I was thinking back to a NYE a couple years ago, when my ex-ex took me to Beaver, Colorado. That trip was notable for two reasons. (1) Him screaming, every five minutes or so, “THIS IS MY GIRLFRIEND’S FIRST NEW YEARS EVE IN AMERICAAAA!” and thereby making me feel maximally Fresh-Off-Boatey, when all he meant was that I was excited to party because I had spent most of my New Years Eves in Tokyo, watching TV while eating mikans with my grandpa. (2) We bought all of our liquor at Beaver Liquor.
Anyway, 2008 was an eventful year. ConsumerMachine and I parted ways; I joined with Simon/Daniel to birth MTFB, my Obama Mama T-Shirt was not worn in vain (woot!), and I had my first foie gras wrapped in cotton candy. (Oh, did I not post about that yet? Well, you better come back in 2009 to read all about it.)
Here are ten of my favorite posts, in chronological order except backwards within month {clarity fail].
Post: Poo Peeps
Because: It took away my homemade marshmallow virginity. You haven’t had your virginity taken away by a marshmallow? It’s very soft and gentle; guaranteed to be better than when you lost (or will lose) your actual virginity.
Post: Hot Pot & $10 Massages
Because: $10 massages are clearly, clearly noteworthy, especially when delivered lovingly by a middle-aged super Chinese dude named…Andy. Oh, and FEET TEA!
Post: Lucid
Because: My first foray into “absinthe” which had the flavor of epic fail.
Post: E Tutto Qua
Because: It was just one of those nights where the occasion, company, food, and service came together to create happi.
Post: Sugar Butter [giggle]
Because: It wins Most Controversial post of 2008. I don’t think I ever told you about it. The bride, who didn’t even know my name, somehow found the post and bitched Dr. Z out. I think my treatment of her wedding was very kind, so I’m not sure where she gets off freaking out about an identity-protected post about a random wedding guest, but whatevs. Just realized that maybe writing this is not going to help Dr. Z-bride relations, but god help her if she is STILL checking my blog six months later…
Post: Shimi’s Wedding Cake
Because: This post wins Most Labor Intensive post of the year, both in actual execution of the food item in question and the post itself. Also, it’s my crowning achievement of 2008.
Post: Taste of Santa Monica 2008
Because: It was the most food I had in one sitting in all of 2008, and included wings from Hooters as well as foie gras. All in all, a fabulous day.
Post: Lot Lizards and Urine Pots
Because: Wins Most Surreal Experience award of 2008, and of course makes it into the Top 10 for including the fun topic of pissing on hookers.
Thanks for reading! Now go out to somewhere within walking distance and get drunk!
OK so most of you have no need to say goodbye to Tofurkey. Truthfully, a good lot of you haven’t even said hello to Tofurkey. And perhaps a number of you threw up in your mouth just thinking of the texture and taste of a fake turkey in your mouth. But according to this Yahoo! Answers post, roughly 6% of the population is vegetarian. (As you can see I did some hardcore research on this.) And since we love to be inclusive here at MTFB, here’s a little post dedicated to our vegetarian friends.
So why are we saying goodbye to tofurkey? Well, even though the holiday season is drawing to a close and this post is woefully ill-timed, some of you may have it in your head to try a little tofurkey to close out the year. Or kick off the new one. Or whatever. In any case , I nominate for your masticating pleasure: the Vegetarian Turkey from Vegetarian Plus, a VegeUSA brand. My brother happens to be a (almost) vegan and since the rest of my family and I have no problem with eating veggie food (don’t get me wrong, I love me a good steak or drumstick, but sometimes I crave the taste of the fake stuff), we prepare a veggie turkey of sorts every year.
Anyway, as far as looks go, Vegetarian Plus’ (VP) Vegetarian Turkey is the closest lookalike to a real turkey that I’ve come across, complete with a golden skin-like appearance. And while the veg. turkey may look smaller than the real thing, it has no bones to mess with and is basically a sculpted mass of dense protein. What’s not to love?
