A couple weeks ago when I was sick, I had made myself a batch of risotto using some homemade shrimp stock, onions, saffron and bacon. The thing was, my throat was so sore that I had to quit eating after just a few bites because it just hurt too much. I put all the risotto into a ziploc bag and chucked it into the fridge. Well the other night I came home from Mi Cabanita at about 11:15 and it was too late to cook up any real food, so I just decided to microwave the risotto. It reheated superbly, probably because I had made it with so much butter and bacon fat.

So there I was, chowing down on my kickass risotto and watching tv when I noticed I had half a bag of pork rinds on the table next to me. Hrmmm… So I opened the bag and put one pork rind into my bowl and buried it into the risotto. I waited about thirty seconds for it to soften up a bit and then went in after it. The result? Goddamn heaven, that was the result! Still the slightest little bit of pork rind crunch and all that glorious pork skin essence permeating that spoonful of goodness. From there I naturally emptied the rest of the bag into my bowl and stirred gently to get them all coated with risotto. It really rocked. The fact that there was bacon in the risotto also helped. It wasn’t crispy bits of bacon, but rather one inch slices that were still soft enough to play nice with the rest of the textures in the bowl. There’s a fine line between culinary brilliance and madness and I’m not sure which side of that line my wacky risotto falls, but all I can say is it was delicious.

Yesterday evening Vicky HighLife got us into one of those free Johnnie Walker tasting events. It began with a check-in process where these buxom babes would scan your license and ask you survey questions before shuttling you over to another line where we would have to wait to get into the main room. They kept us waiting in that line for quite some time, with nothing to do but to stare at the mighty bosoms of the check-in chicks. Vicky was as impressed as I was, maybe even more so. Finally we were allowed entry (into the ballroom, not their blouses), and we were each given a gold coin redeemable for a drink at the bar. Just one token?! Damn, guess you get what you pay for. I went to get our Black Label on the rocks while HighLife went in search of food. We finished our measly pours of scotch in no time and then we did some more waiting around for this cocktail hour to end. Eventually it did and we were led into the adjoining room where seats were set up with tiny glasses of scotch on a paper placemat not unlike what you’d find at a wine tasting. The four walls were projection screens which they used for their trippy IMAX-like presentation and opened with giant images of their Striding Man silhouette logo. A friendly guy with a beard was our host/instructor for the evening and he did a decent job even though he was one of those guys who is not really funny, but it doesn’t stop him from trying to be. Fortunately we were drinking. As for the scotch itself, Black and Red were the two that I had been familiar with and Black is kind of the standard everyday, non-offensive kind of scotch. Red, we were told, was the one meant for mixers. I mixed a Red and Ginger Ale and found it rather bland because Jack and Ginger has always been my whiskey/ginger ale combo of choice and Jack has a much more pronounced sweetness that works with mixers like that. Whatever, not like I would order Red in a bar anyway. Green Label was my least favorite though; simply odd and slightly off-putting. My favorite was the Gold Label which they served chilled to enhance the creamy, smooth flavor profile. Quite nice and I could actually see myself ordering that if I were in the mood. The big finale was a taste of the rare Blue Label. It was a big letdown. Not particularly interesting in flavor nor finish, it was just a smooth easy drinking whiskey. Nothing special.

We closed out the night by going to a cool little dive bar called The Ear. They had Boddingtons on tap and HighLife knew the bartender so it was cool. It was also cool watching her put away a whole order of fried pork dumplings which she didn’t even really want to order. She can be funny like that. Oh, and the reason the bar is called The Ear? The lighted sign out front was configured to say BAR, but the curved parts of the letter B were purposely unlit, resulting in it saying EAR. Cool, but as some of you old skool Bostonians will immediately point out, it’s not quite as cool as the hall-o-fame-dive-bar that used to be on A St. where the B totally fell off and we all called it The AR. The Ear was good last night, but man, The AR was a classic.