A carnival of technology

Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night and all that. Let’s see what came in the mail:

• Menu for a new Japanese buffet that was actually mailed for some reason
  instead of just stuck in my door
• Information on a ridiculous proposal to split Buckhead off into a separate
  city
• Economic stimulus check for $600
• Another Buckhead mail sent to someone that doesn’t live here anymore
• Bill from Rural Metro Ambulance for $613.61

Huh. I guess I forgot one. Well, thanks, dysfunctional government. I guess.

Havana Club, in this case. Well, Bacardi, anyway.

So my parents are coming to visit tomorrow. I don’t know, maybe it’s a holiday or something. I figure what better way to prepare than to make sure I wake up hungover? (just kidding, mom (I hope)). I suppose I could try to tidy the place up or something, but that sounds boring, and I hope my apartment isn’t the highlight of their trip. Mostly I wanted to break out The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book again and take another shot at figuring out how people drank back in the days when even the hoboes wore suits. The “Cuban Concoctions” section particularly intrigues me; I imagine a Manhattan bar dropped into the tropics, posh sensibility creating new wonders with rum and exotic fruits. So with that in mind, I thought I’d begin at the beginning. The chapter starts with what was once the signature drink of Havana’s Hotel National:

Equal parts of Bacardi and Pineapple Juice
Squeeze of Lemon
Dash of Apricot Brandy
Ice; shake; strain

So right away I’m faced with a problem. I thought I remembered seeing apricot brandy before, but I was apparently mistaken. I guess I’ll have to visit one of those places with “warehouse” in the name sometime. The closest I could find was De Kuyper’s “Apricot flavored brandy,” which I suspect isn’t quite what they had in mind at the turn of the century. The De Kuyper’s, rather than being a distillation of fermented apricots, is an apricot infusion mixed with actual brandy and some other things, creating something that tastes almost like a very sweet, apricotty vermouth. The brand is also a bit low-rent as far as liqueurs go, but it’s probably close enough for the purposes of this experiment. I don’t know how they rolled in 1908, whether the apricot brandies available back then included the bitter pits, but as far as I can tell from the Internet the brandies sold today don’t, so I’ll assume that the only goal in this recipe is a little hint of sweet apricot flavor. The stuff with the picture of apricots on the bottle will do.

I mixed this drink with two jiggers each of rum and pineapple, a quarter lemon’s worth of juice and a little of the apricot brandy. And it tasted like pineapple. It was like a really boring tiki drink; I used light rum, so I don’t expect much flavor from that front, but the lemon and apricot were completely overwhelmed by that prickly fruit, making little more than a hard glass of juice. The original recipe calls for the cocktail to be strained into a tall glass, but without ice in this glass I noticed a second problem: I don’t really like warm pineapple juice. But I still have faith in this idea. The basic concept of the cocktail is to find the balance between three of the world’s essential flavors—sweet, bitter and boozy—and with some slight modifications I think I found something that better walks this line. A little less pineapple, a little more lemon and a dash of bitters made for something much more interesting. It perhaps wanders closer to a daiquiri as the pineapple gives way to the sour of the lemon, but the pineapple lends a new flavor not imagined in the syruped original, and the bitters offer a new thought entirely, creating something that feels like a martini for the beach. I retained the shaking, since I like how the shaken pineapple juice creates a creamy froth, but I poured the final result over more ice rather than into an empty glass. So with all of that in mind, I present to you the Embargo:

2 jiggers Bacardi
1 jigger pineapple juice
juice of half a lemon
dash Angostura
dash apricot brandy
ice, shake, strain into glass of ice

This drink is considerably less sweet than the National above, but I like to think that addition of the famed Trinidadian tincture is still in keeping with the tropical traditions. It’s something that stimulates the mind and soothes the soul. The pink bitters also create a drink that looks more like grapefruit juice than the simple yellow of the original, but I don’t think that’s such a bad change.