In the taste department, the turkey “taste” doesn’t really make an appearance. In fact, one of the words that came to mind is Asianesque. If you ask me what that means, I couldn’t tell you, but I had an odd inkling that if I doused that sucker in some soy sauce or teriyaki, we’d be good to go. Still, in a taste test between a tofurkey and this one, I’d lean on this one. Let’s talk texture: while VP’s turkey was obviously not texturally equivalent to a real turkey, it is far better than that of a tofurkey. VP’s turkey had some type of meat texture going on… just not a turkey.
So there you have it my veggie friends, consider your horizons (very slightly) broadened.
Hi from vacation. I have 0:41 left on my lappie batts and a sporadic interweb connection, but I had to post about how Papua New Guinea cannibals report that white people are too salty, the Japanese taste the best (TOOOLLLD YOUU!!), and “the only thing that beats it is the meat of their own women.”
So. Maybe you spent the last month working furiously on a grant. Or maybe you spent it drunk. Maybe both at the same time. In any case, imagine that you are in a situation where it is Christmas Eve and you have NOT BOUGHT ANYONE PRESENTS! Oh no!
After contemplating a plan in which you injure yourself, severely enough so that you’ll be hospitalized and have a good excuse for not having gotten anyone anything, but not so severely that you die, and then discarding this plan, and then, more sensibly, looking online to see whether overnight shipping means they’ll ship on Christmas Day (they don’t), and discovering that even fucking TARGET is closed on Christmas day, you then drive to… the trusty 7-Eleven!
There, you might contemplate the following holiday gift ideas, all available at 7-Eleven:
But, wait. First, to get into character, loiter in front and have a cigarette like I did. I don’t smoke unless drunk, but I had to make the experience a complete one.
OK, onto the LIST!
1. VIDEO GAMES: 7-Eleven has come a long way, baby! You can get fucking Call of Duty at 7-Eleven now!!? Or, if you are, like, a grandma who doesn’t know cool video games, you can get your grandson the 007 game because that’s familiar to you. Note: I just looked up reviews of the game online and it’s actually semi-well reviewed, so this year grandma would have landed a winner, unlike that year when she bought you a Zune.
2. Giftcards: iTunes is probably your safest and best bet as far as giftcards go, though you could get a World of Warcraft giftcard if you are me and buying for your sister, who is a supercute, giggly sorority girl who has a nerdy streak.
3. Sunglasses: Not the best gift if you’re not an LA-ite (well, not the best gift in general), but you could take off the tag, throw it into an old sunglasses case that you’ve kept lying around when you bought yourself Prada shades two years ago, and hope for the best.
4. Gift Subscription to Magazine: This was an excellent suggestion by Cole, who was helping me on my mission. You could buy the latest copy of the mag, roll it up, and wrap it so it looks like a bottle of wine, except it’s SURPRISE! a magazine! Just pop the subscription card into the nearest mailbox.
5. Wine: …or you could just straight up get them a bottle of wine. Not too confident on the selection at 7-Eleven, though. I think a good strategy would be to buy a super obscure brand that is more than $10, and then say, “Yeah, I read a review about this in an in-flight magazine a while ago.”
6. Beer: Or maybe you could go with beer. I think this is safer. Sapporo or some other semi-”exotic” beer is good. Heineken is really trying to promote this strategy of giving beer with their holiday commercial depicting men as (a) selfish (with the holiday 5-pack), and (b) terrible at wrapping. Both seem accurate to me?
7. A boatload of lottery tickets: I think this is a good gift in the “ironic” vein of gifts if you give it to a prissy person who has never played the lotto before. The only risk with this gift is if they actually hit it big, in which case you’ll have to deal with your own bitter feelings for many years.
But they come with their own holiday gift envelope! A definite plus as you won’t have to pay for wrapping paper. Which 7-Eleven, of course, sells. Along with Christmas cards!
