Text 18321, 126 rader
Skriven 2007-07-29 23:11:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: Friday cotd. 899
========================
Back to the house for kicking back, knocking back, and
trying to figure out what's wrong with my darn computer.

Beverage tastes.

A beer that I'd not tried before: Leinenkugel Berry Weiss,
which has good blackberry-raspberry scents and flavors
layered over a lemony white beer and a fair amount of hops.
Good enough to drink but not good enough to drink a whole
one of, so Glen and I split one.

Blue drinks courtesy of Lynnie:

Jones blue bubble gum soda - good acid balancing the
sweetness; fairly convincing bubble gum flavor. Nice.

Full Throttle Blue Demon blue agave flavor - I was given
this with the admonition to take just a sip or two, so I
did. Thinnish fruit flavor, not reminding me of blue agave
at all but rather some faint tropically melony taste. I
had an ounce, and it gave me a buzz.

Drinks courtesy of Clean Dave:

Or it might have been the Diet Moxie, which I thought didn't
have the Moxie of Moxie - a touch of the bitter kick of the
real thing but a tad sweet. It too has a load of caffeine.

And two milk drinks from the Korean store, also from C. Dave:

Milka - melon citrus yogurty taste, moderately sweet, refreshing.

Ambasa - very similar, more citrusy, sweeter. Sort of like the
Korean Coke vs. Pepsi, perhaps.

Asian snackies:

Kirin blue crab snack - this is the Korean Kirin, which probably
has nothing to do with the Japanese Kirin. Slight fishy aroma,
texture like styro shrimp chips. Flavor similar to shrimp chips,
perhaps a tad stronger. These dissolve to leave little hard bits
in the mouth - simulated shell?

Candied dried sardines - imagine sardine brittle with sesame seeds.
Kind of fun; medium fishy aroma, mild fishy taste, fishy aftertaste.
Quite sweet. Varying in texture from slightly chewy with some crunch
to total hard crunchy. These actually disappeared fairly rapidly.

None of the computer gurus could figure out how to get my wireless
to work, although during the tweaks the sound (gone awol for quite
a while) came back. Will work on the wireless for a while today
if I can get anyone to help and then tackle the other big question
- why can't I set up a secondary partition on my hard disk?

Time to go to Blob's Park, a Biergarten in the wilds of Maryland,
right by 175 and the B-W Parkway. A largish nondescript building.

$5 cover charge; food prices quite reasonable.

The most important part for some of us was the beer: we had
pitchers of:

Bitburger Pils - light, a fairly well-made beer but probably
mistreated and so fairly skunky;

Warsteiner Dunkel - okay but rather sissy, fairly popular;

Blob's Ale (made by Dominion) - nutty, cereally; a bit cloying;

Yuengling - the usual.

Pitchers ran $8-11, a relative bargain.

Maryanne ordered a rum and Coke. She took a sip and sent it to
Lynn, who pulled a face and said that there wasn't any Coke in
it. We all took a pull or two, so it went rapidly. There actually
were a couple ounces Coke in the mixture, but it was in fact
predominantly rum.

What does one expect if one orders a cheese plate at a German
restaurant? What came: fried Mozzarella sticks and fried
Jalapeno poppers, both cooked at an insufficient temperature
so rather greasy and a bit undercooked, although the poppers
were done enough to have exploded.

Tastings of various dishes:

Sauerbraten - good flavor, but not as good as Dimitri's, as the
meat was a little tough and the gravy spiked with caraway;

Kassler Rippchen - a large, somewhat too lean smoked pork chop;

Wiener Schnitzel - almost-beef veal, decently cooked, pretty
plain;

Jagerschnitzel - as above only topped with mushrooms and onions
and brown gravy: much better.

Those were the dishes within stealing bites distance. We were
seated at a long cafeteria-style table, so there were many
people whose dishes I couldn't see.

I had a sausage sampler, one each Bratwurst, Weisswurst, and
Knackwurst; the Bratwurst was like a regular Italian sausage,
pretty good; the Weisswurst very white and very bland; the
Knackwurst very pink and would have been very bland but for the
fact that it smelled kind of fishy. I ate all but part of the
Knackwurst, which went down the table to Dirty Dave, who solved
the stale problem by drowning the piece in mustard before eating it.

One gets a choice of two side orders with each main course: I had
the dumpling (which I thought I'd be cruel and send to Glen, only
it was nasty enough that I didn't want to be all that cruel) and
green beans. The beans were from a can, the dumpling from a glue
factory.

Tasted the sauerkraut - quite sour; Burt loved it. The red cabbage
was as one would expect.

The band - three pieces tonight - was hideously loud. Someone
suggested that I should have brought my violin. I countered that
perhaps I should have brought my M-1 Carbine.

___ Blue Wave/386 v2.30
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