I must admit I’ve never been a huge fan of Valentine’s day, having been “reinvented” in the 19th century by a stationary store owner. I’m a bigger fan of its alter ego, Singles Awareness Day. In any case, it is yet another Margarita Friday. It is back at one of its primary haunts, Teala’s. Christina always makes an excellent Margarita and the food is good and reasonably priced. How did I spend my Valentine’s day? At Corkscrew, a local wine bar (which now serves grub). And the Houston Chronicle took a photo of yours truly to prove it. Happy Margarita Friday!

Well, happy February 2008! To those that know me, I used January to detox, i.e., not drink. Not a single drop (I’m talking CH₂H₅OH here). My last drink before tonight was new year’s toast, a strike after midnight January 1.

I did this for a lot of reasons, but primarily because December was the month of lushness. My birthday was the first week of December; with the many holidays thereafter, parties, etc., the drinking was progressing at an accelerated rate. I hadn’t had any major problems or any single catalyst to decide I was going to take January off, just the simple notion of taking a break.

What a great break it was. Luckily, it was a lot easier to abstain than I ever thought (and being of German and French lineage, this was a good thing). The interesting thing was I never had a real compulsion to drink, even amongst the merriment of margarita friday and other merry gatherings with my friends. I have good friends, so they were supportive of my decision and never thought twice about it (they even congratulated me on my sticking to my personal goal).

I really never thought anything of it. Until January 11. All the sudden, it hit me. Where was I getting all this energy? Why wasn’t I suffering from the usual mid-afternoon coma during the week? Why was my mental acuity on high alert and why was I able to focus on tasks so easily? Why did I have energy levels I hadn’t had since adolescence? BAM! It hit me. No booze! Wow. It never really occurred to me how profound a simple decision would be in terms of its effect. I cannot possibly overstate how much not drinking for a month improved my sleep, increased my energy, elevated my mood, and dozens of other positive side effects.

A myriad of other benefits resulted from my abstinence. I took back up with vigor hobbies I hadn’t paid adequate attention to, namely musical composition and cooking. My creativity flourished. I also had the energy and focus to follow up on many projects I had promised to get done for many months. This blog was one of those projects. I finally finished the web application for scoring and tracking scores for my parents’ bridge league, which I promised to get done a year earlier. Additionally, my business partner, Philip, joined me in abstaining which allowed us collectively to begin 2008 on a good note. Given the fact that I dissolved my previous business relationship and lost a huge amount of momentum in 2007, this is a good thing indeed. The other main benefit is not spending ridiculous amounts of $$$$ on booze. On average, during the last 3 years, I could have financed an Aston Martin or a new plane with bar tabs - this is no joke. It certainly makes you reevaluate your priorities.

In any case, I “celebrated” my making it through January with a couple of beers during happy hour and a glass of wine with dinner tonight. That compares to my typical 2007 Friday happy hour imbibing margaritas, consuming about a fifth of tequila in the process (that’s just happy hour, mind you). The good thing is I probably won’t have another drink for a week or two. I really don’t have any desire to at this point.

In the end, I found that booze was getting between me and the goals I had set for myself. It was costing me lots of money (exacerbated by the opportunity cost incurred by alternate projects for which that money could have been used), energy, and generally was keeping me from being at the top of my game.

I would say to anyone who’s feeling malaise or feeling they’re not achieving the goals that they’ve set for themselves (or just wonder where the hell a thousand bucks or more disappears ever few weeks) they may want to try getting off the sauce for a month. Make it a personal challenge. If you can do it, you can do anything; you’ll feel like you can do anything. If your friends give you shit about it or try to influence you with peer pressure, tell them to screw off; they’re not really your friends.

I certainly have no prejudice against drinking or those who drink; I’ve faced alcoholism front and center in my family on more than one occasion - it is an insidious disease. I hope this will be construed to be a positive message; that is my intent. I bid you adieu for the time being, since I’ve got an 8:30 tee time tomorrow morning, where I hope to pursue another one of my hobbies with vigor, clarity of purpose, and joy.

Here is the update you’ve been waiting for complete with pictures from the party. I believe it was an overall success! Much food and good company to be had, and another thanks to Reggie, our gracious hostess with the mostess!!

We had a couple missing in action, but I won’t name any names (Keith, Jen).