Skimming through some of the other recipes in the Waldorf-Astoria book, there seems to be no definite theme for Cuba. The drinks seem to follow the forms of the most basic of the early cocktails: mostly mixtures of varying amounts of vermouth, but with Bacardi instead of gin or bourbon. An orange or a lime appear here and there, but overall it feels like these are northern cocktails given a hasty island panache. I don’t know when exactly the Hotel National opened, but I suspect it was sometime after Cuba’s independence from Spain, so perhaps there wasn’t enough time in Cuba Libre before these recipes were collected to create new drinks appropriate to the local culture and ingredients. Or maybe the Mafia is to blame; I can’t recall that part of The Godfather Part II.

One of the few cocktails in this collection that survives today, the mojito, receives barely a mention, despite being one of the tastier libations passed down from that time. Perhaps I’ll start with mint next time.

So far I’ve gained three pounds. I don’t think it’s working yet.

I have mixed feelings about Wii Fit. It’s not the panacea I knew it wouldn’t be but hoped for nonetheless. Its lack of direction sometimes leaves me confused as to what to do next. And it’s not a substitute for going to the gym. But on the other hand, I think gyms are a scam, and Wii Fit can be kind of fun. If nothing else it’s incredibly useful for making me aware of how out of shape I am. It encourages you, even if you don’t exercise every day, to at least do the daily weigh-in and balance test, and it’ll make a little mark on a graph and let you put a stamp on the calendar to show that you can step up on a scale. If you end up gaining weight between tests, it’ll make you stop and think about it, giving you a list of options to choose from to explain yourself (e.g., too much snacking, not exercising). At first I thought this was meant to just be a pause for reflection, a moment to think about why you’re so dang fat, but no, that reason gets written on that graph right next to your big ol’ weight. Going back through the graph was kind of depressing; every time I passed over one of those red dots my poor, sad Mii would hang his head and say, “I ate too much,” or “I didn’t exercise,” or whatever horrible thing I did that day. Even if it hasn’t helped me lose any weight yet, it at least keeps me thinking about it while I chomp down that second helping of extra salty french fries.

But weight is only half of what the Wii balance board knows about you, and it’s not even the interesting half. The thing looks like a curvy white bathroom scale, but it does live up to its name; it can tell with surprising precision where your center of balance is, and balance is the real concentration of most of the exercises along with a whole section of actual games that use that balance board more like a traditional controller that happens to be controlled with your feet. Some of the exercises critique you based on how balanced you remain throughout, but it’s the yoga where this feature really shines. Sure, you might be able to stand on one foot and stick your finger in your ear or whatever the pose might call for, but it doesn’t count for much if you’re swaying like sawgrass in a hurricane. And I think it’s the yoga that’s really helping. I feel like my gut is in a little better shape than when I started, but my balance is very noticeably better.

When I first used the Wii Fit, my back was about seven kinds of jacked up. Even the simplest pose, just standing there and breathing slow and big, left me aching. I was swaying and shaking and just generally being uncoordinated. I suspect the accident had some contribution to this, since I did notice a couple of oddities while doing the yoga poses: when standing on both feet I favored my left side, and when standing on one foot I was more stable on my right. The latter may seem a little odd, but for that I blame Fitness Forum for doing too good a job. I may have been hopping around on my left foot for a couple of months, but I was only balancing on my right without the crutches during physical therapy. Standing on one foot isn’t something I do much on my own, and while in a cast I was standing on three.

As part of the daily body test, after it weighs you, takes off your rose-colored glasses and adjusts your Mii’s chubbiness to match reality, there are a couple of balance tests and a Wii Fit age based on how badly you do. When I started I came out in the 40’s, my Mii hunched over and gripping his back in pain at such an increase in virtual age, but I’ve since pretty consistently hit 23. The BMI graph is a depressing thing, and I seem to be traveling away from the weight goal the game had me set, but the game has me walking tall and evenly. Maybe the Wii Fit has me doing what my mother couldn’t: stand up straight and quit slouching. I hope with more Wii Fit and more of the bike that I’ll start to shed those pounds and hear more encouraging words from the cheery balance board character, but maybe the improvement in balance is enough to make it worthwhile.