Bon Vivant VA

Jul 25thCatch up ’16 part I

Tons of catch up. Got pretty far behind on the blog this year.

: Moravian sugar cake

: Playing with her uncle

: croque madame at Requin

: Chamber gala

: Masters lunch

: HB!

: SBs

: Marteen Gras

: Valentines Day

: Pre-Myrtle tune up

: Transparent Pie

: Leftovers

: Frabs

: St. Patrick’s Day

: The Fred Special – Sky on the rocks with lemon

: We were the first customers ever

: sorghum glazed biscuits

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Jul 25thAlabama White Sauce, from Garden and Gun

I saw a recipe for Alabama white sauce on twitter, and though I’d heard of white bbq sauce, I’d never had the opportunity to try it. I wanted to smoke some chicken on my weber smokey mountain, and decided to whip up a batch. I’m a pretty big fan now. I pretty much followed the recipe, but it did up the spice level a bit.

: Transparent Pie

: Leftovers

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Jul 25thFirst trip to the Zoo

Early in the summer we took EF to the zoo for the first time. We used parking panda, and reserved a spot right by the panda exhibit. We arrived later in the morning, but our parking spot was waiting for us, and we got to the panda exhibit right when the panda came out to eat some bamboo. EF loved it. We saw as many animals as we could, but we’ll definitely have to go back.

: I see him!

: EF’s favorite part of the zoo

Here are a few videos from the trip:

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Jul 25thThe Woods, golf in the snow

This post is very late. We haven’t been to The Woods since February, but hopefully this will inspire us to return soon, in better weather.

: homemade biscuits

: The Woods was covered in several inches of snow, so we drove out to Rock Harbor, determined to get a round in

: We realized we’d played this course before at Coleen’s bachelor party

: It was in great condition, and I was playing really well

: classic steakhouse meal

: country ham and biscuits for breakfast

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Jun 7thMake your own/DIY Cologne (and perfume) #bestanniversaryprezzieever

I recently enjoyed a really cool cologne class in St. Martin. I’ve never been very big into cologne but the class piqued my interest. Really, I’ll take any excuse to indulge my creative side. I won’t recap the previous blog post too much, but essentially, we got to try to mix a few base, middle, and top notes to create our own custom scent. Once you had your oils you like and in a good proportion, you add some perfumer’s alcohol and you’re in business. At home, one does not have the option of smelling each scent before committing to buy a bottle. However, if you know of a cologne you like, you can look up the notes of that scent on basenotes or fragrantica. I’m not suggesting or recommending that one try to copy a favorite cologne, but it does give you an idea of what smells you like, which provides a pretty good starting point. For example, I wanted to create a Virginia themed cologne (big surprise I know). I got on the basenotes forum, proposed my idea, and asked for suggestions. I got some ideas I liked conceptually, like cedar, but then found it difficult to blend said specific scent into my cologne. Then someone suggested a pineapple top note. Virginia is known for pineapples, not because they are grown here, but there were a symbol of welcome and status back in colonial times. I thought this was a great idea, especially since I didn’t really have any good ideas for the top notes at the time. I thought about citrus or mint, but citrus can only loosely fit a Virginia theme, and the mint was overpowered by my middle and base notes. I also thought about some clean scents like sea salt and driftwood to try to get a briny oyster thing going, but I couldn’t get that to work either. I googled cologne with a pineapple note, and found Creed’s Aventus, which has a smokey pineapple scent. I asked for some more help from basenotes to create something similar, and after some trial and error, found a pineapple scent that wasn’t too cloying or sweet, and also not too green and herbal. After playing around with several ideas, I came up with a few variations I liked. One of which is as follows:

TOP – pineapple – dihydro myrcenol, ambroxan, AAG, Ambergris, Allyl Heptanoate

MIDDLE – black pepper, all spice, nutmeg, tonka bean (popular spices of the colonial era, and tonka bean was a common pipe tobacco additive at the time)

BASE – Tobacco (and variations of…ie tobacarol, vanilla oak, etc.), Leather for Virginia’s esquestrian heritage (several variations including suederal)

I also did one with a middle of dogwood, magnolia, and jasmine (dropping the pineapple top note) but it seemed too floral for my taste. I still kept it though. I also messed around with vetiver using the justification that its similar to sorghum (and I couldn’t find sorghum essential oil). I think a few versions had oak moss and honeysuckle, but neither made the final cut.