Anyway, continuing onwards~
8. Cat Food? This was one of Cole’s suggestions. He insisted that cat food was a great gift. I was skeptical. He said, “Cats LOVE this stuff!” Well, duh. It’s cat food. Cole apparently has a particularly aggressive and hissy cat who I think rules him a little…
9. Lame To-Go Coffee Container: Have you ever noticed that just slapping a pink ribbon on something suddenly turns it into a purchase-worthy object? You could pretend that you bought this at a coffee shop. Not Starbucks, because they shill their logo on everything, but maybe a lesser-known coffee shop…maybe Groundworks?
10. Carton of Cigarettes: Another suggestion from Cole. This one was actually good unlike the cat food. He even suggested providing the link to the scene from The Breakfast Club where Judd Nelson talks about only getting a box of cigarettes for Christmas.
I’m sure the quote is in there somewhere.
Bonus Gift #11. Condoms! “But Janet,” you might say. “What if the person I’m buying a gift for isn’t that good of a friend? Wouldn’t that be awkward?” No problem! Just buy one in every size! That way you are sure to gift a size that fits. Problem solved.
From Daniel (Ok, so confession – this post idea was all Daniel’s idea so he is owed props. We just procrastinated on the procrastinator’s guide so we didn’t have time to get together to do this.) and me at MTFB (that rhymed if you ignore the long shit in the parentheses), happy happy holidays and have plenty of GOOD EATS!
Continuing with Day 1 in Taiwan, we weaved our way back down the mountain on the wretched tour bus, already greeeen at the gills from motion sickness even though we had just gotten a lot of nice fresh air. One happy thing that happened on the drive back was a bathroom stop – happy because Shimi was having a peemergency and because I made friends with a super cute stray dog with big glisteny puppy eyes. Taiwan is overrun with stray dogs, which sounds scary but was really fun for me.
Shimi and I discussed our rehearsal dinner outfit on the way back. We were psyched because we were to have Chicken Food for dinner (that’s what it said on our itinerary). Venus told us it was sort of like Taiwan’s answer to Thanksgiving dinner – rice with turkey on top, covered in a yummy soup stock. Mmmmmmmmmm.
After finalizing our outfit plans, we arrived back at the hotel…
…except not. We had come straight from the mountain to the restaurant for rehearsal dinner. OK, I guess Shimi would have to make her speech in her jeans and hoodie, and I would get to eat Chicken Food with hair as greasy as KFC. Awesome. We decided to sit as far away from the vegetarians as possible to maximize our dish options. This took us to the Japanese peeps’ table, which included the parents and best friends of the groom. This ended up being an excellent decision, and these people ended up being some of my favorite guests to hang out with on the whole trip.
First: GREEN STUFF! MMMMMM! Unlike most people, I love “gloppy” as a food texture, so I was really excited to try this. Also, I had just frozen my butt off on the top of a mountain, so some restorative soup was just what the doctor ordered.
Except it had shrimp in it. BASTARDS! I had my epi-pen in my purse, but I wanted to make it alive to the wedding since I was singing, so I didn’t risk it.
HERE IT IS! The elusive CHICKEN FOOD! I can honestly, honestly say that this was my favorite thing I ate on my entire trip to Taiwan. It’s a trademark dish of Chiayi, the city in which we were staying, and just dynamite! Listen: white rice, turkey, marinated bamboo shoots (menma or shinachiku is what we call it in Japan), and crispy fried onions, all drizzled with a very mirin/soy-ey, tasty broth. I glanced around and noticed that there were two left on the table. I schemed about eating one more and then sneaking the other one back to hotel for a late night snack.
But then I was distracted by another dish that was set dramatically on the gigantic lazy susan. It was another off-limits crustacean item, but I didn’t want to piss off or inconvenience the wedding guests who didn’t know about my blog (I didn’t really know how to explain “food blog” in Japanese) so I had to be snappy with my photos. Luckily we were at the Japanese table so excessive photographic documentation of everything did not seem so strange. This dish looked like some very potentially good fried crab bits. I asked Shimi and she said, as always, “Underseasoned.” WTF Taiwan?
