getting hammered on a budget

You’re not getting a raise in 2010. Kansas City has also experienced a record-breaking 21 inches of snow, and you’re depressed, anxious, and taking it in the ass from Father Time, a meth-addicted version of Santa who leaves the house shirtless wearing acid-wash jeans from 1987 and brings back a pack of Pall Malls and some circus peanuts from the Shell station.

The good news: though you’re broke, you can still get a bit tight after your three-hour strategic meeting at work or chain-restaurant dinner with your more-successful friends. And because you’re not fermenting grape juice in a trash bag with a piece of moldy bread stuffed in your gym sock, you’ll still be high-class compared to most bums and prisoners.

But if you want to want to poison yourself with what is essentially top-shelf rubbing alcohol, there are a couple of ground rules.

1. You will be massively hungover tomorrow.

2. The booze will not taste good.

In fact, there are no concrete benefits to getting blackout drunk on cheap booze, but if you want to obliterate some intangible, abiding malaise that resides within the thorny depths of your soul, odds are you don’t care that in 12 to 18 hours your brain will try to chisel its way out of your skull and your liver will be the size of a pummelo fruit.

Here’s what you’ll need:

1 handle of Viaka, Popov, or McCormick's vodka, $12

1 jug of Carlo Rossi sangria, $10Buying booze on a budget is the same as buying 50 rolls of toilet paper at Costco – the initial cost is slightly more than if you bought, say, a fifth, but you’re damn well not running out of that shit. And when it’s 4 a.m. and you want, no need, just one more nightcap before you stumble to bed, you want a half-full liter of vodka to work with, not the dregs of a sipped-to-death pint.

You want vodka because, unlike whiskey or rum, the difference between well and top-shelf vodka is like the difference between getting arrested on the first day of spring in a dew-kissed meadow or on the coldest day of winter after falling in a five-foot snowdrift – it doesn’t matter, you’re still getting hauled off to the clink. The sangria will be used to chase the vodka. Forget about water and soda. You also will not need shot glasses, as these are for people who have an aversion to sleeping on the rug beneath the futon or puking on the bathroom floor and attempting to clean it up with their socks; in other words, pussies. 

Pour the sangria in cups (for your safety, it is vital they are plastic) and take a hefty swig of vodka straight from the bottle. Have a few swallows of sangria, and repeat until you are sufficiently hammered, though you may not be fully aware of when this occurs.

Suggested listening: Pogues, Violent Femmes, Hank Williams.

Suggested precautions: have a trusted friend hide your cell phone and car keys; don’t walk on wooden floors wearing socks; don’t keep an entire pizza in the fridge; have ibuprofen on hand for the morning.

curried lentil gloop

I can has basil leaf?

The recipe

Curried lentil soup
1 cup finely chopped onion
1 1/4 teaspoons curry powder
7 cups water
3/4 cup lentils
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
1 14.5 ounce can diced tomatoes, un-drained

1. Sauté onions until soft. Add curry, sauté 1 minute. Add water and lentils; bring to a boil. Cover; reduce heat. Simmer 40 minutes or until lentils are tender.
   
2. Place 4 cups lentil mixture in a blender; process until smooth. Return mixture to pan. Add chopped basil, vinegar, salt, sugar and tomatoes; cook until thoroughly heated. Garnish with basil, if desired.

The process

After a particularly difficult zumba class, my confidence is low. I’m beginning to question my ability to build this soup, especially because, when I think about it, I’m not 100 percent sure I know what a lentil is. When I locate them at Sunfresh, I realize they are basically tiny peas. Really, pea soup? But I have committed to making it, so I toss the damn lentils in my basket.

At home I turn on Regina Spektor and drink a glass of cheap cabernet sauvignon, and I feel slightly restored. I am ready to cook.

Chopping the onion, as usual, makes my entire face drip and burn, and I am relieved to get it cooking in the frying pan. The sautéed onion mixed with curry powder smells sweetly dirty and spicy, like what you’d get if you parked a hot dog cart inside a perfume shop in the Shire. And then had sex on it.