Here are some takeaways from this feast:

• a 55 gallon drum of guacamole would not be enough - a huge bowl was devoured within minutes
• ditto on sweet potato chips
• make a list of what you’re supposed to take with you when catering an event such as this, and check it three times; we forgot a myriad of ingredients: 5 avocados (see above), quart of cream, eggs, two huge heads of romaine, and probably a couple of things I’m still forgetting
• when empanada dough made from ripe plantains requires the empanadas to be soft (from roasting about 45 minutes at 350 F), they really need to be soft; I rushed and added cream (fat) to the mixture to make it doughy, which does not work if you’re going to be frying them! We’ll be doing this one again soon.
• taking the fryer is a good idea! If you run out of things to fry, you can start frying up shoes, severed fingers, whatever for wholesome party fun!
• ’tis best to take the time and bring implements to make a proper fry station, i.e., dry-wet-dry dipping for things like chiles rellenos. using shallow bowls and your fingers makes for splotchy batter coverage
• definitely no drinking whilst you’re preparing the feast, especially in the days leading up; we wouldn’t have gotten half the dishes done if we had been
• tune in BeatBlender on SomaFM and crank it as loud as it will go while cooking!!! Loud deep house music creates the best energy in the kitchen ever. Perhaps we can start powering cars on house music?

My personal favorites:

• the roasted tomatillo serrano salsa rocks! Tangy, zesty, spicy with a hint of sweetness. This is a distinctive green color.
• the roasted tomatillo chipotle salsa - tangy and spicy with a touch of sweet. This one is mahogany colored (uses dried chipotles not ones in adobo).
• enchilada suiza - made this a gillion times and it’s always a fave, esp for such a simple dish
• guacamole always a fave - my shortcut on this one is to make the fresh chopped tomato jalapeño salsa as a stand-alone dish, add several tablespoons of the salsa to mash fresh avocados with a fork, chop up several cloves of garlic and mince with coarse salt, throw it all together and voilá!
• simply made, freshly fried corn chips with any salsa

Finally here are some pics from the party! Click on an image to zoom in and get a full description.

Until next time . . .

All I gotta say is, we threw down some serious groceries tonight! Paul and I cooked for a solid 5 and a half hours, both running 120% speed. Thing is, we’ve got about 2 more hours full speed cooking tomorrow, so we’ll be getting to Reggie’s a little early, schedule permitting. So what is the MF menu exactly?

For conidemento, or accoutrement, we have:

• roasted, simmered tomato jalapeño salsa
• fresh chopped tomato serrano salsa
• fresh chopped tomato habanero salsa
• roasted tomatillo serrano salsa
• roasted tomatillo chipotle salsa
• fresh guacamole
• plantian chips with chimichurri (yes a little further south but what the hell)
• sweet potato chips, dusted with chipotle salt
• chihuahua cheese
• queso fresco
• tortillas de mais (corn tortillas)
• fresh romaine lettuce
• cremini and shiitake mushrooms
• freshly made tortilla chips

For starters, appetizers, side dishes and main dishes:

• ripe plantain empanadas with cheese filling
• picadillo stuffed jalapeños (chiles jalapeños rellenos de picadillo)
• fresh enchilada suiza
• shredded poached chicken in seasoned broth for tacos
• freshly grilled flank steak (carne asada) with spicy ancho seasoning paste
• chile rellenos (poblano) stuffed with chorizo and queso fresco in a tequila lime sauce

I’m sure there are things I’ve missed. The general motif is kind of like a taco bar (kind of like a bruschetta bar party if you’ve ever done one of those - and that word, just like chipotle, is almost always mispronounced; it’s bruce-KETTA, not brooshetta, bershetta, broshitta or any other such nonsense). We’ve basically got three proteins, chargrilled beef, shredded poached chicken and roasted pork. These can be served up in warm, soft tortillas with a myriad of choice ingredients and condiments as you so please. The only exception would be the chile rellenos, enchiladas suiza and empanadas.

I’ve got some pictures of our preparations this evening for your enjoyment. Click on the links to get the full pic and description:

• Poaching Chicken
• Decimated Sausage
• Tacos
• A vertible garden!
• Eating a Habanero
• Ancho Chiles
• Spooge
• Poblano Rajas
• the “flip”
• Roasting Serranos
• Suiza Beginnings
• Pollo y Spooge
• No. 10 can of tomatoes
• Fresh Whipped Cream
• Let them eat cake!
• You can’t stop me!!
• Cooling Suiza

Ok as you can see it’s very late and there is much to do tomorrow. I look forward to seeing all you MF-ers out there and hope you enjoy the vittles as much as I’ve enjoyed making them!

