In other words: if we have to bid adieu to summer, we’re gonna do it with a bang.

You may also recall a trip last weekend, involving Wisconsin, beer, and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. On the heels of said trip, then, it was fortuitous that my friend Jessica posted this, which might be the most awesome fan-video-mashup-thing ever: the Bosstones’ “Another Drinking Song” cut in with great drinking scenes from movies. If you’re not hung over this morning — or if you are — enjoy:

See you Tuesday!

I have clearly been reading too many pun-and-alliteration-littered Tiki menus.

Model not included.

So, anyway, a few weeks ago a contest on Sloshed! won me a copy of Beachbum Berry Remixed, an updated, revised, prettied-up and expanded edition of the first two Tiki history/recipe/everything books from the foremost historian of all things fake-Polynesian, Jeff “Beachbum” Berry. And, after many days of lamenting, a couple sessions of shopping, and a few more days of steeping and experimenting, I finally managed to have, in one place, many of the ingredients necessary to dig into a few of the book’s zillions of recipes. Here’s the first of a few worth trying, with digressions on the making of some ingredients:

Tortuga
1/2 oz orange juice
1/2 oz lemon juice
1/2 oz lime juice
1/2 oz orange Curaçao*
1/2 oz white creme de cacao
1/4 oz grenadine
1 oz Italian (sweet) vermouth**
1 oz Lemon Hart 151-proof Demerara rum***
3/4 oz 151-proof Bacardi rum****

Shake all with ice cubes. Strain into a pilsner glass filled with crushed ice. Garnish with lime wedge.

This is a tremendous, smoky, spicy, almost-but-not-quite-too-sweet cocktail, created by cocktail genius Constantine Ribailagua of La Florida, the Havana bar that also invented La Floridita (occasionally known, maybe incorrectly, as the Hemingway daiquiri). I had to take a few liberties, and was pleased to take some others. To wit, by asterisk:

* I made homemade orange Curaçao a while back, and it’s tremendous; if you don’t happen to have Curaçao orange peels sitting around, the premade version will work just fine.

** Just made my own red vermouth last week, using some subpar red table wine and this recipe. It is to Martini & Rossi what a Mitsubishi Lancer Evo X is to a Mitsubishi moped. Again, not necessary, but oh-so-good.

*** Lemon Hart 151 is always a problem; it’s well-nigh impossible to find in a lot of the U.S. My half-ass substitute here was 1/2 oz Appleton Estate V/X, 1/4 oz Myers’s Dark and an extra 1/4 oz Bacardi 151. That made a good drink; Lemon Hart would likely make an amazing one.

**** This is an acceptable substitution for the original 123-proof Cuban rum called for, international trade laws being what they are.

As Tiki drinks go, this has reasonably accessible rums and juices and such; the homemade touches are fun, but not strictly necessary. If you’re new to Tiki, or just want something classically tested and delicious, this is a fine place to start. Next week: our own (well, this guy’s) homemade coffee dram takes center stage.

Part of the reason we went to the Fair when we did was to catch the free show being put on by Boyz II Men … and, holy crap, there are a lot of very, very intense Boyz II Men fans still out there. Like, people who knew all the words to the songs they did from their 2009 album *and* everything from Cooleyhighharmony (which came out, for real, 20 years ago). We had absolutely no idea the show would be anywhere near that crowded, popular, or decent. (Syrupy R&B has never really been my thing, but I was impressed at the high-quality show they put on. Great suits, too.)

After that, our next show is as unlikely a segue as it gets: we’re heading out this evening to Mighty Milwaukee, to catch the Mighty Mighty Bosstones mini-tour show there tomorrow night. To say I’m excited is a bit of an understatement, not only for the show — the Bosstones are very near the top of my list of bands I love but have somehow never seen live — but for the road trip, the outstanding cocktail options in town, and the chance to work on Jenni’s photo tour of everyplace she’s lived. As a Milwaukee native, she’s got a couple spots to seek out; we also need to find the bar where her dad once set a record by drinking a beer atop 14 stacked bar stools.

Given our recent past and future plans, for today’s Friday Morning Video, we have a band that sits at the very unlikely intersection of Boyz II Men and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. The Pietasters, like Boyz II Men, carry forth a pretty heavy Motown influence (this is just a static-photo video, but their cover of “Same Old Song” is pretty great); like the Bosstones, they come from the 90s East Coast ska-punk wheelhouse; like both bands, they are inordinately fond of suits with open collars. Here’s “Yesterday’s Over” from 1999′s Awesome Mix Tape #6. If anyone knows who the brunette at the beginning of the video is, let me know, so I can confess my now decade-long crush:

And, now, since you’ve checked out the rock, listened to me blather and killed ten minutes on the long, hard march to the weekend, here is a video of two corgis on a treadmill. Have a lovely Friday, kats and kittens.

