The Black and White Italian
In Superman 3, Richard Pryor… um… "stars"?... as Gus, a down-on-his-luck guy looking for a break until he realizes while taking a programming class for a new job opportunity that he is in fact an incredibly talented programmer. When his first paycheck isn't up to snuff, he learns about fractions of pennies that are being casually disregarded by the computing system at his company, and writes a program to tally up those fractions and drop them in his paycheck. (If you've ever seen Office Space, they try to do the same thing.)
Meanwhile, elsewhere, Superman saves the day when he manages to drop an entire frozen lake on a burning chemical factory before some volatile chemicals get to a temperature that would cause a cloud of gases to devastate the east coast. Our favorite photographer, Jimmy Olsen, is on the scene to get pictures, and ends up falling from a ladder that he wasn't supposed to be on and injuring his ankle, and so it's no wonder that he's not able to go to Italy to help cover the story when Superman straightens the leaning tower of Pisa.
You see, when Gus' financial trickery is discovered by his employers, they extort him and force him to (reluctantly) try to help them carry out a plan to kill Superman, whose do-gooder activities are doing damage to their bottom line. Gus sets out to try to reconstruct a piece of Kryptonite using incomplete data, having to replace a final unknown element with "tar" read off of a pack of cigarettes when he's wracking his brain to figure out the last ingredient.1. He then manages to present the rock to Superman as a "gift" for his heroics, however nothing seems to happen, and he assumes that his missing ingredient has caused the kryptonite to be ineffective. We soon learn that this is not the case, and Superman starts to exhibit erratic, carefree, and even destructive behavior as a result… including straightening the leaning tower to the dismay of a nearby tourist truck dealing in miniature leaning towers...
Well, Jimmy, we felt really bad that you didn't make it to Pisa to cover the mysterious straightening of the Leaning Tower, so we've decided to bring a little well-dressed Italian class to you in the form of an only slightly modified take on the Black and White Italian Cocktail recipe courtesy of Susan at A Less Processed Life, which in turn draws on a recipe suggested by Giada De Laurentiis of the Food Network.
As you can see, it turns out pouring half and half on top of all of those ingredients, no matter how carefully, definitely does not just 'layer' like that.
Instructions:
I'm using parts instead of ounces, since I just based my measurements on a shot glass I was using. The original recipe wanted 1/2 ounce amaretto, 1 ounce vodka, and 1 ounce Kahlua, but I decided to even out the Kahlua and amaretto a little by reducing the Kahlua to 1/2, and then doing everything in terms of 'parts' relative to the 1/2 ounce measurements in the modified recipe.
- Freeze coffee into an ice cube in advance. I decided to freeze a honkin' huge sphere, but I have backup cubes of normal size.
- Stir 1 part Disaronno, 2 parts vodka (I'm using Reyka Icelandic), and 1 part Kahlua, and pour over the ice.
- Top off with 2 parts half-and-half.
- This should look nice and layered for a photo, but then give it a stir when you actually go to drink it.
- Optional: Giada's version suggests an optional sprinkle of cinnamon.