No cake today. The husband left early this morning for a week-long meeting, and since that means there would be NO ONE around, I did my waistline a favor 😉
Friday’s Cocktail: I’ve been primed to make a julep for a long time now, just because. Like a lot of very old cocktails (and the julep seems to have been around in one form or another since the late 18th century . . . so around the same time as the first cocktail, “a whiskey sling,” made an appearance), the julep was seen as medicinal. If you remember, I said that’s what kept a lot of folks from adopting cocktails to begin with. Adding bitters, which are essentially herbal preparations in alcohol, was seen as synonymous with taking one’s medicine, and where was the fun in that? Since the julep is bourbon-based and uses crushed mint and/or mint syrup—so, an herb—I’m not surprised that it, too, was viewed with some suspicion.
Legend has it that Kentucky’s Henry Clay introduced the drink at the Willard Hotel during his years in the U.S. Senate (so this would’ve been roundabout 1831-42). But the drink was well-known even earlier, having been mentioned in the 1700s as a drink favored by Southerners, specifically Virginians. If you’re interested in more history, Wikipedia’s entry is pretty thorough. I, for one, didn’t know about a gin-based julep featuring genever gin, which is an old-style type of fermented gin popular in the Netherlands well before England discovered a taste for the liquor, which happened when William of Orange—that’s King William III to the rest of us—came to the throne in the mid-1600s. Interesting, too, that gin was seen as medicinal, useful for stomach complaints. Seems to me that just about all alcoholic beverages were viewed that way, probably because of their association with herbal preps steeped in booze, which is, as I mentioned, where we get our modern-day bitters.
Anyway, having lived in Virginia a fair length of time, I can tell you that I was never once offered a julep. Like just about everyone else, I only know about the drink because of the Kentucky Derby, but the julep didn’t become associated with the race until the mid-30s. The whole silver cup, silver straw thing also seems to have originated with Churchill Downs, and according to Wikipedia at least, Woodford Reserve bourbon is the “official” julep bourbon.
Okay, whatever. Now, I like Woodford Reserve but didn’t have any on hand. My bottle of Old Forrester was down to just a few ounces, but I did have some lovely Old Scout Ten-Year Bourbon and thought, sure, why not? I also wanted to jazz things up. I mean, mint is okay and bourbon is fine, but I’ve seen recipes for lavender juleps, juleps made only with real peach brandy, and all manner of fruits. Then I stumbled on this site that had seven different julep recipes, one of which uses blueberries mixed with a mint simple syrup.
Hey, no sweat. Although you have to make your own simple syrup and then puree the berries, you can do this. We’re not talking a long marinade time or a steeped infusion. Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, using frozen berries, of which I still have a couple pouches from last year in the deep freeze, works just fine because you’re making a puree. Doesn’t matter if the little suckers hold together or not.
The only thing I do suggest, though, is that you must use crushed ice. (This, too, is easy; this is why God invented blenders.) I looked at several recipes and they all say the same thing: the way the ice is prepared makes a huge difference. Me, I normally have a knee-jerk aversion to shaved or crushed ice because bars use that to quickly water down drinks as well as take up space in a glass. (Even Starbucks does that with their cold brew. Nice profit margin for them, but it drives me crazy.) Here, though, I agree that the ice really makes the drink into something you slowly sip—and it was pretty to boot.
As a Georgia-born friend of mine would say, this one purty drink. Natch, the husband loved this and had a second.
Definite keeper.
***
Weird dream this morning that felt like a continuation of my dream from the night before. All are moving dreams and will probably be moving dreams until we actually move. The one from the night before, I remember only as a snippet: the whole family’s getting ready to go somewhere, only my youngest daughter’s room was a mess and she’d completely forgotten about finding someone to take care of her tadpole and I was starting to panic about the animals.
Now, the daughter never had tadpoles. I have no idea why there was tadpole . . . except I once did have a tremendous and humongous pair of African clawed frogs. Those suckers grow to accommodate their tank; that is, they can stay small, or they can get big. Mine got big. But, one afternoon, I come upstairs to the kid’s room to find that she and her friend have decided the frogs would be cool to hold.
Wrong.
I could blame her age, but she was 8 or 9; she knew better because I’d told her, repeatedly, that handling these is the surest way to kill them. Plus, the kids had to pry off the secured top to get at the frogs. Sort of a clue to stay the hell out there.
The poor things predictable developed bacterial infections from the crap we carry on our skin. I tried treating them, but the frogs eventually died a pretty terrible death that I still remember more than forty years on as if it were yesterday.
I was so pissed. Just writing this pisses me off because they didn’t have to die. The kid just did what she wanted because she wanted to, and these poor creatures, who’d never done her any harm, suffered because of her.
Hmmm…
Well, then, maybe the dream does make some sense after all because, of course, I’m pissed that we’re moving. I’m not dying or anything, but I am sad and angry. I’m not as vocal about it as I used to be; in fact, I rarely say anything these days about it. No point because this is going to happen, and I need to get past my anger. Although I have a funny feeling that I allow my anger to keep percolating because of what I’ve always said: anger gives you the illusion that you’ve got the power to change things.
