpret this as hostile, and directed all of her attention to Kristin, who was still hanging onto my arm with both hands.

"My boyfriend hates having his picture taken, too!" and then they both giggled, united in their shared burden of non-photogenic boyfriends. "You know, I have a coupon for some money off the tickets. Let me get it for you."

"Oh, thank you," Kristin cooed.

"Yeah, thanks," I added, doing my best not to grumble. It was a nice discount, so I guess I should have been more thankful.

Anyway, we finally got inside and wandered around for a while, staring at things and stopping a lot so that I could take random photos:

















and right when we started to get tired and hungry, we saw it:



The Fried Cheese Emporium.



What else would you eat at the fair, really? You don't come to the fair for apples or a salad or all organic tofu nuggets. No. You come to the fair for fried things on sticks, and the fair is happy to provide:



Maybe you can't tell from the size of the cheese log compared to the salt shaker, but that was a massive hunk of fried cheese. I'm not sure what the recommended daily allowance of fried cheese is per day, but I bet that thing exceeds it. It was so huge that I had trouble eating it:



But I gave it my best attempt.

And then when I got home I was too tired to blog about the experience, probably because my body was falling into some sort of coma.

A delicious, cheesy coma.

Full of cheese.

I hear they also have one in Pennsylvania

In comic books, Bizarro is a twisted version of Superman, an imperfect duplicate who wants to be the same but ends up being different. His planet, Bizarro World, is square while Earth is round, he causes disasters instead of saving people from them, the S on his shirt is backwards (but you usually can't see it because unlike the humble Superman Bizarro wears a homemade sign proclaiming himself to be #1), he is vulnerable to blue kryptonite instead of green, and so on.



Bizarro stories always annoyed me when I was little, but the Superman animated series gave me a better appreciation for him. In his send-off episode, the last time we see him on that show, he frees an animal from a zoo with the comment, "Why am you locked up? Me bet it am for something you not do," and I suddenly understood, and felt bad. At heart, Bizarro means well. He wants to be good. He just doesn't know how, and his essential nature fights against it. He wants to be Superman, but he'll always just be an imperfect duplicate.

I was thinking about Bizarro last week because I learned, from a commuter request form, that just down the road from me there is a Bizarro village of Philadelphia. I've mentioned before that my hometown is Philadelphia, NY, a small village that sits on Route 11, so I was surprised to learn that there's a Philadelphia, TN, and it also sits on Route 11. It's Philly, but not Philly! It's, as I said, Bizarro Philly, and I immediately wanted to go see it.

(Before anyone argues that our Philly is the Bizarro Philly, I'll point out that ours was founded first. Sorry, Bizarro Philly.)

I didn't know if there actually would be anything to see there, but Bryan offered to drive, so off we went on Saturday morning. It turns out that Bizarro Philly really is like our Philly, but different in small, odd ways.

1) We both have a closed gas station on Route 11. At home, ours is the Agway. In Bizarro Philly, I'm not sure what it is, because the sign is gone:



The whole building is gone, actually, but they left some lovely ruins behind:





2) Nothing important happened in our town, ever. Bizarro Philly, on the other hand, was the sight of the apparently famous Battle of Philadelphia:



According to the plaque next to the Civil War Trail sign:



the Battle of Philadelphia was fought a short distance away on Federal Hill:



It was the first Union defeat in East Tennessee, and allowed the Confederacy to capture a number of guns and supply wagons. Bizarro Philly is historically important, while our Philly has contributed nothing important to the historical record.

They sometimes claim to have invented cream cheese, but this is a lie.

3) Our town has a lot of churches. Bizarro Philly also has a lot of churches:





Is it just me, or does the "including you" come out sounding a lot less welcoming than it should?

The historical plaque was on the lawn of another church, and there was a non-photogenic Baptist church past the Presbyterian Church. We didn't stop because we were trying to find this church:



I have no idea what a cowboy church is. Bryan and I tried to follow the signs to find it, with a slight caution from me: "If we pull up and it looks like snake handlers or 'Children of the Corn', just drive away. I'll try to take a picture without getting out of the car," but we must have missed a turn or something because we just ended up doubled back to a street we'd already come down.

4) Regular Philly sometimes has graffiti problems:



So does Bizarro Philly:



5) Regular Philly is smack in the middle of dairy country. Bizarro Philly also has a dairy:



Their sign said that the cheese shop was open, so we went in, and there was so much cheese:



Case upon case of cheese, and the whole back of the store is glass windows into the cheese processing area, so you can see the presses and vats and drying areas. Even better, when I starting talking to the lady at the counter, whose husband owns the farm, I was explaining that I was from dairy country in upstate New York and she explained that her husband was, too! He's from Cortland, the town where I went to school for my undergrad. We started trading New York towns, and I went on to explain that the whole reason we were in Bizarro Philly was that my parents live in Philadelphia, New York.

"There's a Philadelphia in New York?" she exclaimed, eyes wide. "I never knew that!"

She probably thinks ours is the Bizarro Philly.