Turkish Haze Cocktail Recipe

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We’ve already shown you some of the pictures we took when we were in Turkey recently. We also talked about eating raw meatballs over there in a post last week. Before we close the subject though, we want to talk a little about raki.

We’re in the habit of keeping a bottle of Pernod on our bar at home, so we already had a taste for drinking anise flavored liquors. In Turkey though we had to get accustomed to drinking them more often than just having the occasional solitary glass after dinner. Partly this is because it’s widely available and pretty affordable, but mostly because decent whiskey was hard to find and very expensive over there.

A visual approximation of the Turkish Haze cocktail.

Turkish bars leave a lot to be desired. In Mersin at least, if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. In every bar there’s one or two kinds of beer, little to nothing in the way of atmosphere, no women at all, and a clutch of old Turks looking sullen and chain smoking. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs. Mixology isn’t a big thing over there, and even if you find someone who knows how to make a decent drink, you’re going to have to order it in Turkish. So it wasn’t until we came home that we got a chance to mix up this cocktail idea we came up with over there: the Turkish Haze.

This is about as locally inspired as a cocktail can be. It’s only got three ingredients, but all of them are in abundance in southeastern Turkey, and go quite nicely together. We picked the name not only because the drink itself is hazy, but mostly for the horrible cloud of noxious smog that envelops the entire city of Mersin on a nightly basis.

> 2 oz. Turkish raki

> 6 oz. water

> 2-3 cucumber slices

> several dashes of lemon juice

Muddle the cucumber in the bottom of your cocktail shaker. Fill it with ice. Add raki, water, and bitters. Shake and strain into a collins glass over new ice.

The key is to use enough cucumber to make this a cucumber drink with raki in it, and not the other way around. Throw in an extra slice or two as a garnish. Mixed properly, this is a crisp and incredibly refreshing drink that screams Summer. The hotter the weather gets, the more enjoyable the Turkish Haze is to drink. If you’re lucky enough to have access to a pool (you bastard) this is the perfect cocktail to sip while you’re sitting out next to it. It’s almost as refreshing when sipped on a rowhouse porch. If you’re the type that has fancy garden parties, you can even mix up a pitcher full for sharing with friends.

Of course, Turkish raki isn’t exactly easy to come by here in Baltimore, but Greek ouzo is pretty widely available, and they’re pretty much the same exact thing. In fact, any anise flavored liquor will do.

The Couch Chronicles, Volume III

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As some of you may know, we’ve been selected to participate in the Test it, Blog it, Win it contest which is going on right now at Su Casa Furniture. We’re incredibly excited about having the opportunity to try to win some furniture by blogging about it, especially since our living room has been completely bare for a long time, and we were in the market for furniture anyway.

The way it works is that we select a couch, blog about it, and possibly get it for free. If not, we still get the chance to buy it for 50% off retail, which is a pretty sweet deal all by itself. All we have to do is select a couch. Easy, right?

Actually, selecting a couch is decidedly not an easy process. At least not for us, anyway. We’ve put more thought into this decision than most others we’ve made. We certainly gave it a lot more consideration than say, buying a car. And why not? The fact is that this living room is a good deal more expensive than any car we’ve ever owned, and we expect to keep it much longer. We’re going to be spending a lot more time in it than we would in a car, and it’s going to be a much more personal reflection of who we are than a Honda or a Chevy ever could be.

Seriously: you buy a little economy car to get around in and maybe you insist on a sunroof or a stick shift or a certain color. You slap a couple of bumper stickers on it and that’s it. In furnishing a room there are dozens of variables to consider, and hundreds of thousands of possible combinations. Even in a modest rowhouse.

Su Casa Furniture's Fell's Point Store.

Su Casa's Fell's Point shop. Courtesy of their Facebook page.

But it all starts with a couch; the biggest and most expensive piece in the room, and the piece that we’re meant to “test.” We were prepared to go fairly high-end on the couch, and spend a good deal of our budget there. After all, you can always buy a stand-in lamp or table to serve for a year until you find something perfect, but that’s not the case with a couch.

To tell the truth, we were a little worried about limiting our selection by committing to a single store with the contest. Turns out, that concern was completely unfounded. What we failed to realize was that all of their furniture is entirely custom made. Unlike, say, Crate and Barrel where a couch comes in a two or three stock fabrics and you can special order a few more (at additional cost), At Su Casa you’re literally designing your own furniture.

In the case of a couch, You first have to decide on what sort of couch you want. And there are many options. Even when you find one you like, many of their pieces come in different lengths, and are available with or without chaise lounge options on either side. Once you find one that passes the ass test, so to speak, you get to go through literally hundreds of fabric swatches of varying materials, colors and patterns. The fabric selection is as generous as what most full-time design studios offer, and… They are not broken down by price. Hundreds of fabrics- one price.

