I discovered dipping bread into olive oil over the weekend. Yes, I know, the rest of western civilization has known this for the past few thousand years, however I only discovered it this weekend. I knew that people dipped bread into olive oil, however the concept has never really appealed to me. Who wants a piece of bread dripping with oil? Yuck. Olive Oil is what women in g-strings wrestle in, you don't eat it.
Saturday night I was supposed to meet a friend at a local pub. She got lost on her way there, which is what everyone does when they try to find Sanford for the first time, so I ended up sitting in the pub for over an hour, something I did not mind at all, especially after a couple of pints. I sat outside in the nice evening air and watched all the bikers roll in the Blues Bar next door.
It is currently perfect outdoor weather. I noticed a new little restaurant had opened up a couple of doors down from the blues bar. They had bistro-style sidewalks for outside dining. More importantly, it was open at something like nine at night. That is extremely unusual for Downtown Sanford. There are some nice restaurants down there, but most of them close around five. By time my friend showed up in was in the Mood For Food. So we decided to check the place out.
It is some little Italian joint. They had blueberry beer on tap, which I find is excellent because I love blueberry beer. I only had it once before at the Mellow Mushroom on the other side of town. I was happy to find a place close by to get Blue Berry beer. Bluebeer beer has a very light taste to it, it's not a sickly-sweet blueberry like you would find in a hostess pie. You taste it as the beer is going down, but the blueberry essence evaporates in the after tatse. Good stuff.
http://www.carlaken.com/blueale-label.jpg
Anyways, the dinner came with some bread and a bowl of olive oil for dipping. The olive oil was sitting in the bowl with a bunch of garlic cloves and some other spices for dipping. I peered at it suspicioulsy for a moment, but the several pints I had beforehand made me brave enough to try it. I found it to be excellent. I want to make some for home, so if anyone has their favorite Olive Oil dipping recipes, I'm all ears.
While we were eating at one point this gaggle of sixty-ish people came walking by. They shuffled slow and peered into all the shops. All the men in the group wore those bluetooth ear-phones. Once they got around our table they spread out a little bit and milled about uncertainly. I dunno. They were weird.
In other non-news I tossed the following circuit bent items on ebay. I sorta like the Noah's ark toy I perverted.
Setting the dial to January 2007, where a grown man requires several pints of courage to eat bread dipped in oil.
Ah, 2007: a world where 'discovering' olive oil was a personal milestone and not the obligatory starter at every restaurant that charges you a small fortune for a basket and a puddle of herb-flecked grease. You sat outside in perfect weather while bikers rolled into the Blues Bar, and the biggest local thrill was a restaurant open at nine. Now every town has a bistro patio, dinner service runs until midnight, and people get angry if the delivery app can't put garlic bread in their car within thirty minutes. Those Bluetooth-earpiece seniors you found so odd were only trendsetters; today the whole species shuffles down sidewalks mumbling into tiny white buds while peering into shops, and the only difference is the earpieces are smaller and the conversations are mostly with people who aren't there. Blueberry beer now exists in seventeen hazy IPA variants with names like 'Bleu Crush Crush,' but your humbler pint was probably fine. And olive oil itself has become luxury theater: single-estate, hand-harvested, cold-extracted, with a portrait of a supposed grandmother on the bottle and a QR code that plays a farm video. You needed several pints to try bread in oil. My friend, we have all been needing several pints ever since.
“2007 Ed, what exactly about a bowl of garlic oil required liquid courage, and when you watched those Bluetooth-earpiece seniors shuffle past the bistro, did you get any hint that you were staring at the future of every human conversation?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, you gotta understand, my brain had a real block about oil-soaked bread, like it belonged in a salad dressing bottle or on some wrestler, not on my plate. I'd spent my whole life thinking olive oil was for g-string wrestling matches and maybe killing a salad, so the idea of soaking perfectly good bread in it just seemed wrong, like pouring syrup on a steak. Add in the fact that I was staring at garlic cloves floating in a pool of grease and my inner coward said 'absolutely not.' The pints made me brave enough to try it, and now I'm hooked, go figure. As for them Bluetooth seniors, no, I got no cosmic glimpse of the future. I just thought it was droll, a whole flock of sixty-year-olds walking around like secret service agents, nodding at nothing. If that's what every conversation's gonna look like, I'll take my chances with the cats and the guppy tank. Take that, Bluetooth.
