Happy New Year's Eve! A Tip to Stay Merry Tomorrow, & an Awesome Song About Slyman's Corned Beef

Are you bidding 2009 farewell with some good old fashioned binge drinking?  If you want to avoid starting 2010 with a bad case of veisalgia (the medical term for a hangover, which you might want to remember the next time you need to call in sick to work), consider picking a poison that's light-colored instead of dark.  A recent study showed that dark liquor makes worse hangovers -  bourbon gave drinkers a more severe hangover than vodka.

Why?  Maybe because bourbon contains 37 times more toxic compounds than vodka does, like acetone, acetaldehyde, tannins and furfural.  The clearer a liquor is, the less of these substances it probably contains, so less of a hangover.  Though the study does note that vodka drinkers may have felt better the next morning, they performed just as badly on cognitive tests that required attention and quick reaction times.

While there will be no hard partying for Foodgoat and I tonight (I'm hoping to see one little girl catch up on her sleep), we will be having a final, delicious lunch of 2009 ... Slyman's corned beef sandwiches!

GoatSpawn, by the way, loves the Slyman's corned beef.  So does Grammy-nominated Canadian alternative rock band Barenaked Ladies.  Listen to them sing about Slyman's!

Foodgoat's Style of Budgeting

(somecards.com)

An even more significant portion is allocated to beer and wine.

Tasty, and Medicinal Too

Recently, Foodgoat's drink of choice has been a gin and tonic, garnished with a slice of lime. The gin is Bombay Sapphire, the tonic is Canada Dry, and it all started when an Irish midwife I know mentioned that back in Ireland they used to say that a gin and tonic and a warm bath would help induce labor.

A couple sips were included in the arsenal of old wives' tales methods used to encourage GoatSpawn's well-timed arrival (just after Ladygoat's mom came in town, at the start of the weekend, after dinner, and on the Cleveland Browns' bye week), and since then, he's fixed up the cocktail regularly.

Gin and tonics was first popular with the army of the British East India Company in India. Tonic of course contains quinine, which was used prevent malaria. But since quinine was very bitter, the addition of gin made it easier going down. Modern tonic water has much less quinine, but lgin and tonics remain popular. Winston Churchill apparently once said that gin and tonics saved "more Englishmen's lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire."

Soho for Bobos

The bottle of Soho Lychee Liqueur just screamed to me: "gimmicky accoutrement of superficial trend-followers who take up a quasi-Asian aesthetic in a sorry attempt to affect an exotic sophistication!" So of course I had to try it.

Lychees, if you haven't had them, are tropical fruits that grow in the Philippines and other Asian countries. They're like raspberries in texture, being soft and squishy (inside of the red rind, anyway), but sweet in flavor.

Made in France by Pernod Ricard, one of the largest alcoholic beverage companies in the world (brands now owned include Kahlua, Stoli, Seagram's, Chivas, etc), and launched in the U.S. last year, Soho is just made for fruity cocktails. It smells absolutely heavenly (mmmm, lychees ...) and mixes well with all sorts of fruit juices. I had it with fresh limeade, and give it a thumbs up.

By itself, it's definitely on the sweet side (although not overwhelmingly so) but it is pretty smooth, making very some very nice summer sipping in the kitchen in the early evening while one's husband (tee hee!) is making bacon avocado blue cheese sandwiches for dinner.

So I like it. Does that put me in their target audience of the bourgeois bohemian?