Wrong-o. It’s also quite clear that my unconscious hasn’t gotten the message that I need to shake this already.
Anyway, this morning the dream’s all about me losing touch with the husband. That is, we’re at this hotel (and, oh my, I’ve been in more hotels in the past few months, what with going back and forth to find a house), only I’m having dinner in a fancy restaurant with this woman I don’t recognize. Nice woman, and I remember liking her.
So the dinner goes late, very late. Past 11, I remember that, and then the waiter’s trying to talk us into this very rich chocolate dessert. (Despite my Sunday’s cakes, I am not a dessert person and rarely indulge.) Still I say okay; I let myself get talking into it, only I have to let the husband know I’ll be awhile yet.
Except I can’t remember where we’re staying.
I don’t remember the room number.
I can’t even recall his phone number.
In the dream now, completely panicked, I spend an obscene amount of time with an operator getting absolutely nowhere, and then the scene shifts so that I’m wandering around this largely deserted high school and mistakenly stumble into the guys’ locker room. The locker room is dark, but I hear someone moving around and the flush of a toilet at which point I boogey.
And then, suddenly, I’m on the street in a strange city, wandering around, wondering where I’ll spend the night, realizing that I’ll be awake all night and by myself and that I might actually have to figure out a way to walk home . . . except I have no idea where home is or how to find my husband.
Okay, most of that’s pretty transparent, you ask me. I’m sure that the very nice woman I’m having dinner with is an amalgam of our realtor (a truly wonderful person who’s become a friend) as well as a few other women I’ve now met, all of whom are nice and seem to genuinely care that the move goes well for me and I get comfortable down there. Honestly, it’s not their fault if my unconscious doesn’t want to eat a rich dessert I normally would never have. But I know that the dessert is a metaphor for me “swallowing” everything I’m being fed and liking it, too.
The unconscious is a very weird place, trust me. Even the toilet thing makes sense to me, but I’ll spare you that interpretation.
The high school, I didn’t get right away. But if I let my mind drift a bit, I immediately associate to two things. The first is easy; I got the husband a new turntable with a built-in pre-amp as well as a Sonos 5 so he could listen to records.
Wait . . . let me back up.
We have a lot of records. Not tons, but enough to fill a couple cabinets and still have some spillover. Most are my classical recordings to which I haven’t listened in eons because I liked CDs and then discovered streaming and, frankly, I don’t listen to much music anymore. For me, music requires concentration; I like to listen to how it flows and what the composer is doing. But I don’t make the time anymore because that kind of listening is hard; it’s analytical and by the time I get to the end of a work day, music is only so much noise. I’d rather listen to the voices of whatever characters have taken up residence in my head.
So we have all this stereo equipment we never use, and y’all already know that I’m into this major purge of weight and sentiment and the past. I see no reason to keep dragging around stuff we will never use and which will end up taking up mental/emotional/physical space, even if that is only in boxes.
But the husband really didn’t want to get rid of his records. He didn’t want to say good-bye to his preamp, the speakers, the turntable, the yada-yada. Mind you, he hasn’t listened to a record in more than a decade and probably longer.
Why I did this, I don’t know. I’m trying to make him happy; I know that. What I did was talk for a while with a very nice guy who’s the boyfriend/main squeeze of our realtor-friend and a true audiophile. Anyway, at the end of the day, I got the husband an early Father’s Day gift: a turntable with a built-in pre-amp and a Sonos 5 speaker.
Okay, I’ll admit it: the Sonos is terrific. The sound quality is fabulous, and I love streaming Big Band. But, mainly, I got this for the husband because the 5 allows for a line-in. So, last night, I put together the turnable, did all the skate and pitch controls and all that, plugged that into the Sonos and then popped in a record that I knew the husband loved.
Well, he was thrilled. Loved that I’d gone to all this trouble. First words out of his mouth: “I haven’t heard this since high school.”
So. There you go. I think that’s partly where this high school-thing in the dream is coming from.
The other association I have is to the husband and his gang of fellow docs and lab-rats. They are, in fact, a team. It’s how I always think of them, and a lot of them are making the move down to Alabama, too. It seems to me that every other day someone else has decided to jump ship. In a weird way, what the husband’s doing is an echo of what Werner von Braun and his team of rocket scientists did way back after WWII: that is, making the move from Louisiana, which they hated, to Huntsville that they liked better.
So maybe that’s also where the locker room/team thing is coming from. Feels right.
The rest is easy, right? I’m not part of the team; I’m being force-fed something I don’t want; blah, blah.
Boy.
I keep hoping that the deeper I get into working this new story, the more the rest of this won’t matter or bug me as much.
We live in hope. Or denial. Whatever.
My unconscious needs to take a holiday.