I also made some beard oil. I bought some unscented beard oil online (jojoba and argan oil) and then added essential/fragrance oil to it. There are a bunch of sites online that describe how much oil to use, etc. Tobacco and vanilla oak turned out great, as did a variation of my Virginia cologne with the leather note punched way up. This is way easier than making a well-balanced cologne, but you can go so far as to develop a complex cologne and add it to the beard oil if you want to get fancy.

When we were at Tijon taking our class, it seemed to me that perfume was much more difficult than cologne. For a masculine cologne, there are only so many options when it comes to essential and fragrance oils. For perfume, the sky is the limit. As such, blending becomes much more difficult. I wanted to make a perfume for my wife for our anniversary, but it was an intimidating task. Bare in mind that each bottle of oil costs on average $6, so best case scenario, my fragrance would end up costing roughly the same as a store bought bottle. I decided on a concept for her perfume based on some cologne I like. 1 Million by Paco Rabanne has a really nice cinnamon – rose note (but an off-putting sparkling citrus top note). I thought the spicy rose note would work for a perfume, if I was able to create a more feminine base and top note that blended well. I started with a highly rated rose accord (not just straight rose scent/EO, but a complex blended rose accord) from creatingperfume.com. Then I decided on a few other middle notes: dark narcissus (picked mostly for name but I ending up really liking the smell), honey, and prismantol (a woody, spicy, ginger, cardamom note). I bought these blind (nose-blind/I hadn’t smelled them before). The honey didn’t thrill me, but I thought it would blend well. The prismantol was additively good. I smelled it frequently while mixing, and kept adding more and more of it. The rose accord was also very enjoyable, and strong enough to stand out the way I intended. For the base I ordered a sandalwood musk and light patchouli. I was concerned that the patchouli was a little too masculine, but blending it in to test anyway. For the top note I ordered peony, kumquat, and apricot. They all smelled good, but they did not smell great together. I decided to simplify and only include the peony. I started with a fairly even blend of 33% top, middle, and base notes. This wasn’t bad, but I needed to punch up the rose note. I kept adding rose until I found a sweet spot, and I also added a fair amount of the prismantol. At this point I had something very floral smelling, but it just seemed like something was missing. It was too sweet and too floral. I looked in my bag of cologne oil and found a sample of cinnamon. The bite of the cinnamon really balanced out the sweet florals, but it still seemed like it was bordering on cloying. Certainly too sweet for summer. I tried to add a fresh/sea component with ambroxin and hydro myrcenol. These kind of chemicals are what make aqua di gio and davidoff cool water remind you of the sea. I went easy on the fresh/sea component, and slowly added more until the sweetness seemed balanced. Now I was really starting to think I was on to something good. I added a little ambergris, and then I decided the perfume was really good, and it was time to stop before I messed it up. I’m really happy with the outcome. The peony top note comes off pretty good during application, and dominates for an hour or so. The inclusion of the sea smell makes it a fresh floral note and not overly sweet. Upon dry down, you really get warmth from the rose and cinnamon. This was really where the concept started, and I think it works quite well. As the perfume fades, the sandalwood musk, light patchouli, and ambergris leave a very subtle complex scent that I’m not able to identify/explain despite knowing the component parts. Its pleasant and not masculine so it works very well.

If you interested in creating cologne, perfume, candles, etc., I think a good place to start is foaming hand soap. I bought some unscented hand soap on amazon, and then just tried simple blends of two or three essential/fragrance oils. This is an inexpensive way to start out. I did a magnolia one for HB, and for myself I did one with a variation of the Virginia cologne described above. After those ran out I tried one with tobacco, vanilla oak, and leather, and another with tobacco and patchouli. It was very easy. I literally opened the top of the soaps, poured in some oil, shook, and pumped. As with most of my interests, this one can have a pretty hefty price tag. However, if you’re already buying a few bottles of luxury cologne a year, the price is negligible. Until you fall down the rabbit hole…

UPDATE: I just saw an article about upping your hand soap game (ridiculous I know), but it shows you how expensive good soap is, and also, how easy it is to pick a few scents that blend well. Lime, cumin, and patchouli sounds particularly interesting.

