South 12th

• It would be all glass blocks and wood paneling.
• It would only serve beers named after eminent 19th Century German-Americans or colloquial nicknames for mid-sized American cities and geographic regions.
• It would be shut down after five days for what the city health inspector would later call, in television and newspaper interviews, “the most serious and egregious violations of the health code I have seen in my twenty-six years with this department.” He would add: “[Sturdevant] belongs behind bars for what he let happen to those mini-burgers, if you gentlemen will permit me to even describe those…things that I saw as ‘mini-burgers.’”

According to Frank Schoonmaker, writing in a 1957 edition of The Standard Bartender’s Guide, purchased last weekend at a garage sale.

• 1954 Red Bordeaux: “Barely passable, thin little wines. Will not last.”
• 1951 Red Bordeaux: “A year to forget.”
• 1956 White Bordeaux: “Mediocre. Many wines hard and rather green; several of the great vineyards refused to chateau-bottle.”
• 1954 White Bordeaux: “Poor. Wines light and often acid.”
• 1956 Red Burgandy: “Extremely poor in red wines; hardly any of the better growers estate-bottled their wine.”
• 1954 Red Burgundy: “Of no possible interest.”
• 1956 Champagne: “Very poor.”
• 1957 Loire Valley: “No wine at all was harvested.” [emphasis Schoonmaker’s]
• 1956 Rhine and Moselle: “Hardly any natural (i.e., unsugared) wines were produced. Poor.”

If you are brought any of these vintages in a fine dining establishment, refuse to drink them and cast aspersions on your sommelier’s taste.

Or, alternately, you may demand a 1954 Red Burgundy and struggle, against all odds, to find some possible interest in it. Maybe something has been overlooked. The wait staff will mill around nervously as the chairs are stacked and the kitchen closes and you sit, hunched over your glass of wine, slightly drunk and muttering to yourself “Goddammit, it must be here somewhere.” The ghost of Schoonmaker hovers over you, repeating the phrase “no possible interest” over and over and howling with laughter at your hubris.

“You devote yourself to your future self’s wants,” writes Lucy Ellman in her novel Man or Mango? “You do its chores for it, tidy up so that your future self can find things later, avoid committing crimes which will land your future self in prison, pay bills so your future self will be adequately provided with heat and lighting, food and shelter.”

Which is why my kitchen is such an ungodly mess right now, and why I am unable to go in there and cook a meal for myself. Andys have been in there for days — weeks, perhaps — cooking and making messes and not doing dishes and eating Mexican food and not taking the trash or recycling out. Some of the Andys didn’t even separate the trash from the recycling.

“Who’s going to clean up this mess?” asks Last Tuesday Andy.

Last Thursday Andy snorts derisively as he eats a quesadilla con carne asada (and leaves the wrapper out). “Pfft. Let Andy do it. If he wants to cook so bad, he can take care of this himself.”

Ha ha ha, they all laugh. “Ha ha ha! Yeah! Stupid Future Andy! What a chump!”

Those assholes are right; I am a chump.

I should punish them. I am going to misremember as much as I can about my meals from last week. That quesadilla, for example, was really dry and they went really light on the meat. So enjoy your dry, crumbly quesadilla, Last Thursday Andy. I will retroactively ruin every meal I have ever eaten to get back at those irresponsible loafers.

• Fifteen cat ladies moved into a one-bedroom apartment.
• After a brandy-fueled evening of speechifying and posturing, they sign a declaration (“The South 12th Avenue Statement”) designating the space a collectivist socialist commune. They all sleep in the same queen-sized bed.
• They get rid of the cats.
• No one has done the dishes.
• Why did they eat so much pizza?
• All fifteen of the cat ladies murdered each other in a bloodless — yet surprisingly violent — fashion.
• Persons unknown removed the bodies.
• One the victims seems to have been hoarding a collection of men’s blazers from the other victims, which were strewn on tables, chairs and radiators in a jealousy-fueled blind rage.
• Why did they eat so much Mexican food?

Last month, we sponsored a contest to see who could come up with the best — or at least most plausible — recipe for an exotic beverage using only items commonly found in office kitchens. You know: sugar, cocoa mix, instant coffee, stuff like that. You can read the original post here.

Well, we got so many replies that we are now just finishing sorting through all of them and deciding on a winner. There were so many great entries we could probably throw them all together and use them as the basis for a quickie stunt memoir (working title: You’re the Coffee Mate Now, Dog: One Man’s Year Making Heated Sprite-Based Drinks in an Office and What He Learned Resultantly About Life and Love and Also His Family), then use the advance to finally retire from office work, thus freeing us up to spend the rest of our days engaging in more meaningful pursuits, such as posting images of girls with accordions and handsome liberals to Tumblr and making friends with “microcelebrities.”

In the meantime, we are pleased to report our results now.

