Graham Glass, etc.

Wine: Amethyst Malvasia Bianca 2001

I'm by no means a wine connoisseur, but every now and again I stumble across a bottle that I particularly enjoy. I've decided to keep a record of these on my blog, and my first featured wine is Amethyst Malvasia Bianca 2001. It's an aromatic white wine with a great writeup here.

Hydration Mania: Vindication

A few months ago, I posted an article about what I termed "Hydration Mania", a reaction to seeing so many people walking around with bottled water and drinking way more than I saw as being natural.

Guess what? Yet another article, this time on MSNBC, points out that there's no scientific reason to drink that much water, and that a better rule of thumb is "drink when you're thirsty".

Parisian Sushi Surprise

Right now I'm in Paris, one of the cities in the webMethods Business Integration Forum tour. During one of the breaks, a tremendous selection of finger-foods was served, including duck-pate bites and chocolate prunes. It might sound odd, but it was delicious! The funniest thing I saw looked more like drug paraphanelia than a piece of food; a bulb filled with grapefruit juice with an extruded plastic straw that pierced through a piece of pineapple and sushi. The idea is that you hold the bulb, put the food on the straw into your mouth, and then squeeze the bulb to get a jolt of juice as you start chewing. What will the French think of next?

Food and Coffee

Many people really like food. I don't mean that they want to stuff their faces all day long, just that they thoroughly enjoy savoring good food. Personally, although I certainly enjoy food, I would prefer not to eat at all if possible. For example, if someone told me that if I took the red pill, I would never have to eat again, I'd swallow the pill in a heartbeat. Why? Because I'd save about 1-2 hours a day and around $1,200 a month in expenses. It's odd in a way, because I love chocolate, desserts, caviar, and other such delicacies, but I also know that I wouldn't miss them that much. Coffee, on the other hand, is another matter. It's the perfect way to start the day, and has fueled many of my most productive periods.

Incidentally, until I get the nuclear-powered food-replacement implant, I enjoy eating meals at the Guards in Georgetown, which is a convenient one-minute walk from my townhouse.

Players Restaurant

Most of my friends were at their friends or family for Thanksgiving, so I decided to enjoy a quiet dinner at Manhattans, a restaurant on M street. After a short while, a couple of people sat down beside me and we soon started talking. I mentioned randomly that I enjoyed the TV show Sex and the City, and asked  whether they'd like to play the Sex and the City Trivia game that I had just purchased. They said they would like that, so I walked home, grabbed the game, and returned with it under my arm. We had a great time asking each other trivia questions, as well as some of the "truth or dare" style questions that can sometimes be a bit embarassing to answer in front of strangers. We had such a good time that we pondered whether it might be a good concept for a restaurant; a place that served food and drink, as well as supplying the patrons with a variety of fun games. People entering the restaurant would choose which game they wished to play; groups could form their own game, whereas singles and couples could be grouped to form larger parties to play a particular game. In addition, games could be subtlely modified so that losing a particular turn might result in having to order a shot (thereby improving the restaurant's profit as well as the general spirit of the game). We came up with a great name for such a restaurant - "Players". If anyone's heard of such a restaurant, please inform me. I have to say, I like the idea so much, I'm tempted to invest in such a venture.

Fun at Starbucks

I just had a good customer experience at the Starbucks on M Street in Washington DC that I thought I'd share. I ordered my favorite items - a tall cafe mocha and a piece of lemon pound cake - and paid the bill. After waiting for about 30 seconds, the server noticed that he had forgotten to give me the cake, apologized, and quickly filled a bag with the cake. As I wandered away from the counter to pick up my coffee, I looked into the bag and found two pieces of cake instead of the single piece that I had ordered. I figured that this was his way of saying sorry, and felt a smile of appreciation creep onto my face. The server, who had been tracking me out of the corner of his eye, shouted out "Yes, he likes the extra cake!" and high-fived his collegue. It was an infectious kind of enthusiasm, and I've noticed that this particular server treats virtually all the customers with the same kind of good humor and service. These kinds of employees are like gold dust, and my respect for Starbucks went up as a result of this experience.

Cooking

I have a confession; I have not cooked a meal for over 15 years. I make the occasional sandwich, brew coffee, and microwave popcorn, but that's about it. Why? The main reason is that I prefer to spend my time on other things. At high school I took a cookery class, made some tasty food, and thoroughly enjoyed it; I still remember eating a delicious spaghetti dish on the school bus on the way home from a cooking lesson. When I went to college, I tried to cook the UK basics, such as sausages and mashed potatos, but often fell asleep in the bath while waiting for the dish to cook and ended up with a saucepan full of carbon. One of these days, I can see myself actually enjoying cooking again, especially with web sites such as Cooking for Engineers.

Hydration Mania

One of the things I always find odd in the US are the number of people who carry around bottles of water with them, as if they might find themselves stranded in the middle of a desert at any moment. I grew up in the UK, and nobody felt the need to carry around water with them. I decided to write this post after reading an article recommending no less than 8 glasses of water a day. Even my doctor gave me the same advice. I told him that I often drink orange juice, coffee, and red bull, and wouldn't this count towards my water intake? He said no, it needs to be pure water. What a bunch of crap! Virtually everything you eat contains water, so to calculate your water intake, you need to add up all the sources of water in your calculation. Your digestive system doesn't discriminate against where water comes from! For example, when I was a kid, I had a glass of milk at breakfast, with additional milk in my cereal. Then I had a bottle of milk on my morning school break and orange juice at lunchtime. Then I had lemonade at dinner and a hot meat drink (Bovril) at night. I did plenty of exercise, and virtually never drank water on its own. I view the current popularity of carrying around water bottles as a fad based on mis-information. Interestingly enough, one of the comments to this post points out the following article that supports my view.