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May 26thIs it Memorial Day yet?

Miami Beach

Old People Friendly

Southern

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May 17thBook Review: A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia

I just recently finished Richard S. Dunn’s A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia. This book took me over 18 months to finish (see my previous post about it for more detail). I read some other books start to finish in that time, and I also had my first child, but mostly I took so long to finish this book because it is incredibly detailed. I love a good non-fiction book, but A Tale of Two Plantations will not turn the pages the way, say, The Right Stuff did. Thats not the say I didn’t enjoy the book. In fact, I thought it was very informative. The book compares Virginia and Jamaica in in terms of family units, demographics, religion, quality of life, from acquisition to emancipation. It also looks at the lives and roles of slave owners. I think the interesting contrast was that Virginia owners lived closely with their slaves and experienced population growth that allowed them to sell surplus slaves and/or expand their operations. Jamaican slaveowners were absent from their plantations, relying on overseers to continually repurchase new slaves to replace those lost to disease and mistreatment.

The book details the lives of several generations of slaves and slaveholders in Virginia and Jamaica. The book also compares and constrats the two situations. The higher level detail I found to be very interesting. The detail of the individual persons was informative but made for an extremely dense read. Imagine a novel with hundreds of characters, and you will start to see why A Tale was so cumbersome a pursuit. I think I would have preferred to read a higher level comparative analysis without all the details about the individuals, but admittedly, I would have missed a lot of information I found valuable had I enjoyed a more condensed version of the book. While I would recommend the book to those that are very interested in the history of slavery, particularly in Tidewater Virginia, my general feeling is that I’m glad I read this book, but I wouldn’t want to do it again. In the interests of brevity and laziness, I’ll leave you with a few quotes I highlighted via my kindle. Hopefully some the quotes will spark your interest as this really was one of the most informative and enlightening books I’ve ever read.

–

Thus, we see two radically different slave systems in action. The sugar planters in Jamaica had been making lots of money for many years by treating their workers as disposable cogs in a machine.

In Virginia, the continuous growth of the slave population was a compulsive force that enabled the slaveholders to populate the interior of their state with black workers, and to move or sell hundreds of thousands of Virginia blacks to slave-hungry states in the West and the South.

–

ONE OF THE MAJOR DIFFERENCES between U.S. and British Caribbean slavery is that the North American slaveholders permitted and even encouraged their slaves to join the Christian church from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War, while almost all of the slaveholders in Jamaica and the other British islands strenuously opposed any program of religious instruction for their “heathen” black workers.

–

These Mount Airy people were part of an enormous migration in which approximately one million African Americans born on the eastern seaboard were moved to the western and southern slave states between 1790 and 1860…

–

…both argue forcefully that the thousands of new plantations established in the cotton states between 1800 and 1860 differed greatly in character from the eastern seaboard farms and plantations where the migrant slaves had previously lived. Their books differ in style and focus, but both historians see the American slave system erupting into a corrosive apogee of unprecedented wealth, intoxicating power, unbridled speculation, and virulent exploitation of black labor.

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…the cotton production system enabled reckless slaveholders in the Deep South to acquire dangerously great wealth and political power.

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Here they differed greatly from runaway slaves in the antebellum South who aimed to reach the northern states, where they could hope to be protected by abolitionists, or to get all the way to Canada. For Jamaican runaways there was no Canada.

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The revolt is often called the Baptist War because the initial slave leaders were converts to the Baptist Church who were inspired by the Bible to strike for freedom.

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The editor objected to a bill in the Jamaica Assembly prohibiting the flogging of female slaves, since women are harder to govern than men, and always the ringleaders of trouble.

–

The editor was well aware that the sugar islands did benefit from the fact that absentee planters like Joseph Foster Barham II became virtual representatives by buying seats in the House of Commons, and the Courant’s worst fears were realized in 1833 when the reformed Parliament quickly passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which brought about emancipation in Jamaica in 1834.

–

To move from Mesopotamia in 1760–1832 to Mount Airy in 1800–1860 is to enter a vastly different environment. It was not possible in the Northern Neck of Virginia, nor in the Alabama Canebrake, to stage a slave uprising in any way equivalent to the slave revolts of 1760 and 1831–1832 in Westmoreland. Slaveholders in the antebellum South were expanding in wealth, power, and ambition, not struggling like the Jamaican slaveholders.