Oooooh! Sashimi! A dish that I could season to my heart’s saltiest content! Shimi and I attacked this aggressively, only noticing later that the other guests were demurring on the fish. Were they just being Japanese? Or did they know something we didn’t know? I realized that the fish was on ice, and we aren’t supposed to drink the water in Taiwan. Maybe that was what was bothering them?
It turned out that what was bothering them was indeed fear of inadequate food handling and bacteria, but also they were turned off by the gigantic cuts of sashimi. Indeed, each piece of fish was twice the size of a normal slab of sashimi, and Shimi unearthed a fish bone in one of her pieces, but I am immune to food poisoning (never ever had it!) and Shimi just plain loves sashimi, so we dug in.
OOOOOOH! Sesame balls! I love this shit at dim sum restaurants! Shimi and I very ungracefully started stuffing our mouths, asking the other guests if it was ok if we had another, then having another without even waiting for the answer, and then “splitting one last ball” but then splitting two more after that. We were not really being good ambassadors for America with our behavior at this dinner, but they were irresistable! Crunchewy and steaming hot insides to boot!
So. With that dessert, our meal was over. OR SO WE THOUGHT! If you only remember one thing from this post, remember that your meal is not over in Taiwan until the fruit comes out. If you have room to remember one more thing, remember that tomatoes are considered fruit in Taiwan.
So after I sat back, satisfied with my chicken food and balls, a new round of food came out. This included real turkey, a la America but a little bit weird (e.g., Taiwanese seem to not like their bird skin crispy, so it wasn’t, and as with everything else in this country, underseasoned), that was carved by the chef (fancy! …but cut with the grain?) in the middle of the restaurant.
Then came “gravy” and “cranberry sauce,” which Shimi was too scared to try (OK, you’ll eat raw fish loaded with 0-157 colonies but not this cranberry sauce?) so I was the guinea pig. The result is pictured top. It was pretty good, actually. Made me want some mashies.
Three MORE courses later (with ugly, unpublishable pictures – my bad), the fruit came out. Everyone’s favorite was the citrus fruit which everyone was calling “mikan” – the Japanese word for clementine, even though this looked more like a lemon (see it hiding innocently at the left part of the pic? You can hide but I’m gonna eatchoo anyway lil’ lemon.) and tasted like a very very sweet orange. After traveling for six days by this point, my insides were a little, ahem, gummed up? So I appreciated the roughage.
The “toothpick” pinwheel = cute, no?
Also note the aforementioned comment about tomatoes being considered a fruity dessert-like-item. I should have noted this and wouldn’t have committed a grave error later…
But first, the bride and groom rolled up – he in jeans and a polo, she in tracksuit pants and a t-shirt (PHEW glad I didn’t change), and Shimi had to translate the maid of honor’s speech from English to Japanese (stressballs!) and then the best man’s speech from Japanese to English. The maid of honor went off script and started talking about riding stationary bikes in the snow, which threw Shimi off a little, but otherwise she performed brilliantly.
Then, off to the night market. WHEEEE~! I was so psyched. Dozens and dozens and dozens of stalls with food, Engrish clothing, and other randomness. For example, I contemplated for a long time whether or not to buy a Doraemon humidifier that plugs into your USB port. It would be good for my singing, but real estate in my suitcase was in high demand, so I passed. This, inexplicably, saddened crazy tourguide Frank, who was following us like a hawk (after the fiasco on the mountain he was apparently determined to not let us out of his sight).
Another notable item – BUNNIES! SLEEPING IN A BLUE-LIT BUN PILE! AAAAAA! Just the kind of stall that makes a parent go, “Oh fuck. The kids are going to go apeshit over this and I don’t want to take care of a fucking rodent.”
After browsing through the whole market, Shimi decided to get a cream puff that looked absolutely divine – fluffy and decadent. It tasted, like everything else in Taiwan, bland. In fact, she said, “This probably isn’t even worth the calories,” and threw it out. Disappointment City. I was intrigued by fruits-on-a-stick that were coated in cherry-colored hard candy. I picked out a stick, thinking the red orbs were plums or strawberries or something else yummy, but it was (can you guess the punchline?) candy-coated cherry tomatoes. Fail.
