Halloween was fun. I had five classes that day, and I knew I had to scare the daylights out of my half-dead students. So I bought a Venetian-style masquerade mask for ₩3,000 at E-Mart, packed a Nerf gun in my briefcase, got dolled up in my best three-piece suit, and leaped into the classrooms brandishing the pistol like some kind of madcap bank robber. Quite a few of them jumped or yelped—even the boys. Mission accomplished!
But I didn't come here to tell you that. On to the meat of the subject:
Chalk up another failed attempt to get on the O-Train.
Miss H and I rose up at 6:00 a.m. this morning, grabbed a ₩13,000cab to Seoul Station, arrived with mere minutes to spare...only to discover that the 7:45 to Jecheon (the railhead in Gangwon-do) was sold out.
On a whim I made my way onto the platform to watch the dratted train itself pull out of the station, and I found out that it's only four cars. No wonder it sold out. Next time, Miss H and I will have to book tickets in advance. We'll try for next Saturday (November 9), I guess. I hope we don't miss out on the autumn hues.
Looks like the cosmos wasn't having any of it today anyway. The sky is overcast and starting to drizzle. I don't know about you, but I was hoping for a train journey through sun-washed valleys and over sparkling rivers, not gray, leaden hills and water the color of gunmetal. Let's hope next weekend has better weather, too.
To pass the time, Miss H and I have decided to grab a few more hours' sleep, then head down to the newly-built Starbucks a few blocks away and work on our respective NaNoWriMo projects. Remember, I'm not officially participating. I'm just penning the first 50,000 words of Novel #4. I'm a thousand words in, so I'm a bit behind. I need to write 2200 more today to get caught up. I also need to keep editing Mugunghwa and finish writing Novel #3. I should have plenty of time to work on those today too.
Aside from a workout at the gym this evening, Miss H and I plan to sit down and get caught up with the TV shows we missed: the new season of Castle and the last few weeks of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Can't wait to find out what happens with both of 'em. I'm hooked.
How fortunate that Samhain falls on a Thursday (my cocktail-reviewing day) this year. And with the time difference, this review'll show up on your computer screen in the morning, and you'll have time to rush out and buy the ingredients before your big evening spooktacular.
Here's the recipe. It's real simple:
2 ounces dark rum
½ ounce dry vermouth
2 black olives
orange sugar
Stir and strain into a chilled martini glass that has been rimmed with the orange sugar, then garnish with the black olives.
photo by Steve Murello
Let me be clear: I did NOT get this recipe from The Bartender's Bible. It's from Home & Garden Television, actually. I'm no fan of the idiot box, but if something made HGTV's website, then theoretically it must be good, right? (Or popular at the very least.)
That being said, I wasn't too sure about using dry vermouth in this drink. It's Halloween. Drinks are supposed to be sweet. Rum is sweet. Why sour a drink with dry vermouth when you could add sweet vermouth and have basically a rum Manhattan? With orange sugar 'round the rim of the glass? That sounded mighty nice to me. (I added a photo so you could get the idea.)
But I got my comeuppance. HGTV is on top of things. This is where that orange sugar comes in. That's right, folks: just as the salt around the rim of a good margarita really makes the difference, the sugar in this cocktail isn't just window-dressing. It actually serves a purpose: to temper the dryness of the vermouth with a bit of sweetness. And it works. As long as you take a nip of orange stuff with every sip, you'll be just fine. The smoky dark rum will be rounded out by tannins and botanicals, which are then balanced by the sugar. The olives at the end make the perfect dessert. Using sweet vermouth would be overdoing it.
Try it if you want, though. It's Halloween. Overkill is underrated.
I think the secret to happiness is being happy. It's just that simple. To be contented inside, you need to actually be contented. One of the ways to do that is to surround yourself, as much as possible, with things that make you happy. I'm not talking about being a materialist and buying yourself a bunch of plasma TVs and expensive tequila. I'm talking about appreciating the little stuff. When the little things make you happy, you'll never be unhappy for long. And you'll live a longer life because you'll enjoy more of what's in it.
