Post-Modern Drunk: The Wedding: Fortune Favors the Bold
It's been a month, and I've been despairing of how to write about my wedding, even though I know I can just put any old thing saying, "I got married!" and it'll be Liked a half dozen times out of reflex. The effect is fading, but by my estimation, putting the words "my wife" into any old Facebook post doubles the amount of Likes on it.

So I'm going to start small when it comes to talking about my wedding. Let's just talk about wedding favors.

I haven't been to a lot of weddings (only a couple a year), so a couple of the traditions went completely unnoticed by me. For instance, I was unaware there even was a tradition as to the precise moment it is okay for the groom to see the bride. And I was unaware that there was a tradition of providing food--often Jordan almonds--as a wedding guest.

Anyway, also by the time the wedding came around, we were over budget. One wedding website I read recommended that you allot 3% of your wedding budget to wedding favors. Fuck that noise.

So no falling back on tradition. Not even knowing a tradition existed makes it really easy to buck tradition. Being over budget makes you more creative.

So, after reading about it on a random wedding article, we decided to make sriracha salt. It's "unique" (as unique as something you got the recipe for from another wedding website), and memorable, and cheap. It's got the benefit of being one of those things that, if you're the type of person who likes that sort of thing, you're really going to like it. And it's small enough so that people who don't like that sort of thing can appreciate the gesture, put it on their shelves, and never touch it.

As someone putting together wedding favors, programs, gift bags, and wedding guides, you have to realize that a fair portion of the stuff you're going to spend a lot of time on is going to be looked at once, and then either set aside and forgotten or, best case scenario, put on someone's fridge until enough time has passed for them to throw it away in a spring cleaning. That's just the nature of the beast--you've done it for other people's weddings, and other people are going to do it for yours.

So, sriracha salt. All it took was six pounds of kosher salt, two bottles of sriracha, and time.

We'd mix three cups of salt with ten tablespoons of sriracha (for a home cook not preparing this for 100 people, I'd recommend doing a half a cup of salt and five tsps of sriracha), and dump it on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper to dry out completely. You can do this by leaving it out overnight, or, if you're trying to do six pounds of it or are just generally impatient, you can dry it out by putting it into an oven you've preheated to 350 and shut off immediately after you put the salt in. Leave it in until it's dry, two or three hours. Then bottle it up in about 100 bottles, put nice labels on it, and give it to everyone who likes you.







And, a vine, courtesy of Rich.

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took my chances on a big jet plane				five years, my brain hurts a lot

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