Up next: How you do a wedding with 1,500 people, Taiwan-style.
By way of Geekologie, my favorite blog after failblog, is this extraordinarily vom-vom-vom-worthy post about the joys of cooking with testicles.
It tastes like…you guessed it! Chickenz!
Yeah, yeah, the whole thing screams FAKE but maybe that’s just because I really really want it to be so. I mean, balls are just not anything that teeth should be sunk into.
So, for Thanksgiving this year I went to Tokyo and then to Taipei and Chiayi in Taiwan. My friend Venus was getting married in Chiayi, Taiwan, and had asked me to sing in the wedding. I was reluctant, because the last time I sang in a wedding I sang At Last in 4/4 time, while the string quartet was playing At Last in 6/8 time (WHY and WHAT THE FUCK?), not to mention I cracked really horribly like 4 times.
Anyway, water under the bridge. THIS time I was determined to succeed and sing brilliantly. And the trip was going to be the trip of a lifetime, because Venus’ family was picking up the tab for ALL of the lodging and ALL of the food while we were there~! And many, many fun things were planned, like karaoke, night markets, and epic sightseeing on tour buses.
I have to say, it was epic as promised. Here’s what happened on Day 1.
Our first activity was a trip to Alishan (a.k.a. Mount Ali or Ali Mountain). We were loaded onto two gigantic tour buses – one for English speakers and one for Japanese speakers. [Venus's fiance, now hubby, is Japanese, so many of the guests were from Japan.] Shimi and I got on what I called the whoring bus for English speakers.
Frank, our “English-speaking” tourguide, was very sweet and VERY excited as he clutched his mini-megaphone and told us about the plan. From what we could decipher from his English, we would stop by a tea factory on the way to Alishan National Scenic Area. The trip would take 3 hours there and 3 hours back.
What was not mentioned was that the 3 hours was 3 hours of driving up a mountain. This meant 180 minutes of a very tall and enormous bus weaving through impossibly curved, steep roads that, for some reason, had huge, very deep drainage trenches on either side. Frightening. It was around this time that we also discovered that the tour company had taken out life insurance policies on all of the guests. Bad timing to get this info. Anxiety all around plus extreme nausea.
Frank had the sense to distract us from our misery by putting in a DVD about Alishan. The focus of the DVD was the Alishan Forest Railway, which is super famous and was described in Shimi’s Lonely Planet book as a “must-see.” It is a train that has multiple switchbacks that takes you from the bottom of the mountain through three different climates – tropical, temperate, and finally alpine. The film footage looked absolutely gorgeous (Taiwan is so amazingly lush with vegetation) and I couldn’t wait to get on a vehicle that traveled in a relatively straight line.
But first, the tea factory! First we visited the actual tea plants and watched the workers pick the tea leaves. It was EXACTLY, and I mean EXACTLY, like the Snapple commercial with the old Chinese man jacking off a baby tea leaf:
I did my own “Whiiite tea is a baby tea leee” impression on Shimi and she thought it was spot on. : D
Then we went to the actual factory, and watched as they bundled the leaves into giant cotton-wrapped balls, squeezed them in machines, threw them into a huge spinning vessel, took them out, re-wrapped them into balls, re-squeezed them, re-threw them into the vessel, repeat, repeat, etc. etc.
We were then invited to sample the tea, which was just stellar. They kept saying it was green tea but specifically it was Oolong tea. David Lin, Venus’ dad’s spy/chaperone sidled up to me when I tried to buy some and said something to me. I think he was trying to communicate to me that we would receive free tea as a gift from Venus’ dad, but that that tea would not be as expensive/high quality as the one I was attempting to buy. I thanked him for the hot tip and waited for the free stuff, which, sure enough, appeared at the end of the day as a souvenir. Not one, but TWO boxes~!
