Po' Bastard's Chocolate Syrup for Drunks

In Ireland, the Easter Bunny drinks Guinness.

Po' Bastard's Chocolate Syrup for Drunks

Ingredients:
-1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa (I used Ghirardelli, brought to me by the beloved Aunts)
-1/2 cup sugar
-1/2 cup GUINNESS (awww yeah!)
-dash salt
-1/2 tsp. vanilla

Method:
Stir together the cocoa and sugar. Heat the Guinness in the micro or in a small pan on the stove. Add the beer and all other ingredients, and stir. Put it in a small pan, and bring to the boil. Let it go for about 3 minutes, you can tell it's getting thicker if it coats the back of a metal spoon.

Notes:
-I drizzled this syrup over vanilla ice cream and chocolate Guinness cake. The recipe for the latter is available in Nigella Lawson's latest publication, FEAST.
-I suppose you could put the syrup on any kind of ice cream, really; or brownies, with Guinness in them. Maybe you could even stir it into coffee, but I'll have to get back to you all on that one.
-People who might like this recipe: Bill Clinton, Frau Elsa, any pirate, James Devlin

Try it and see the light.

Let's all learn to speak English

As a baby, it is Evan's job to learn to integrate himself into the adult world. That is, into a place where one learns to play with the blocks AND to put them away; where one throws food into one's mouth instead of AT it, and rests one's fork on the side of the plate rather than on the floor. Evan: get a clue-- becoming an adult is all about awareness: pay attention to how others behave, and then modify your behavior to fit in.

Evan is fourteen months old. He is the apple of my eye, the cream in my coffee, and the annoying screech from across the room. While Evan is clearly an intelligent baby-- and is quickly developing into a Daddy-like bibliophile-- he doesn't speak one word of human English. This is becoming a problem. Well, it is for me, anyway.

Evan's methods of communication are effective, and I gotta hand it to him for that. The real issue is with his lack of variety in communication-execution. He points, grunts, and waits for the desired item to be handed to him; he points, cries, and waits for the desired item to be delivered to him; he points, cries, and when the item delivered is not the one he wanted, throws said item on the floor. With proper words, he could express himself in eloquent two-word sentences: "No, no," "Yes, milk," "Dada read."

At the moment, all we get are syllables that sometimes sound like real words. And, as parents often do with their children, we give Evan more credit than he deserves--"That's right, Evan, there's a doggie!," "And what was it you said last night about the formation of European identity?", "You prefer Duran Duran to Erasure?"-- each time hoping our enthusiastic responses to baby-babble will lead him to say something, I don't know, INTELLIGIBLE?

Gibberish is as charming as it can be frustrating. In the meantime, I'm so looking forward to Evan's first word that I swear I'll toast it down at the Matt Weldon with any plonker willing to listen to me recite the story. "And then he said, get this, he said, 'Beck-ummm.' "

Hurry up and get with the program, Evan! Or I'm calling Noam Chomsky to analyze your language development!

The Travel Virgins

The Beloved Aunts left this AM. I wish them luck travelling home: I hope it's better than their trip here, where, because of extremely bad weather conditions in Amsterdam, they were routed through Manchester, and then finally to Dublin... where their luggage arrived three days later. At this point, we'd already left to hang out with Sister Alice in the Rural West.

They did very well coping with this dearth of travel problems, and maintained a keen sense of humour throughout. It was their first time abroad, and they adjusted well to Dublin culture, perhaps learning the bus system more comprehensively than I, who've lived here five months.

There were many highlights to their visit. My personal faves were being a designated whiskey taster at the Jameson Distillery, and seeing the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain perform at the Helix on DCU's campus. The band played everything from Otis Redding to Nirvana, and it was all tremendously musical and very entertaining. The jokes were very English: including bestiality/Welshman and alcoholic/Irish references. They also took the piss out of themselves-- not as English people, but as ukelele players-- but in my opinion, it's funnier to be English than it is to play a wee guitar.

It is very windy today, and I am half-wishing I wouldn't have sent all my turtlenecks home with the Aunts. However, maybe it's a way to invite Spring in!

Andrew returns home Thursday after a week-long Fulbright nerd conference in Brussels. It's been suggested that he deliver gifts of chocolates, diamonds, furs, and a miniature Manikin Pis statue for the front yard we don't have.

So sorry

What have you been up to?

Well, the reason for my lack of updates can be blamed, in part, on my current company-- my beloved aunts Janette and Jaye. It is their first time abroad, and I was blessed to accompany them on a three-day jaunt outside Dublin (HOORAY!) to the West of Ireland: Galway, Westport, and many rural mountainous, sheep-filled sights in Connemara.

Our personal tour guide was Sister Alice Wittenbach, a neighbor of Janette and Jaye's from Grand Rapids. We bunked in her thatched roof cottage (oh-how-QUAINT!) in the village of Tully Cross, pop. 35: three pubs, one church. Sister Alice chauffered us around on the only-wide-enough-for-a-donkey-cart roads, and stopped every ten feet or so to show us the beach, the water, the mountains; sheep, cows, and goats.

My favorite points in the trip were, in descending order: Kylemore Abbey and the jam-making Benedictine nuns (I'm thinking of retiring to their order after Andrew finishes his PhD.-- what could be better than hanging out with your friends in the woods all day making jam for Jesus?); the day I ate smoked salmon from Lisdoonvarna and crab from Kinvarra in the same day; and walking around the windy streets of Galway wandering into the sweater shops.

Oh, one more thing: at one of the Tully Cross pubs, I had the pleasure of meeting Drunk and Crazy Danielle, formerly from Hohokus, NJ. Who knows what sins she committed in America, but at the tender age of 13, her parents shipped her over to Ireland to go to school at the Kylemore Abbey school. She hopped out the window, married a Tully-Crossian, and now has SEVEN children between the ages of 13 and 1. Did I mention that Danielle was only about 32 years old? Yeah, she's so Catholic she makes Mel Gibson look liberal.

While I was gone, one of my dearest friends, Chris Devlin (nee Fellrath), gave birth to her first child-- a girl, Brooklyn Rose. I wish her, husband James, and baby luck and love! Slainte!