kill vehicle

Picked up Braid yesterday.

I’m pretty sure it’s the best game I’ve bought on Xbox Live Arcade so far (and I’m counting the time I re-bought Puzzle Quest even though I’d already beaten the DS version so I could play the Xbox-only expansion), and it’s in the running for best $15 I’ve spent all year.

The time mechanics are beautiful, and the way the game builds on them with each additional world is very smooth. World 2 seemed simple but pretty; then world 3 took that, twisted it around, and gave me my first “whoa, didn’t see that coming” moment. Then I hit world 4 and had to flail around for a while to un-stick my brain. Now I’ve solved that one, and world 5 is currently making me gibber a bit.

If you have an Xbox 360 and haven’t picked up this game, please do so immediately.

Watch more Middleman, you heartless bastards.

It’s damn hot tonight, so after taking the dog for a walk, I decided it was time for a nice tiki blender drink. It’s hard to find good recipes for these things; mostly you end up with sickly-sweet messes of fruit juice, pineapple chunks, and rum.

Fortunately, I’ve found a couple of tiki sites that have much better recipes — ones with actual complex flavors and interesting combinations. Tonight’s drink was from a recipe round-up on one of them, Kaiser Penguin:

Scorpion from Steve Crane’s Luau, 1958

• 1 oz lime juice
• 2 oz orange juice
• 2 oz gold Puerto Rican rum
• 2 oz gin
• 1 oz brandy
• 3/4 oz simple syrup
• 1 oz orgeat syrup
• 8 oz crushed ice

Add it all into a blender, and mix until it’s more or less smooth. The original recipe claimed “for 3 seconds”, but that didn’t really seem like enough in my sad little blender.

It’s delicious.

I need to try some of the other recipes on that page soon.

So I went to San Francisco last week for a conference, and happened to be staying at a hotel close to John Walker & Co. I figured I’d stop in and see if they had any Crème de Violette, because I can’t get any locally thanks to the PLCB. I’d picked up a bottle at a little corner liquor store the day before, but wanted to get another one for PeterB since he’d tried and failed to order us a few bottles through the PLCB’s terrible SLO program a while ago.

Turns out I left with a bottle of Rothman & Winter Crème de Violette, a bottle of Peychaud’s bitters, a bottle of Regan’s orange bitters, and two bottles of Compass Box whisky that, uh, fell into my arms.

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I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but finally getting around to making the homemade grenadine mentioned at Tea Leaves jogged my memory and reminded me to mention it.

There’s a bar near my house called Kelly’s that we go to sometimes, especially after work. It’s a little hole-in-the-wall place that happens to have surprisingly good food and cocktails. Notably, they actually know how to mix real cocktails instead of just looking at you dumbfounded if you order anything more complicated than a rum and coke. For example, they’re about the only place I’ve found in town that can make a decent Sidecar.

During one post-work happy hour, they had little drink cards at the tables from LUPEC, ’Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails’. Laura ordered a Firefly from it, loved it, and I’ve been pressed into service making them ever since.

It’s a simple drink, but quite tasty:

• 1 1/2 oz vodka
• 2 oz grapefruit juice
• 1 tsp of grenadine

Shake it up with ice, and strain into a rocks glass with crushed ice.

I tend to make them as spritzers, topped with some club soda.

They’re good with fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice and the Stirrings pomegranate grenadine, but absolutely great with homemade grenadine.

For the grenadine, I basically followed Pete’s recipe, but cooked it to 225 degrees instead of 230 so it wasn’t quite as sweet.

Mmm.