Then, another two hours of bus-riding that brought us to the brink of vomming (no WONDER there were barf bags in every seat pocket!). We finally reached the top and jumped off and headed for the gift stalls that were selling all manner of dried fruit that we could sample (mostly yummy plums, but also, to Shimi’s dismay, congealed wasabi powder that looked disarmingly like a yummy plum – sorry babe).
Then, softly pressed into my fingers, was this abomination:
Crunchy slime. That’s the only description.
Frank came around, chastising us, yelling, “NO! BETTER FOOD OVER HERE!” and led us farther up the mountain street. We went inside a restaurant and sat down at huge tables with soup already bubbling away in the center of the lazy susan.
SO! MUCH! FOOD! I counted 10 courses here. It was my first real foray into Taiwanese food so I totally dug in…
…Hmmm. Maybe it is because I am of Japanese descent and our blood is actually a mixture of blood and soy sauce, but everything tasted underseasoned.
Doesn’t this LOOK like it should be salty?
This, combined with the rather gristly/fatty meat that was part of many of the dishes left me a little disappointed. I should mention that what we thought was beef turned out to be venison, so it should have been expected that that meat be tough.
Rudolph.
I should also definitely mention that I’m deathly allergic to crustaceans, so I couldn’t eat the really good stuff – shrimp, crab, lobster.
Off limits to Janet. Cry.
But it was the general consensus around the table that the best dish was the simple stir-fried cabbage.
Most entertaining, however, was the whole-fried chicken head. A shout came up at every table as they respectively discovered the existence of the head. I should have eaten it. I really regret this now.
Then, we were herded into the Alishan Visitor’s Center. After all the buildup and the long journey, I was ready to just see the damn mountain already. However, we were told to sit in a mini auditorium to watch another movie about the Railway. This movie was…I don’t even know. I was speechless. It started out as locomotive sounds played on top of pictures of trains. Then it morphed into a crazy, philosophical biopic of a young woman on a journey, who, while riding the train, would say (through voice-over), things like, “On Ali Mountain, will you find a beautiful landscape? Or, will you find…yourself?” THEN it morphed into a scene on top of a bridge, where a young boy is told by a young girl (ostensibly his crush): “I’m…sorry. I’m sorry.” And then the young woman runs off as the train passes underneath. Fade into the next scene, where the young boy is now a grown man, visiting the bridge with his new girlfriend. The train passes underneath, and he turns to his new girlfriend and says, “Every time I see a train, I think of her.” This struck me as not a very nice thing to say to your current girlfriend, and I said that out loud. Shimi then said, “Can we leave?” and we ditched the theater to go to the 7-Eleven, where I bought hot pads to warm my freezing self.
Finally, after half an hour, we were ready to see the goddamn mountain. Jerry, the husband of the cousin of the bride, asked Frank where the train station was. Frank responded that we weren’t going on the train.
ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS ME?? TWO FUCKING MOVIES ABOUT THE TRAIN AND WE WEREN’T GOING ON IT!??!?
Sigh. So we set off on a walk around the mountain. The first stop, which Frank was really excited about, was to be the Alishan Hotel, which he gushed was “Werrry espeneev!” I kind of preferred stopping at naturey things rather than a hotel plunked into the middle of nature, but whatever. The Japanese guests asked the Japanese tourguide (whose Japanese was astoundingly good – better than mine!) how long the walk would be, and he said 6 kilometers. Shimi then fretted that the little children of the English-speakers (some were JUUUST old enough to walk and certainly wouldn’t survive 6 km) wouldn’t make it and should she tell the parents or what? She is very considerate like that.
We set off on the hike at the pace, naturally, of a child JUUUST old enough to walk. Shimi and I power-walked to the front of the line and tried to take off, but Frank was not having any of it. He said “Eh-Stoppu!” and made stern, come-hither waving motions with his hands. We then negotiated that we would meet the group at the hotel, and the two of us jetted off.
The hotel, though, was literally 3 minutes away, so we didn’t really get any exercise. The group caught up with us and took another bathroom break, and we realized that we had to get our cranky asses away from this epically-slow-moving group. We worked on Frank and he finally relented, saying to meet back at the tour bus by 4 pm.
