Friday, March 21, 2008

Hawking the green fairy: Will absinthe outlive its 15 minutes?

A nice little article about Absinthe, with a good portion on the folks out at St. George Spirits...

Enjoy!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/21/WI75VK3LV.DTL

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Kentucky Fried Kevin

Well, the tickets have been bought, the hotel room paid for and the rental car reserved . In approximately 2 months Shannon and I will be on our way to Kentucky! A week long trip that will be filled with Bourbon distilleries (for me) and antique stores (for her). It will be our first real vacation in about 3 years so we are really excited.

Woo!

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Chili

Well today was the Chili Cook-off at church, and for the second year in a row I made my "Kevin's Irish Chili". And though a fan favorite, and did not win.... but I did get a couple requests for the recipe so here we go... Now understand that I don't measure anything so there will be almost no exact quantities listed here.... If anyone does make the chili and has any ideas or tries anything new I would love to taste it or at least hear how it came out.

1st thing I did was take about a pound and a half of chuck steaks and cut them up into about inch cubes. I threw the beef it into some tupperware andded a bottle of Guinness and about 2 ounces of Jameson Irish Whiskey. I then added a little chili powder, cyanne powder, onion powder and garlic powder. mixed it all up and let it sit for around 2 hours.

On to the vegetables. I diced up 1 yellow onion, 1 green pepper, 4 stalks of celery, 4 cloves of garlic and a handful of baby carrots. I then took out a couple handfuls of the vegetables set them aside and sauted the rest with a little olive oil, salt and pepper. Once the onions were starting to brown and the rest of the vegetables were getting soft I dumped them in the crock pot (which was on High). Then the couple handfuls of veggies went back into the pan with a little more olive oil and then I added the beef (very just a little of the marinade). As the meat cooked I added a can of pinto beans and a half can of black beans, followed by 12 oz of diced tomatos and about 12 oz of tomato sauce and stirred it all up. As far as spices go I added cumin, chili powder, cyanne powder, onion powder and garlic powder.

I let the meat cook to where it was on the very rare side and then added it to the crock pot. I then topped off the the crock pot with a bottle of Guinness and another couple ounces of Jameson. I let everything cook for about 10 hours, about 5 hours on high, 5 on low. At the end of the day I threw it in the fridge and let it sit overnight.

The next day I got up and dumped the crock pot into a large pot and put it on the stove to heat it up quickly. In another pan I cooked about 6 strips of bacon until they were crispy then cut them it to small pieces. I dumped the majority of the bacon grease out, but left a little and threw in a couple handfulls of diced potatoes seasoned with a little chili powder, cyanne powder and salt and pepper. While waiting for the potatos to brown I added the bacon to the pot and stirred it in. Once the potatos were browned and fork-tender I added them to the pot as well and gave it another stir.

I put the chili back into the crock pot, shreaded a small block of aged Irish cheddar cheese and stirred it into the chili. I let the cheese melt and gave it another stir and the tasted it to see if it needed more spices. For my taste it did so I added a little more chili powder and cumin and let it cook for another 2 hours. After that its ready to eat!

I know this is kind of hard to read so I apologize. If you have any questions please ask!

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Jack Daniel's Master Distiller to Retire

Go to the Tri-Valley Whiskey Society blog to read about the retirement of one of the Alochol Indutry greats... http://t-vws.blogspot.com/

Sunday, March 2, 2008

$200

Well tickets to see Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (the musicians from Once) went on sale this morning... and by 10:30, when I logged on to buy some, they were completely sold out. Tickets are now going on eBay for $200, nearly a 500% markup. Ouch... guess I'll have to watch the movie until they come around again.

I'm addicited to a poker tournament that I will have a hell of a time ever winning. Its costs $3.30 to play and you get $3000 in chips with levels going up every minutes. 90 players and the top 9 pay. I've made it to 9th before, but thats it. Since the blinds go so quickly a lot of luck plays into it.

I have my review tomorrow - I think it will be pretty good... I'm just starting to wonder what my next step is. The next position at Safeway is Category Manager and would be about a $12,000 raise would be nice, but there is no guarentee that I would stay in the alcohol department, let alone Spirits - which is where I see my career path going. So I need to do a lot of praying and thinking...

I weighed myself again this morning and was down to 311 lbs. That's another 2 lbs down! Going forward Sunday will be in my weigh-in day which will be tough, as the weekends are when its a little more tempting to cheat. Oh well, it will just force me to be good.