I was up at 3:30 this morning to take my ladyfriend to the opening of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer 3-Day, and then went back to sleep for a couple hours before rolling out of bed, firing up the ol’ computing machine, and commencing to work from home. The point being that it is not my usual, routine Friday. This should be clear given that I TOTALLY FORGOT TO POST A FRIDAY MORNING VIDEO.

So, to make up for it, this is a very special Friday Morning Video, being posted just in time for it to still be morning on the West Coast. In honor of said coast, I bring you “State of Mind,” from Solvang*, California’s own Mad Caddies. These dudes have been around since the beginning of time**, and they are quite possibly the most versatile third-wave band to have ever existed. This one avoids any of their forays into jazz, dub, dixieland, bluegrass, and hardcore, and instead stands on its own as a mighty good hot-weather midtempo walkin’ down the street jam. Dig it.

*Solvang is basically a Danish village smack in the middle of Southern California, and strikes me as a really odd, cool place to be from.

**1995.

And that’s not even counting the flight to Vegas I see twice a week taking off over the highway, or the guy in the Porsche 944 that drives it infuriatingly slowly at least once a week, every week, smack in the left lane in front of me. Nor does it count the various acquaintances that pop up way more often than you’d anticipate in a metro area of a couple million people: our favorite redhead waitress at Grumpy’s, for example, or Adam, who just took over the bar at Heartland (awesomely, by the way), and who was raving last night about the number of Town Talk Diner devotees that had come in that very day to visit his new operation. (And drink some badass cocktails.)

So what I’m saying, I guess, is that for all its bigcityness, Minneapolis (okay, and St. Paul) is a pretty small town. Which means that even though NOFX are California-based punk rock elder statesmen — who I’ve been listening to a lot lately, and remembering the sheer excellence of a lot of their career — it makes perfect sense that they’d devote one of their only very elaborate videos to an inside-jokey song shot in, and dealing with, Minneapolis’s favorite bastion of drunk punk camaraderie. You can’t miss Paddy’s appearance as a cardinal (or maybe the Pope), but if you have ever had a favorite dive bar, you will miss that.

Anyone for poutine and Jager shots at the Triple Rock this weekend?

(Added bonus: “Jeff Wears Birkenstocks,” still one of my very favorite NOFX songs ever. Is he a jerk? No, just confused: Jeff don’t wear regular shoes.)

It features neither Toots Hibbert nor a single Maytal, and the glimpses I got while on-and-off watching between work things showed either some extremely pasty Europeans doing some kind of minimalist skanking, or cameras wandering around Madame Tussaud’s. No idea how, when, where or why it was made; I didn’t even know this cover existed until someone mentioned it on Twatbot this morning.

What I do know, though, is that it’s awesome. And there’s no more fitting band with which to celebrate Jamaican Independence Day than the dudes who coined the term “reggae.” Other fitting celebrations, of course, include jerk chicken and rum punch and Red Stripe, from which I’m about seven hours away. Irie, m’friends.

And pretty much ever since mento has been recorded, it’s been played by the Jolly Boys. The band got its break (and its name) from, no lie, being the house band at Errol Flynn’s personal Jamaican resort in the 1950s, and, therefore, have played for parties crazier than any we can even conceptualize. (Except Andrew W.K., of course.) They toiled in obscurity for years, but are now getting some late-in-life attention thanks to some new production and a savvy cover album coming out next month, featuring their version of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.” Which just so happens to have a pretty great video:

There’s more Jolly Boys tunes at their site, and I owe a link or ten to the article by Marco on the Bass that introduced me to ‘em. (A side note about Marco’s blog: if you care one tiny little bit about Jamaican music, and its history in the USA and UK, it’s indispensable reading. Great interviews, overviews, videos, and his band is pretty killer too.)

That’s all for this fine day. I’m gonna sit in my office and watch the rain until it’s time to break free, head up to Joe’s cabin for the weekend, and see the clouds magically part so I can suntan my head.

Last week, on the ever-awesome Twitter account of Rick Bayless, there appeared one of his weekly 140-character recipes, for roasted veggie enchiladas with tomatillo sauce. Given our love for all these ingredients, for copious quantities of melty cheese, and for recipes that fit in the length of a sentence, we had to make them. Instead of roasting the filling, we threw some strips of orange pepper, carrot, and zucchini and a few of their mushroom brethren on the grill, expanded some of the words in the recipe so they made sense at a glance, and wound up, as I have with every one of Bayless’s recipes to date, very pleased with the results.

