Guest Post

Check out my guest post on KC Coffee Geek

http://www.kccoffeegeek.com/madcap-coffee-kathakwa/

Kicking The Creamer Habit

I love good coffee.  For a large part of my life I didn't know that.  I grew up in a home where "coffee" often came in instant form.  Instant is something but it's not coffee.  Even when my parents were brewing coffee it came from a can and was old and bitter.  I didn't know coffee came from beans or could be a delightful treat.  I saw it as a hard tasting medicine that adults drank to survive the work day.

As I grew up and tried to "adult" I drank coffee.  With lots and lots of sugar and milk.  That is to say  I had some coffee with my milk.  As flavored creamers became more and more interesting I switched to these.  They are pretty sweet and I didn't need more sweetener, so I dumped the sugar from my cup.

Eventually I found my way to small batch roasters and artisan coffee.  I still used some creamer, but much less of it. I started learning more about coffee and all the various tastes that it can have.  How beans from different areas have different profiles.  I started drinking a shot of it black before adding my creamer so I could begin to taste these and it was so cool to learn how complex coffee could taste.  Coffee is naturally sweet!  Who knew!!

Eventually I got ahold of a bag of beans from Onyx Coffee Roasters and another from Bespoken.  Both were Ethiopian beans that had been roasted to the exact point where they were at the height of sweetness.  Creamer was too much.  It just overloaded the coffee.  I drank those black and started drinking more and more of my other coffees black as well.  It opened up a world of flavor that exists without fat, calories or manmade whatevers in it.

It's been ages since I have added creamer to regular coffee.  I do add it to super dark beans and I have milk in my latte or cappuccino.  I just have plain milk with those or occasionally some chocolate for a mocha.  I generally save the sweet syrups and heavily flavored creamer for when I am out and about and getting a treat.

I've really grown to appreciate the complex and varied flavors of coffee.  I've also grown to appreciate the artists who get the best from the beans.  Roasting coffee is somewhere between art and science.  Give two roasters the same beans and they will often get two totally different results.  A local roaster, Vincent,  at Maps Coffee  showed me his roaster and all the nifty tech parts of it and explained what he looks for in a roast.  It's fascinating to see the art of hitting the exact right point meld with the tech of the roaster and the science behind why that is the exact right point.  Vincent does guest roasting where you can learn more in depth.  I'm looking forward to doing that one day.

Today I love my coffee.  If you've seen my instagram (@shouldntsaythat) you know how much I love my coffee.  I still can't drink the stuff from a can and I refuse to think of the instant stuff as coffee.  Getting rid of the creamer has allowed me to really experience all that coffee has to offer.  It comes from a cherry - don't hide that behind some chemicals!

Recovery Lunch

On the way to the market the big kid wanted breakfast so we did a very bad thing.  We stopped at Taco Bell for "food"

Not calories well spent!  Bleah.  Not doing that again.  This giant lunch had only half the calories and 8x the taste of the awful thing I got at TB

I'm not opposed to eating out when $$ budget and Calorie budget allow - but I need to make much better choices.  I fell gross after my meal this morning.    Eating a nice salad did perk me up a bit.  Coffee didn't hurt either!  The white stuff on the salad plate is feta and on the fruit plate it's goat cheese.  I've been subbing feta for dressing.  I can go overboard with dressing and I find the feta accompanies the taste of the food instead of covering it up.  Sometimes I do still have dressing, but only about 10% of the time anymore.  With the goat cheese - I just have an obsession with goat cheese.  :-)  I ended up eating it on my salad instead of with my fruit but it would have been good with either.

All that shopping I do at the market put to use.  I had 2 of the mandarins, 1/4 cup of grapes, 1/2 cup of blueberries, my last tomato from last week, some onion, bell pepper, cucumber and spinach.  The cheeses and spinach came from the grocery store.  Everything else was from the market.  Well, not the coffee.  That is from Barefoot Coffee Roasters in CA.  Tasty stuff and this is my last cup.  It was a good bag of beans.

French Toast

Starting my budget meals off with a bang.  The kiddo had a friend over so I got fancy for breakfast with French Toast and fruit.  Worked out to be $1/serving.

I realized it's going to be hard to calculate some things because  if I've had them in the house  won't likely remember how much they cost.  Also milk & coffee are luxury items for me so I don't count them against the budget.  