Well it’s really late and I need to get to bed. My sous-chef de cuisine, Paul, was out of pocket tonight since he hasn’t been feeling well lately. In addition, I whittled away lots of time working on a remote web caching proxy server I set up (so I can surf and conduct my affairs privately online when I’m on an open, unsecured WAP; people have no idea how easy it is to get all their website account passwords, email passwords, etc. on open wifi hotspots - I’ll eventually make this available to others), and on a bridge scoring and reporting web application I wrote for my father’s bridge league - yes very exciting stuff indeed. In any case, Paul will be here tomorrow early and we’ll get a lot of stuff done, so no need to worry.

Since all this technology work makes a guy hungry, I poached up some chicken breast, made a quick guacamole by fork crushing a ripe avocado with yesterday’s Chopped Tomato and Serrano Salsa and some extra garlic and adding a little lime juice. To that I added some red romaine lettuce, grated chihuahua cheese and the aforementioned salsa and threw it on some steamed corn tacos and commenced hodgering (yes that’s a word my family has used forever, so I added it to urbandictionary.com myself - see here).

Take a look at the mess of ingredients for this feast on my cutting board (excuse the crappy ass phone pic):

In any case, I’m going to check out and go to bed now. I’m listening to one of my other favorite Internet radio stations, BeatBlender from SomaFM as I type this, but I think the DJ is getting a little whiff of the crack pipe this late at night.

Look for tomorrow’s progress!

What the f#$*& is Margarita Friday?!? Ok - here’s a very short description (longer one coming soon): My friends and I do this thing called Margarita Friday, MF for short. Now entering its tenth year, it basically is a get together (either physically or virtually) every Friday for happy hour (or sooner) where we all meet at someone’s house, or a bar or restaurant and celebrate the end of the week drinking, yeah you guessed it, margaritas. Even when we all can’t physically be together in attendance, absentee participants usually check in from far, typically using their picture phones to photograph a picture of the margarita they’re enjoying, and sending it to the rest of the crew using MMS (look for article explaining that better in the soon-to-come geek section - for now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service).

All right. Where was I? Oh, MF. So anyway, we’re doing MF this week at Reggie’s Condo where we can discuss plans for our tenth anniversary edition of MF in some distant tropical land (FYI - themed Margarita Fridays are declared editions, e.g., Margarita Friday, Black Tie Edition [yes, we’ve done that]). I was volunteered to cook for the gathering, which I’m always happy to oblige. So, what are we having and why the hell am I writing about it three days in advance, you ask? Well, my friends typically want to actually eat something on occasion and I’ve been known to get a little carried away in preparing a 13 course meal of haute cuisine when all they wanted was hot dogs and chips . . . so, I figured I would get a head start on this one so we can eat at a normal hour and still have really great food. I will let you know the day-by-day play of what I’m working on. For now I’ll actually get with the program and let you know what I did tonight (Tuesday January 22 though this is late so the date will be off on this article).

My friend and sous-chef de cuisine, Paul, who will also be in attendance, came over tonight to assist with tonights duties. In addition to making two trips to Central Market, we prepared three dishes:

1. basic chopped tomato-serrano salsa (salsa mexicana)
2. roasted tomato-jalapeno salsa (salsa de jitomate cocida y jalapeno)
3. chicken tacos with roasted poblano, mushrooms, cream and queso fresco (pollo a la poblana rajas con hongos)

I’ll dive into these in more detail in a proper cookery page article, but I’ve got to first credit Rick Bayless, Mexican food bad ass extraordinaire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Bayless and yes I’ve eaten at his two restaurants in Chicago) for the inspiration and recipe base and techniques from which I’m creating these dishes. What’s in for tomorrow night? Most likely, a roasted chipotle tomatillo salsa, an ancho seasoning paste, and some other spins on tacos, the perfect fiesta food. <Begin Rant>I know most of you know this by now, but chipotle is pronounced chip-OAT-lay, not chipultee or whatever other god awful pronunciations I’m sure you’ve heard.<End Rant>

Ok - post number 2 and climbing! More to come very soon! Also expect a further dissection of these dishes, recipes and techniques in the soon to come page dedicated to all things culinary. Also more to come about MF and other stuff . . . . stay tuned!
Hasta Luego!