While dining on this, the most delicious of Twitters, we caught an episode of Everyday Exotic featuring plantains as the OMGEXOTICZZZ ingredient of choice. (I mock, because I cook with plantains a lot, but it should be noted that EE is probably the most useful show on the generally useful Cooking Channel, though it is not anywhere near as awesome as Food Jammers.) At any rate, the main course with plantains was a Trinidadian chicken stew (brown down, if you can say it without giggling. I cannot); having more than a passing interest in such things, I recorded the show, took notes on the stew technique, and decided to recreate it in my very own kitchen (and make a vegetarian version as well, for the half of our household that is not down with meat.)

I can tell you, immediately, two things about this recipe. One, it looks absolutely lovely:

And, two, keep any exposed skin you may have out there really, really far away for the first fifteen minutes of active cooking. The recipe starts, essentially, with making caramel, and the tips of both my index fingers are still providing a reminder of how freaking napalm-insano hot it is when it decides to jump out of the pan. Once the chicken’s browned and the whole thing starts cooking down, it’s somewhat less dangerous, but don’t go dipping your hand in to try it no matter how awesome it looks. (And it will.)

I was going to regale you with details of the technique that I painstakingly wrote down, but it turns out that was just a bunch of extra work; the recipe is right here. I will add that your plantain should be yellow and unripe (not green, not black); that I used chicken thighs and drumsticks rather than breaking down a whole bird; and that you can add a bunch of allspice and a lot of your capsaicin-rich heater of choice to that recipe.

Oh, and the vegetarian version involved marinating seitan in the same marinade, scooping about 1/3 cup of caramel into a separate pan, and cooking exactly the same way, adding a little butter and some beer when it threatened to get too dry. I’m gonna make Caribbean food speak vegetarian if it’s the last thing I do.

Last but not least, as a bonus, some grilled pizza porn from Monday:

I don’t even have much in the way of nostalgic rambling or life lessons to attach to this one, actually, it’s just a really great song, particularly for an excellently warm Midwestern Friday. Have a good one, dudes and ladies; we’ll be making some Rick Bayless enchiladas tonight; tomorrow involves Caribbean brunch and watching Goldy crash a plane, and Sunday there will be horse races and pizza grilling. Now to slog through the rest of work, with the help of a whole crapload of brass band music …

I have discovered a thing: the way to keep myself writing regularly is via discrete series of posts on stuff I’m interested in; thus, in the interest of having more than just my typically meandering Friday Morning Videos around here, I’m going to attempt to get myself writing under the Gastronomicon banner, too. Loosely defined: things I’ve made, ate, drunk, enjoyed and/or collaborated on, of a foodrinkerated nature.

This week’s most prevalent highlight: grapefruit/Campari freeze pops. As I mentioned yesterday, it’s officially summer in Minnesota, which means my thoughts are turned to both piquant, refreshing cocktails and delicious frozen treats, and these guys have not one but both going on. I first ran into the technique — making freeze pops via FoodSaver — via this post on the very, very indispensable Kitchn; being in possession of both a FoodSaver and some free time, I figured it’d be worth trying. Especially when I encountered this badass Campari/citrus recipe. I dig the bittersweetness of Campari in hot weather more than just about any liqueur imaginable, and firmly believe that grapefruit juice is the missing ingredient in every tropical cocktail that doesn’t quite taste right; clearly, the whole mess is a recipe made in heaven.

The chief problem with the whole thing is that I lack anything resembling motor-skill creativity or spatial reasoning skills, but I managed, with Jenni’s help, to seal off a strip of five freeze pops, fill them, and close the tops for freezing:

(A word to the wise for next time — instead of just making a seal in between deliciousness-tunnels, make two, so there’s more room to cut them apart.)

After that, it was all over but the waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And then noticing that they were frozen but already being more cocktails into the evening than was strictly necessary, and thus saving them for the next day. And, my friends, nothing makes a better dessert on a Monday than a booze-fruit-freeze-pop. You can tell by the extremely satisfied face I’m making:

Between the freeze pops, the fajitas we made, and the celebration of National Daiquiri Day with a couple of Floriditas, it was roughly as delicious as Mondays get. And I have four freeze pops left. I’m gonna wind up bringing one to work by the end of the week at this rate. Friday afternoon, watch out …