After that, depending on the particular piece you picked you may have to select from half a dozen wood finishes for the legs, and if it comes with pillows you get to go back through all those fabric swatches again and select pillow fabric. It’s a whole process. And then add into the bargain that we were also permitted to select from the inventory at Pad, which is directly adjacent to SC’s Fell’s Point location, our head really started spinning.

Here is the part where we level our one little bit of constructive criticism about Su Casa: that what we saw in the stores did not match what we saw on their website. Not even close. We give them a lot of credit for displaying different items at different stores. There are five locations including Pad, and it really is like shopping at five different stores, which is a great thing. Each store had the same catalogs for perusal, which was also quite helpful. Those catalogs offered much greater selection than the website, which doesn’t even mention fabric choices. Basically, their websites are making them look bad.

Their Design Blog on the other hand is a pretty handy web resource. Maintained by their staff of in-house designers, it’s full of tips and ideas for furnishing and decoration, and is written with a very Baltimorean sensibility, which is always a plus. Those living rooms on Houzz look great, but we don’t have a 20′ x 40′ space with a conversation pit and built-ins. People here live in rowhouses and condos, and these designers really understand that because they do too. (That blog is a separate domain though. It’s at designbysucasa.com.)

A company with five large stores really ought to have someone whose job specifically includes keeping their web presence up to date, including not just their own sites but their social media accounts as well. It’s clear that their website is seldom updated, and for a well-established company with a great name and image around Baltimore, they could have more ‘likes’ on their Facebook Fan Page. Their Twitter is all but non existent, and they’re not yet on Pinterest, which is an ideal platform for a boutique furniture store with its own designers on staff. Here’s hoping they’ll soon create a full time web marketing position that could include all of that and advertising, or at least farm that work out to a local PR operation. Su Casa and Pad are definitely worth the drive for potential customers in PA or Virginia, but those customers might never know that judging by the internet.

So, after all that you’re probably wondering just what kind of sofa we ended up with. Well, you’re just going to have to wait a little longer. Our selections have been made, and we’ll put them up online next Saturday in the next installment of The Couch Chronicles…

The Long Cold Winter Begins @ Camden Yards Today

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It's going to be a long slog this year.

Sigh. Sigh sigh eyeroll. We don’t feel like writing a post about the goddamned ball club. Mainly because we have nothing to say about them. There’s nothing to say about them. Even a constantly talking bloviating blowhard can sum it up in 140 characters.

This is the kind of team that you can’t even talk badly about. Even as a lifelong fan, it’s hard to take them seriously as a baseball team. Most people in Baltimore treat Opening Day like a city holiday, and many view it as the most important hallmark of Spring, but for us, this season is going to more closely resemble a bleak and dreary winter. It’s going to be long and dark, and at the end of it the Tigers or Angels will probably win the World Series, because they’ve decided that they want to buy it this year on the free agent market.

We favor the approach to Oriole fandom advocated over at The Loss Column, to which we’ve contributed occasionally, which holds that we should like baseball for baseball’s sake, and that even if your team stinks as bad as the Orioles, you should still get at least as much enjoyment out of going to the stadium and watching them as you would, say, going to see a random Rockies game on a business trip to Denver.

Of course, that theory isn’t perfect. Lifelong Baltimoreans have a lot of emotional baggage attached to the team that can be hard to forget when Peter Angelos is still the owner and they’re throwing bullshit ceremonies for Mike Mussina.

The real problem with this 2012 team though is that win or lose, these guys just aren’t fun to watch play. Even as recently as last year the pitching staff was a lot more interesting to look at. We had Vlad, who might have just been a washed up DH, but still loved the game and played it with the excitement and urgency of a kid. We had guys like Felix Pie who was fun to watch whether he was hitting for the cycle or making a costly boneheaded mental error. We had Luke Scott who, even though we hated him, could hit homeruns and liked to shoot off his mouth as well as his guns.

With last year’s Orioles there was a feeling that you never knew quite what you were going to get on any given day. With this team, you know exactly what you’re getting, and it’s not good. It’s not even fun to watch. This season’s going to be a long slog full of attrition, holes in the lineup, and playing from behind regularly. Anyone who expects anything different is delusional. People aren’t even hopefully predicting .500 this year.

We’ll still watch and all, but we just don’t think we’re going to get as much out of it as we have in years past. The Orioles as an organization need to drop all this ‘pack the yard’ and 2110 Eutaw nonsense and realize that the fairweather fans checked out 15 years ago and aren’t coming back anytime soon. They need to realize that they’re on the point of boring even their most loyal fans to death and they need to do something about it. Soon.

For the record, this blog’s official prediction is 59 wins, 103 losses.

Friend Collector Record Release Show @ CCAS Tonight

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If you ask Friend Collector, they’ll tell you that they are the best band in Baltimore right now. They’ll say it with a straight face. They truly believe it. They make a good argument too, inasmuch as they’re the kind of band that’s not afraid to call your band a bunch of pussies, because you probably are. We’re still reserving judgement, but it is at least safe to say that they are the best band going right now over a certain decibel level.