–

At Mount Airy, the field hands lived on scattered farm quarters, miles away from the domestics and craft workers who lived adjacent to the Tayloes’ plantation house, so that the two sets of slaves were socially separated.

–

At Mesopotamia the head people led the way in joining the Moravian congregation that the Barhams sponsored, and they also led the way in defending their absentee owners’ estate during the slave revolts of 1760 and 1831–1832. At Mount Airy the opposite happened. Here the slaves with the greatest skills and the house servants who personally served the Tayloes were more likely to rebel or escape when they had the chance.

–

The Mesopotamia head people lived in a black world with a small cadre of abusive whites ordering them around. As long as slavery was the only option, the slaves with the most responsible jobs wanted to protect the stake they had achieved in that black world, and they could reckon that the rebellions of 1760 and 1831–1832 were going to fizzle out. The wisest course was to follow the Moravians’ teachings: to oppose the revolt, to preserve their community, and to protect their small leadership stake. At Mount Airy, the skilled workers and domestics lived in a mixed black-white world with many more controlling white people close at hand. Rebels like Mary and Lizzie Flood, sick of dealing with the whites on a daily basis, were clearly revenging themselves on their owners. Two domestics who did not rebel, both of whom were characterized in 1862 by William Tayloe as “faithful” servants—Mount Airy house servant Armistead Carter, whose brother deserted, and coachman Ruffin Moore, whose daughter deserted—must have been strongly tempted to flee, but the risks were great. Three of the men who fled in 1861–1863 were carpenters, reflecting the fact that these workmen operated much more independently than the field hands and didn’t take kindly to discipline, as exemplified by Bill Grimshaw. And all of the thirteen Tayloe slaves who deserted during the Civil War had a broader view of the world and its possibilities than most of their colleagues. Working in or near to the big house, they were in the best position to learn about the course of the war and the possibility of freedom through flight. So the Mount Airy rebels, like the Mesopotamia cooperators, were exercising their intelligence, courage, and good judgment to achieve their goals.

–

Black and colored people constituted over 90 percent of the population in the British islands, but only 40 percent in the southern states,

–

It was obvious that in small, high-density islands such as Barbados and Antigua, where all the land was under cultivation, the apprentices, once freed, had little choice except to continue on the sugar estates as wage laborers.

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However, in Jamaica—and also in Trinidad and British Guiana—there was a great deal of unoccupied, uncultivated land, so the ex-slaves would be able to desert the sugar estates and set up independent peasant settlements in the bush.

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more than half of the resident workers in 1838 had left the sugar estates by 1844. And by 1861, when the census found 147,468 “laborers,” probably two-thirds of this huge undifferentiated group had become independent peasant farmers.

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From 1655 to 1834 there had always been more black deaths than births, and now the overall Jamaican black population was actually increasing

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But in this book I have aimed for something different. I have tried to show a Jamaican slave community in action during the final seventy years of British Caribbean slavery (1762–1834) and a Virginia-Alabama slave community in parallel action during the final seventy years of United States slavery (1792–1865).

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Apr 29thFountain Pens, Charleston Green Ink

My uncle has an amazing fountain pen collection. He has gifted me a few, but I don’t use them for fear of losing them. I do occasionally carry disposable fountain pens since losing them is no big deal. I was at a performance review the other day using a Pilot Varsity when the reviewee noticed my pen. We got to talking, and he suggested the Pilot Metropolitan and that I check out Fahrney’s Pens (right next to Shelly’s Backroom in DC). As it turns out, the Metropolitan is a great pen, and it only runs about $14. I already have a couple. Now I keep a couple pens in my bag just for fun, for important documents, and for writing big checks. To make them my own/particular to me, I decided on dark green ink. I bought Noodler’s Zhivago, and Diamine Green Black. The former was a little too green for my tastes. The later was not rich enough, but plenty dark and formal. Unsatisfied, I bought some Noodler’s heart of darkness and mixed it with the Zhivago to get a beautiful dark Charleston Green. Perfect for business and personal correspondence.