Now, not to brag or anything, but I'm one of the people who does that. I appreciate the small stuff, I mean.
I mean, take Friday, for example. Got up in the morning and had a beautiful flight to Barstow-Daggett. Got informed by my instructor after landing back in Apple Valley that I'd be soloing the next time out. Went home and had my favorite sandwich ever for lunch. Got invited to a party that evening and had a marvelous time. Came back and listened to my new favorite Led Zeppelin song. (Just when I think those guys couldn't possibly get any better, I go and find another tune of theirs that I've never heard before that breaks all previous records for awesomeness.) On Halloween I got up and went shooting, played 36 holes of mini-golf with a couple of good friends, then went to my best buddy's house, sat around the fire, sipped some 14-year-old Clynelish, and got to try smoking a pipe for the first time.
Now, some people might frown on this kind of lifestyle. Some people might not see anything exceptional in it. But I see happiness, the simple happiness that comes from taking time to enjoy the little things, to be with friends, to have some clean fun, to surround yourself with what you like, making your life a hodgepodge of cool stuff. The scrapbook of your life should be full of images that, viewed side-by-side, make you (not anyone else) pause and think, "Yeah, cool." I look back over the past few days and see pipe tobacco, Scotch, mini-golf, philosophical talk, bad jokes, friends, Led Zeppelin, costume parties, delicious sandwiches, flying, and good news.
Have I got a good life or what?
I had a deplorable amount of difficulty coming up with a name for this post. Even now, I'm not entirely satisfied with the result. "Halloween cocktail party" implies that all we drank were Halloween-themed cocktails, which most certainly wasn't true. I could've called it a "costume cocktail party" but that (a) leaves All Hallow's Eve right out of the picture and (b) weakly implies that we only drank costume-themed cocktails, whatever the hell those are. So in the end, I elected to stick the words "Halloween" and "cocktail" into the title somewhere and let the grammar go whistle.
Now that we've got the stew sorted from the dumplings, let's get to the meat of the matter. Last Friday I hosted a Halloween cocktail party at my parents' house in Apple Valley, California, in celebration of the upcoming holiday and in recognition of the fact that all of us need to get blind drunk more often. 'Twas a good party. About ten people came, there was nonalcoholic punch (limeade), plenty of cocktails, oodles of snacks (Costco pizza, a fruit bowl, Cheez-Its, Chex mix, Halloween candy, some creative costumes (a few too many girls came dressed as "sexy" somethings; sexy referees, or sexy gun molls, or sexy firefighters...but oh, heck, it's a party), and lots of fellowship and good cheer. I hauled out some Halloween-y drinks, we played games like Taboo and Apples to Apples, there was music on the stereo and Pirates of the Caribbean playing silently on the TV, and it was fun. We all got a little tipsy (except for the designated drivers, of course) and broke up about 1:00 a.m.
Now if somebody would only invite me to a party...
Now, normally I'm not the kind of man who goes poking through recipe databases and plumbing the bowels of Martha Stewart's Web site for inspiration. Nuh uh, not me. No sir. But my mom is. That's how I wound up with this recipe. And I'm awfully glad she went to the trouble to hunt it up for me, because it was a hit at my Halloween party last night (more about that later). So, without further ado, here it is, courtesy of Claire Robinson for Food Network Magazine (and my mom):
2 ounces dark rum
2 ounces ginger beer or ginger ale
juice from 1 lime
1 lime wedge
1 black gummy spider
black decorating sugar
Spread out the black sugar on a small plate. Rub the lime wedge around the rim of a rocks glass and dip the glass into the sugar. Then fill the glass with ice. Combine the rum and lime juice in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake well, and strain into the glass. Top with the ginger ale and add the gummy spider.And what have you got when you're finished doing this? If you've done it right, you should have an orange-colored drink with a black crust of sugar on the rim of the glass and a black spider hovering at the bottom. I didn't quite obtain that nifty result. The only gummy spiders I found (at Wal-Mart) were small, and multicolored. But the rest of it came off without a hitch, and the guests at the party who sampled the drink (yours truly included), thought it a tastefully sour, mellow sort of cocktail.