If you’re familiar with former Baltimore bands the New Flesh and Pfisters, frontman Jason Donnells pretty much picks up with Friend Collector where those bands left off, which is to say playing music that is loud, heavy, loud, caustic, loud, aggressive, and drunk. Oh yeah and loud. If you like Unsane and the Jesus Lizard you will like this. You should even like this better, by virtue of the fact that you can hear these songs the best possible way, which is live. Tonight.

Friend Collector Self Titled lp cover art

Friend Collector is releasing its first record tonight at the Charm City Art Space. Recorded right here in Baltimore Maryland, USA and put out by local label Terra Firma, we can guarantee that this is genuinely unlike anything else that’s being released currently. While some bands are fucking around making dopey songs about dreams with toy instruments on cassette tapes or whatever, here is a straight up heavy band that is flat out saying “We’re here to fuck you in the ear-hole as hard as we possibly can.” If you’re looking for that one go-to record to reach for when your job is shitty and your rent is late and your girl turned off her phone and you need some angry music to rage to- this is it.

We also happen to have a copy of the marbled purple 12″ vinyl right here next to us. The only problem is that we don’t have a record player, and haven’t had one in almost 10 years. So rather than let Friend Collector become a dust collector, we’re going to give it away here on the blog.

We want to keep it, actually. But it’s a shame to keep something you can’t possibly use; and besides, we’ve already bought the download from their Bandcamp site.

So here’s what you have to do to win: comment on this post with the name of the last track on the record. We’ll give you a hint: it’s on that Bandcamp page we just mentioned. While you’re there, we also want you to stream the music to make sure it’s something you would be into. We’re serious about wanting this copy to go to a good home, and to someone who will appreciate it. Most importantly, we want you to play it regularly and not just keep it as one in a stack of hundreds.

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Friend Collector plays Charm City Art Space tonight with Wymyn’s Prysyn, DrunkMonk, and Hivebent. 7 pm All Ages. CCAS is at 1731 Maryland Avenue in Station North.

How to Buy Jeans

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This isn’t really a post on how to buy jeans. You’re a grown man, right? You know how to buy jeans already. At least you should. It’s not that hard; you just go to the store and try them on and pay for them. The only way you can really fuck it up too badly is to just have horrible taste in the first place and end up with some dad jeans or something that says Ed Hardy on it. You can even get an okay pair of jeans at Target for under $30. Not the best, but fine for most. If you’re in the Levi’s Store or the Gap you almost can’t go wrong.

We could write a very long and detailed post about the intricacies of buying jeans. Straight leg, boot cut, mid-rise, selvage, etc etc. There are a ton of blogs and websites and message boards that deal exclusively with the denim subculture. There are even “artisans” in Brooklyn who will be happy to take a four digit sum out of your bank account to make you a “one-of-a-kind” “bespoke” pair of jeans. This post isn’t about any of that because that’s all stupid and boring.

Iggy pop shirtless in a hotel room with two women

Sometimes a good pair of jeans is all you need. Especially if your name is Iggy Pop.

The point of this post, like all well-written blog posts, is to transmit exactly one good idea to the reader. Here is that idea: You should buy one brand new pair of decent quality jeans every year, preferably in the Spring. You should do this whether you think you need to or not. These are meant to be your everyday pants. They’re the pair you throw on when you get home from work and the one thing you don’t think too much about when you’re going out. They’ll take you almost everywhere you go, and take all the wear and misuse and punishment you can dish out.

Personally, we’re big on the whole jacket and jeans thing, and have even been know to wear a tie casually over denim. If you’re going to do stuff like that, it’s important that your jeans stay crisp and clean. Fraying and wear can take that style outside the realm of a cohesive look and make it appear as though you’ve just thrown a blazer over your laundromat outfit because you were cold. See exhibit A.

Even if you’re more casual than that, your jeans still aren’t as nice as you think they are, just by virtue of being everyday pants. Wear and washing patterns and dirt and the detritus of skin all conspire to slowly ruin your jeans, but you spend so much time in them you’re likely the last to notice. It’s kind of like not smelling the cigarette smoke in your clothes until after you leave the party. If you’re not careful, you can end up as one of those guys whose wife or girlfriend is bitching about how he wears his ratty old jeans everywhere and is trying to drag him to Men’s Wearhouse for khakis. And you don’t want to end up in Men’s Wearhouse khakis, do you?

Our birthday happens to fall at the first week of March, so every year we set aside $75 to $100 to treat ourselves to a new pair of jeans. This year it’s a slim, dark pair from Express with a zipper fly (and you gotta go for the zipper, because when you’re at the bar as often as we are buttons just won’t do). We suggest you think back to the last time you bought jeans, and if it’s been a while, get yourself to the store this month.