While preparing to cook the lentils, I almost immediately suspect “7 cups of water” is a type-o, especially since it wants me to put the “lentil mixture” in the blender; I imagine seven cups of boiling hot lentils and curried onions will destroy the nearly ten-year-old blender I purchased on sale at Wal-Mart when I wanted to make margaritas one night. I text my boyfriend and tell him to come over later than planned so he won’t see me wading in the lentil lake after my blender explodes.

I switch my cooking music from Spektor to Chopin. Feeling immediately smarter, I improvise and add only five cups of water. I also decide to drain the mixture before blending. I am a genius.

While the lentils simmer, I seek the opinions of my colleagues. When presented with a basil leaf, Bubba Kinsey turns up his nose and stalks away. Phoenix, however, tries to snatch it out of my hand. I assume she's jealous because I offered it to Bubba first, but then SHE FUCKING EATS IT. I am reminded of when she stole my fresh cayenne peppers over the summer (and possibly ate them; several are still at large). She is a strange creature, but I’m glad she approves.

After draining the lentils and onions, I pour them in the blender and choose the “blend” option, pausing briefly to consider whether “puree” would work better but outright rejecting “liquefy” and “frappe.” The resulting mixture is green and resembles baby vomit.















Instead of dwelling on its appearance, I dump the green goo back in the pot and add the tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, salt, sugar and basil. It begins to take on a more soup-like appearance, and I suspect it might be edible. I lean over to inspect it more closely, and a bubble of boiling hot sludge explodes IN MY EYE. Fuck, it burns.

I turn down the heat and plunge a spoon into the mess. Surprisingly it is kind of good.

Still, it’s not fucking spicy enough for me, so I brazenly add a hefty squirt of Sriracha sauce, as well as another sprinkle of curry and a pinch of sugar.

The verdict















The end result is almost too thick to be called soup; it’s more like something you would scoop up with naan at an Indian restaurant. Still, it's rather savory and filling – my boyfriend calls it “hearty” – even though it is allegedly low-fat, and neither the curry nor the spice is overwhelming. It could have used a bit more water, and next time I would sweeten it with honey instead of sugar, but my boyfriend totally went back for seconds.

The score

This time, I made the food; the food did not make me (as in pissed off, dejected, nauseous, etc.).
Angela: 1
Food: 0

Next up:
Spicy mung bean soup

behold, indeed

I discovered this classic billboard along a rural Missouri highway while heading to the Lake of the Ozarks in 2007. Surprisingly, it didn't appear to be near a church - rural Missouri is filled with miles of winding roads, deciduous trees, porn, and Jesus - so I like to think some nearby gas station owner put it up to spread the good word, and ended up spreading the - er - slightly disappointing word instead.

growth for the sake of growth

Like many kids who came of age in the suburbs during the era of sprawling strip malls, big box stores and chain restaurants, I did not have an idyllic setting to explore during my childhood.

The Stilwell, Kansas, neighborhood where I grew up was built in the mid-70s, and it wasn't as cookie-cutter as some of the newer neighborhoods, the ones with names like Cedar Crest, Parkwood Hills, or Deer Creek; in fact, the house where my parents still live sits on a two-acre yard in which my dad plants a vegetable garden, my mom plants flowers, and my brother and I used to spend hot summer days running through the sprinklers, playing volleyball and basketball, and splashing on the slip 'n' slide. And, in the backyard, my dad still keeps homing pigeons, which he races competitively against other pigeon breeders in the KC area. These aren't your mangy, garbage-pecking street pigeons; they are big, muscular and graceful. They're kind of like if Kid Rock were a pigeon vs. if James Bond were a pigeon, or a Courtney Love pigeon vs. an Angelina Jolie pigeon. Anyway, you get the idea.

When I was a kid, Stilwell was still relatively rural, but by the time I was 16 and able to drive, big corporations had gobbled up much of the open space and filled it with strip malls, Wal-Marts, Super Targets, Taco Bells, Starbucks, etc. - you name it, and if it's a corporate franchise, you can probably find it within a 15-minute drive of my parents' home. Having such a homogeneous setting in which to do my first large-scale independent exploration (because you can't get around Kansas City, especially the suburbs, without a car) might have stifled my personal development (and led to my repeated decisions, once I turned 18 and moved out on my own, to throw myself, head first and unprepared, into unfamiliar and sometimes dangerous situations), but at the time it was all I knew. When you're 16, you're still just a kid with a drivers' license, and you'll find mystery and excitement in even the most sterile, oppressively-mauve shopping center, or the neon-lit aisles of a 24-hour Wal-Mart. You'll find it even if it's not there.