So we went on a hike through the absolutely gorgeous trails of Alishan. Particularly stunning was the “Giant Trees Trail,” which was an elevated, wooden, meandering trail through astonishingly lush trees and brooks, with the age of each tree (thousands of years!) marked on a placard. I was in heaven.
We killed as much time as we could, but still arrived back at the bus thirty minutes early. Balls. As we turned the corner, though, there was a clump of people from our group who saw us, threw up their hands, and said, “Oh, god! There they are!!!” and rushed towards us with open arms.
“WE CALLED YOUR CELLPHONES!”
“WHERE WERE YOU?!? WE WE SOOOO WORRIED!”
“WE CALLED VENUS TO SEE WHAT WE SHOULD DO!”
“WE SENT A SEARCH PARTY AFTER YOU!”
Oh, shit. Apparently Senile Frank (I will provide you with proof of his senility in future posts) totally forgot about our 4 pm arrangement and freaked out when the huge group got back to the buses after the children (predictably) tired after 20 minutes of walking and everyone turned back and we were nowhere to be found. I felt terrible, particularly for disturbing the stressed bride while she was prepping for the wedding back in Chiayi, and I could tell some of the (particularly English-speaking) guests were pissed at us, since they were hanging out for over an hour waiting for us (and all the while we thought we were EARLY!). Later on, though, the girls in the “search party” confessed to us that they didn’t really look for us – they just wanted to get in a hike of their own.
Shimi and I filed back into the bus, this time adding shame to our mix of nausea and anxiety on the 3-hour ride back home.
Have you ever thrown a party and someone tells you they are having problems seeing your alcohol selection because they are drunk and can no longer read? Knowing that all of you faithful readers are all about the crazy times at parties, I’m pretty sure this has not only happened to you, but that you might have been the one whose reading ability disappeared.
But what if the real problem isn’t intoxication?! What if… what if you just have poor lighting and everyone thinks your bar is lame? We here at MTFB are dedicated to making you the coolest of the cool and keep your home bar looking swanky while on a budget. Welcome to the first hands-on project!
Back at the beginning of November, I threw one of my infamous highlighter/blacklight parties. I wanted to up the stakes and decided to put together bar shelves with up-lighting, just as I had seen in all the classy bars that I sometimes frequent.
So here’s the list of materials- all found at your local Home Depot:
Large Cardboard Box – $1.42
Acrylic Light cover – $8.97 (found in the lighting section)
Plastic lighting grid – ~$10 (most everything is found in the lighting section)
Colored Flourescent Party Bulbs – About $5 each
Direct to plug bulb adapter – $1.29/each.
Black spray paint -$0.99
Cable Ties – I dunno how much they are but they are super cheap.
Other things you’ll need:
Scissors
Measuring tape
Sharp pointy object (ice pick? screwdriver? choose your own adventure!)
Electrical power strips
So the first thing you’ll need to do is measure the area of the “bar” that you’re making. And then trim the box, plastic grid, and acrylic accordingly. At the top of the box you’ll need to cut out a hole, making sure to leave a 1-inch rim – this will keep your acrylic and grid in place. As soon as you’re done getting your box into shape, take it to a well ventilated (or not so ventilated area, if that’s how you roll) and spray paint the box. You should end up with something like the box on the right in the picture below.
From there you slide in the trimmed acrylic cover and then fit the grid in after it. Using your pointy tool of choice, poke holes on the sides and top of the boxes, near the rim. Through these holes you’ll thread the cable ties and then around the grid to hold the grid in place and support the plastic cover. Depending on how heavy you think your booze will be, the number of ties you’ll need will vary.
After that’s all set up, you’ll put your bulbs together and plug them into your power strips. Slide the strips under the boxes and cut a small opening for the cord to come out. Now all you have to do is set up your drinks and hit the lights. Now you can be a baller and party in style, just like us:
Party hard friends! Happy holidays, and remember, drink responsibly.