Milk as a luxury?  Yeah, I prefer the taste of raw milk.  It's WAY WAY WAY more expensive than regular supermarket milk.  It's also something that can be eliminated from the monthly budget if I feel tight that month.

With coffee, it's more complicated.  I'm not going to eliminate it and I'm not going to drink cheap coffee ever.  Maybe it's a necessity, not a luxury.  I do save money by roasting my own beans.  That makes it about 20 cents a serving most of the  time.    That's a big savings over 45cents a cup from the kind I buy when I purchase roasted.  Funny thing even that is cheaper than those darn K-cups which are not not not good coffee (and bad for the environment).  Some people think it's fancy and rave over them, but gag - no.

Coffee is an experience for me.  From roasting to hand grinding to pour over brewing.  I don't take cream or sugar in it very often now.  Good coffee will do that.  You learn to enjoy the taste and don't want to hide it with other stuff.  You can follow my coffee life on one of my other blogs www.krulewich.com  I'm posting my year in coffee there.  On my instagram I post a cup a day from my collection  I love thrift shops and have tons of cups.  Too many.  I'm displaying them this year and as part of my minimizing my life I will keep a select few and sell the rest.  They are almost all vintage cups and as much as I enjoy them - I just don't have the space.  I'll post a link when I get around to that.

Back to budget food:

Lunch is leftovers and dinner will be black beans cooked in stock made from the bones of those hams I bought yesterday.  I boiled them with some peppers and made 3 quarts of stock.  Two will be saved for later and one was used today.  Black beans with a bit of ham and some gf cornbread from a mix I have on hand.  Today's food will come in at around $3 per person.  That's a tiny bit lower than my goal.  Good, because some days will be over a bit.    It's a rough estimate of course.  I'm not sure how to count the ham stock.  Mostly those would be trash, but I was able to get some good eating out of them and turn the stock into several more servings.

Oh well, as long as I only bring in $300 worth of new groceries for the month.

Handpresso - one day review

Whole Latte Love is giving a new deal every day before Thanksgiving.  One of them is the Handpresso in Silver

comes in a nice gift/storage box.  

The Handpresso is a manual espresso maker.  No electricity needed, just a way to heat the water.  You pump the handle until 16 bars (there is a gauge), add coffee and water - then you're ready for espresso, even when you're away from your machine.  Add a handheld milk frother and you can have a latte no matter where you go.

I like this one because you can use fresh ground coffee in it.  From what I've read you had to use pods in the previous version.  I've not dealt with pods in the past and don't really want to start now.  I like the way fresh ground beans smell.  It's addicting.

I'm still playing with it.  Trying to get a good cup of espresso with decent crema.  My first shot was too thin.  I didn't realize my grinder wasn't on the finest setting so it went too fast.  The second shot was better, but still not a good head of crema. 

I'll keep playing with it until I get it down.  Even if I never get the perfect shot - it's still great for traveling, which is why I wanted it.  

I've decided to rate products by my own scale.  I'm a balloon artist, so I'll use balloon dogs.  This one gets a 4.5 out of 5 balloon dogs.  Only took off the half star because of the difficulty getting crema.  I'll revisit the rating after I give it a few weeks of experimentation.

Handpresso

Pro -

----

Price - it's affordable

Quality of device - after 1 day I'm impressed.  I'll revisit & update this after a couple of months

Quality of espresso - Not the equivalent of an expensive machine but far better than what many restaurants serve or what you get from some of the home espresso  machines.

Portable - no need to miss out on good coffee just because you're not near a machine.

Can use fresh ground beans or pods if you wish.

I like the gift/storage box.

Con -

Difficult to get a good layer of crema.  I like the feel and taste of crema so that's a drawback for me.

Coffee a Day

I collect

Corningware with a corn flower blue pattern

ways to make coffee

cups to drink coffee


I've started showing off my coffee mug collection on Instagram.  my profile is @shouldntsaythat - follow me there!

In the mean time - here's what I've posted so far!

Much more interesting on Instagram since I tell you about what I'm drinking too.  :-)  

My all time favorite is the bottom one with the leaf imprints.  I bought it at Irish Fest 2013.  I recently tracked down the artist so I can get another one in blue.

I also love the beaker.  It makes my coffee taste like science.  :-)  This one is a replacement.  My husband broke the first one.