Honorable mention goes to Ms. Debra DeNoyelles of The Soap Factory. Her Incidental Table of Appetites was so shockingly decadent we frankly doubted it could even be be made. Well, we were wrong. Heated Coke steeped in tea and mixed with cream tastes much better than you would assume. Here is Ms. DeNoyelle’s full recipe:

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Incidental Table of Appetites

Element I
Mix one packet of pepper with one packet of sugar, reserve. Melt 6 Hershey’s kisses in the microwave. Drizzle over the already crisped 10 oz. of Neuske’s thick-sliced applewood-smoked bacon you retrieve from your backpack. Sprinkle pepper/sugar mix over bacon while chocolate is still warm.
 
Element II
While element I is cooling, place one unwrapped peppermint candy and 12 oz. of Coke in a large coffee mug. Heat in the microwave at 100% for 3 minutes.
Steep two Earl Grey tea bags in said Coke for 4 minutes. (Check temperature, it may need another minute in the micro at this point.) Add 1 T of creamer (liquid) while whisking rapidly with plastic fork. Just before serving, sprinkle the surface with a tiny bit of black pepper.
 
Procedure
Have one Diet Coke and one bottled water at the ready. Serve Element II with a chaser, alternating between the Diet Coke and the water. Follow the exquisite apéritif with chocolate covered bacon.

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Our first place prize goes to Mrs. Cyn Collins of the Twin Cities Daily Planet, for her delightful Spanish coffee-styled beverage. It is simple, elegant and delicious. It will surely, as she promises, get you fired…up.

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You’re Fired…Up!

Ingredients:

Patron Citronge (orange liquer tequila) or whiskey, laced with cinnamon and cayenne pepper, brought in a flask

Hot Coffee

4 Tablespoons, or 2 packets Instant hot cocoa mix

3 sugar packets

¼ cup (approximate) Half and Half (liquid)

2 peppermint candies

4 Hersey’s Kisses 

Crush the peppermint candies. Mix ½ crushed peppermint candy with sugar packets in a bowl and set aside. Wet the rim of your favorite ceramic coffee mug with the spiced Patron, and rub it in the candy-sugar mixture. Ignite the rim with your cigarette lighter to carmelize the sugar/candy. 

Mix Half and Half with the instant hot cocoa mix. Drop 3 Kisses into the mix. Microwave for 2 -3 minutes, stirring ½ way through to mix the melted kisses in. Meanwhile, shave (or crush) remaining kiss and set aside. Pour ½ cup hot coffee into your carmelized sugar-laced mug, add a few jiggers of your spiced Patron Citronge, then top with the hot cocoa mix. Stir. Sprinkle the shaved kiss and crushed peppermint on top. Enjoy! 

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Congratulations to both! Debra and Cyn will both receive gift certificates to Office Depot.

Think, for a moment, of being at work. It’s still morning, before the various and sundry humiliating demands of your job have ground your sense of creative inquiry into a motionless, useless nub. You are standing in the break room, pouring a cup of coffee for yourself and watching the snow fall silently out the window, and you let your gaze fall upon the other various condiments commonly used in break room-centered food preparation: the teabags, the creamer, the salt packets. Is it not uncommon to wonder what, if anything, could be achieved by applying a more unconventional approach to your coffee preparation? No, it is not.

Case in point: one chilly day in November a few years ago, thinking back to a satisfying meal I’d once had at that now-defunct Tibetan place on Hennepin, I attempted to prepare buttered tea, in a quasi-Tibetan style, using the condiments I had on hand. The resulting mixture was horrifyingly bad (it tasted like burnt popcorn) and I spat it out into the sink immediately. However, I blame only myself and my relative lack of skillfulness in food preparation for the unpleasantness of the endeavor — I do not blame not my own sense of creative inquiriy, and I certainly do not blame the notion that butter and tea could somehow co-exist harmoniously.

I couldn’t help but think if I’d done things differently, I might have somehow created a drink that was completely satisfying and worthwhile.

So in this spirit, I propose a contest here to use items readily available to the regular office worker to create such a drink.

The following ingredients are fair game:

• hot coffee
• sugar packets
• Sweet ‘n’ Low packets (potentially carcinogenic)
• Earl Grey tea
• instant hot chocolate mix
• creamer (powder)
• Half & Half (liquid)
• butter packets
• salt packets
• pepper packets
• peppermint candies
• Hersey’s Kisses (limit six! This is a very difficult candy dish to get to discretely)
• Coca Cola (12 oz. can)
• Diet Coke (12 oz. can)
• Sprite (12 oz. can)
• bottled water (refrigerated)
• one wild card ingredient, easily obtainable in any major metropolitan area, that could be carried unnoticed in a messenger-style bag or backpack

The following equipment can be utilized:

• microwave
• water cooler (hot- and cold-running spigots)
• sink
• Bunn-O-Matic coffeemaker
• one piece of Tupperware for cooking, mixing, etc.
• plastic utensils
• wooden coffee stirrers

Send a list of ingredients you use, detailed preparation instructions, a name for the drink, and your own name and email to me at andysturdevant@gmail.com by the end of the day on Friday. Tastefulness, ease of preparation and aesthetics will all be taken into consideration. I will review the submissions and post my favorites to South Twelfth next week, with one grand prize-winning recipe, which I will actually prepare here in my office. The winner will receive an as-yet-to-be-determined prize him- or herself.

Good luck to you!