Archive - August, 2007

Ginger Infused Vodka

August 28, 2007 in Uncategorized with 11 Comments

After some time spent looking around for off-the-shelf ginger vodka with which to re-create the Ginger Cosmo at Excelsior here in Boston, I gave up and decided that there was really only one way to get the central ingredient for this cocktail.

To make it myself.

Not only did I think it’d be kind of fun, and awfully easy…but it would certainly be gentler on the wallet than downing the real thing at the Excelsior bar. A bottle of Vodka is under twenty bucks, and ginger root is cheap, while the Ginger Cosmo runs $12 per drink.

And off we go.


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The ingredients are assembled and ready to go. Once piece of fresh ginger root, one bottle of Level Vodka, a knife, and a cutting board. I also grabbed a small jar, as I needed to pour out some vodka to make room in the bottle for the ginger root (I wasn’t about to do 4 shots at 10am)…and since I had some spare vodka and some fresh blueberries, I thought I would double my vodka infusion pleasure with a mini-batch of blueberry vodka.

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A handful of blueberries from Russo’s go into the jar, ready to meet their vodka soaked fate and infuse themselves into the booze.

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Mushed up nicely, since popping the berries allows the blueberry-ness to mingle with the vodka. The gunk from the berries will be strained later when it is drinking time.

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Add vodka, shake, and seal nice and tightly. This will sit in a nice dark spot for about a week, before it is strained (probably through a coffee filter) and mixed into a nice cocktail.

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The ginger root is peeled and ready to be chopped up and added to the booze. Kind of a pain in the ass to peel given it’s shape and rough edge. As soon as you peel the ginger though, the smell is intense and pretty awesome.

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I went with a pretty rough chop. No need to mince this stuff, but just enough to get it through the small opening of the bottle and to really release some of the ginger-ness. I read that 1/2 cup per 750ML is a good ratio, but since I removed some of the vodka from the bottle up front, this will end up a slight bit more concentrated. Fine by me though, I tend to err on the side of more flavor, rather than less.

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In it goes. A little shake, and along with the blueberry batch, this heads into a nice dark spot to work it’s magic. A little shake every few days, and in about two-weeks, this should be ready to go. From there, it is Ginger Cosmo time.

In case you are wondering, the ingredients are…

* 1 1/3 cups Triple Sec
* 1 cup white cranberry juice
* 1/2 cup fresh lime juice
* 12 pieces candied ginger on bamboo picks, for garnish

I’ll report back in a couple of weeks with some details on how it all came out. Looking and smelling good so far though.

Fake Blogs

August 28, 2007 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment

Maybe I jumped the gun with my hatred for fake blogs. The Techcrunch spoof CrunchFood is pretty damn funny.

Well, my sources just moments ago filled me on a new fruit, the banana, that has all the killer features other fruits have been lacking, and which I’ve been calling for for some time now.

More here.

The Slow And Imminent Death Of The Free IPod

August 27, 2007 in Uncategorized with 2 Comments

If you are just Joe Internet user, you probably are most familiar with the “Get A Free Ipod” sites via annoying banners, spam, and other internet noise. But if you are in the online marketing space, you know them more as the shaky beams that have oddly supported an entire industry for the past several years.

When CAN SPAM took the legs out from under legitimate email marketing (spam itself still thrives), a crap-ton of online marketing dollars went into the buying and selling of data via incentive and freebie registration paths. Companies like Webclients, Azoogle, The Useful, Adteractive, and others made a small fortune by dangling everything from grills and dolls, to ipods and gift cards in front of people – tempting them (and some would say tricking them) into signing up for all sorts of ancillary crap before leaving them high and dry with no prize, but lots of email and phone calls from hungry marketers who had bought their data.

Get a FREE Apple iPod Photo

Well….the bottom is now falling out, as the FTC is breathing down the neck of Valueclick, Aptimus is seeking refuge by selling their “technology”, and TheUseful is just plain on the run.

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out. I for one, hope that these promos go the way of the dinosaur and fast, as removing this nonsense only helps to strengthen the good and legitimate lead generation marketers our there. But a big part of me is expecting it to play out much like CAN SPAM did, where new rules serve to only hurt those that followed the rules to begin with, while the slippery companies find clever ways around them and go on their merry way.

So Much For Quiet Time: Campus Invasion

August 26, 2007 in Boston with 1 Comment

It’s T-minus 7 days until the annual migration of some 250,000 college students begins, and near 80% of the Boston rental market turns over to accommodate the influx of co-eds. I happen to live at ground zero for this campus invasion, in the Brighton section of Boston, which is the college-i-est part of the college-i-est city in the country.

I am right on Commonwealth Ave, dead between Boston College and Boston University, and on September 1st (which happens to fall on a Saturday this year), all hell breaks loose as every single U-Haul truck available within 100 miles of here ends up double parked along a 3 mile stretch of road. Aside from the fact that it is a complete catastro-fuck trying to get around that day, it is really something to see. To say there will be 500 rental trucks on Commonwealth ave between BC and Fenway on Saturday, would be conservative at best. And without fail, I can almost guarantee that at least one of those trucks, will end up pinned beneath a Storrow Drive overpass. It happens every year. I’ll try and snap some photos this year to document a bit of the madness. It’s kind of unreal.

If you are an enterprising person, there are two interesting ways to make a buck from this nuttiness.

  1. Rent a truck in advance (way in advance) for September 1st, even if you don’t need to move. Inevitably, there are hundreds of folks that DO have to move on the 1st, who for one reason or another, assumed they would just rent a truck the week before, only to be left high and dry. Desperate and truck-less, offering to provide a truck with driver (no moving things, just providing and driving the truck for the moving parties), is probably worth about $125/hour to those left with no other options. Foresight + a truck rental + a craigslist ad + poor planners = business opportunity for you.
  2. If you have a pickup truck, SUV, van, etc, hit up Craigslist, or even just cruise around Allston and Brighton looking on the curbs, and snap up the dozens and dozens of free items that are being tossed out by people leaving the city. The money items are the bedroom sets, tables, and other wood items, that sometimes just need to be sanded down and re-finished before they can be re-sold (at near 100% profit) back to the incoming people, who are now in need of furniture to set up their new places.

As I write this, there are three U-Haul trucks outside of my window, but it is still the calm before the storm. The students are coming, but at least this year, so are the police.

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