My friend E. and I would occasionally hang out in a small, wooden gazebo located in the middle of an office park called Corporate Woods. We called it "gazebo time," which meant little more than sitting on the bench smoking cigarettes and talking about boys, whining about our parents, and growing nervous about the future, maybe having a quick dash through the lawn sprinklers if they were on. There was something almost romantic about gazebo time, even if, twelve hours later, corporate drones who decided to brown-bag it would be chowing their wonderbread sandwiches in our very seats.

kind of a drunken superhero

I spent a good part of my early 20s getting hammered at Buzzard Beach, the dive bar that more closely resembles my imagination of a pirate ship than any other place I've been. I was kind of a drunken superhero - I could fall down repeatedly without getting hurt, drink upwards of eight shots without throwing up, and do really dumb shit without going to jail.

Here are some of my favorite shenanigans (the ones that aren't too embarrassing to repeat):

1. I came home hungry from the bar one night, so I cooked a frozen pizza. On my way to the living room, I dropped it face down on the carpeted kitchen floor. Without thinking twice, I grabbed a fork and plopped down next to my snack, scraping the pepperoni and melted cheese right off the carpet and into my mouth.

2. For a year I lived in a house in Westport that my former roommate and I still only call the "death house." While my previous apartment had a particularly nasty carpeted kitchen (see shenanigan number one), this house had a particularly nasty carpeted bathroom. Because it was already so nasty I decided to revel in it, and I would often invite my friends to come hang out in the bathtub to drink and smoke* with me. I passed out there on more than one occasion, oftentimes still clutching a half-empty can of PBR.

3. I used to steal from Quik Trip all the time: hot dogs, Slim Jims, Doritos, those processed beef and cheese combo packs that don't contain any actual beef or cheese. Hot dog thievery was almost too easy: you just put two (or even three) in the same container. The cashiers never question it, and five minutes later you're scarfing a free hot dog on the porch and chasing it with Crown Royal. Brilliant.

4. It was Halloween in the death house, and my friend K. showed up after hours with fake blood all over her face and chest. Deciding I wanted to look dead too, I dumped it all over my head. Then, deciding I wanted the whole "vampire" effect, I dumped at least a half ounce of the stuff in my mouth and accidentally swallowed. I immediately vomited on the kitchen floor. The next morning when my roommate got home from work, she came into my room and said, "Someone bled everywhere last night." There wasn't a hint of surprise in her voice.

5. In a nearly superhuman feat of drunken athleticism, I walked almost ten miles home from a friend's house at 7 a.m. because they were still sleeping and I felt bad waking them after drinking literally all of their beer the night before.

By Halloween of 2008, I had figured out how to apply fake blood correctly.

*I have since quit smoking, and I'm worried I'm becoming one of those awful, self-righteous former smokers, mainly because I just deleted the sentence "smoking is bad, bad, bad, and if you do it, you will die, die, die" and replaced it with this one.

from the great minds of my midtown apartment

...comes this fucking blog.

Meet the contributors:

BUBBA KINSEY
(pictured during one of his many apparitions of the Virgin Mary)

Likes: salmon-flavored kitty treats, satire and irony, stout beer, long naps in the sunlight

Dislikes: being fucked with, running out of kitty treats, skank-ass bitches, complacency

Brings to the table: a misspent youth on the mean streets of KCMO


MS. PHOENIX
(pictured after being disturbed from a pretty serious nap on the windowsill)

Likes: being the center of attention, new toys, the nostalgia of early fall, playing fetch with skill and tenacity most dogs would envy

Dislikes: loud noises, religious zealots, douchebags, water guns

Brings to the table: relentless vanity and narcissism


A.M. LUTZ
(pictured exploring Lava River Cave in Bend, Ore.)

Likes: singing loudly when alone, organic food, swear words, traveling anywhere, anytime

Dislikes: loud, tactless people, boredom, hangovers, corporate greed

Brings to the table: mad typing skills