Never Take Your Coffee for Granted

There are some things you take for granted in life. Like the sun rising.  That Friday always comes after Thursday. And that the neon green coffee scoop will be in the coffee canister.

This morning it wasn’t. I blinked and looked in the canister again. Lots of coffee, no scoop. I checked the kitchen drawers. I checked the dish washer. I checked the drawers again. I checked the dishwasher again. No scoop.

I took a deep breath. A missing coffee scoop does not constitute an emergency. Except when, you know, I haven’t had coffee yet. So I got out my measuring spoons. But none of them looked like the right size. I castigated myself for never figuring out how many tablespoons fit into the coffee scoop.

I checked the drawers again. Still no scoop, though why I expected the third check to be different than the first two, I have no idea.  I blamed the children. I considered blaming Calvin, but he didn’t do the dishes (besides he’s been suffering from a kidney stone, so he gets a pass on the missing-coffee-scoop blame game).

Then, I remembered that I’ve been using the same amount of coffee for fourteen years, so I probably have a mental picture of what it looks like in the coffee grinder. (See, I’m brilliant like that first thing in the morning.)

I dumped beans into the grinder until it looked right.  Then, with great trepidation, I ground the beans and made the coffee. The color is good—black in the center, mahogany at the edges where it touches the mug. The smell is perfect. Woodsy aroma with esters of chocolate and smoke. (Does coffee actually have esters in it? Oh, well, it sounds good.) So I pick up the cup and delicately taste it. And it tastes wrong. The bitter bliss is gone. ACK!

I have GOT to find the coffee scoop.

Image by Arnaud Gaillard, courtesy of Wikimedia.

The Power of Coffee

I’ve been sick. It’s one of those nasty spring viruses that you catch just when you think you’ve made it through the winter. So I’ve spent some time on the couch, sneezing, feverish, etc. But I have made an observation. My family needs me. Here’s why.

1. Someone will cook dinner. Which is wonderful. That someone, however, does not care about vegetables. I make sure we have veggies.

2. Someone will fold the laundry. But they will not fold socks. Socks are viewed with great suspicion and remain in a pile on the bottom of the laundry basket. I suspect that the socks would eventually get folded, but not until everyone ran out of them. I always fold socks. And I know which socks belong to whom.

3. No one waters the plants. Okay, that might be because I have exotic plants with special needs—my laundry room has labeled water jugs, fertilizers, stakes, etc. But still, without me the plants would die and then my family wouldn’t get to enjoy the orchids, African violets, and tropical pitcher plant.

4. No one will throw out the junk mail. It simply gets moved from one place to another and grows. I throw it out as soon as it comes in the front door.

5. No one can do the morning coffee like I can. Everyone knows how to make it. But only I can get the portions just right. And only I can pour. Seriously. Only I can make the coffee come out evenly into six cups. There is nothing more critical first thing in the morning than making sure everyone gets their fair share of coffee. On Monday, one of the minions did not pour the coffee correctly. Great gnashing of teeth followed. Even encouragements to “just make another pot” do not adequately deal with the fact that the coffee wasn’t poured right. And we all know, if the morning coffee ain’t right, ain’t nothing gonna go right today.

Photo Julius Schorzman courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Why I Need A Second Cup of Coffee

I am not an early bird. But I get up early and make a pot of coffee. And not any pot—a pot of freshly ground French roasted beans in a stainless steel Bodum French press. And as wonderful as that is, I wouldn’t get up early just to make it for myself. I get up to make it for my kids—would you want to go to Biochem without a cup of coffee to warm your body and soul?

My husband says that I should let them make their own coffee. I probably should. But I love watching the sun rise and being greeted by my son’s hamster, who spends the night in the dining room because he’s so noisy. When I turn on the dining room light, Rumplestiltskin leaves his wheel and runs to the cage door to greet me. After I say “Good Morning,” he goes back to his wheel.

And I love reading blogs while I eat my toast with cheese, watching various family members stumble out of bed to their cups of coffee. Sometimes they give me the “you-are-a-blessed-saint” look and sometimes I get the “you-are-a-crazed-earlybird” look. But I’m thankful to have them around. I know a lot of kids go off to college and that’s a wonderful opportunity. But we also know lots of people saddled with undergrad and grad school debt, who make life choices based on their debt. Scholarships and living at home during their undergrad years should free our kids of that burden, especially since there’s a major university a couple of miles from our home.

Of course, it does make our house crowded, noisy, and opinionated to have four adults and two near adults living in one home. But I get to be a part of their lives for a while longer and hear about their professors and classes and learn about physical chemistry and partial differential equations. And in the meantime, if I have to get up early and watch the sunrise for time alone and quiet, I think I can manage that.

Time for a second cup of coffee.

Taking It to the Next Level

I love coffee. I like feeling the heat through the ceramic mug. The scent spirals in steam against my face. The nuances of dark chocolate and Cabernet that flavor the taste. Yes, it is almost a sacramental experience.

And I have all the right equipment. Two coffee grinders. One is an old-fashion hand-cranked mill that makes perfect coffee. The other is our every day electric grinder. I have an insulated stainless Bodum French press that allows the oils of the coffee to remain and coat the tongue in a lingering finish.

But I’m lacking one thing. I’ve never roasted my own beans. A few weeks ago, a friend (thank you, Julie) sent us a bag of green coffee beans. I giddily opened the bag and took a whiff of green beans. I scowled. Green coffee beans stink. I spent time on Google, researching how to best roast the beans without a big money investment. It turns out that the most practical, cheap method of roasting is a popcorn popper. And it turns out that ours is the “highly recommended” brand. (Though I wonder if our popcorn will have a coffee flavor from here on out.)

So we (Ariel, Matt, and I) took the popper outside, having read that clouds of coffee smoke would set off our smoke alarms. Sadly, there were no clouds of smoke, though there was enough to keep the mosquitoes away. (The other day I got seven bites just while I was putting food in the pond for the goldfish. I’ve now assigned my kids to feed the fish.)

Coffee bean chaff floated through the air. And it smelled fantastic. We went for the dark roast, which our directions said would take 6.5 minutes. But it wasn’t dark enough. So we went to 8 minutes before we stopped the roast because we didn’t want the beans to burn. The roast isn’t as dark as we normally drink. We’ll do darker today.

The coffee had a delicious woodsy flavor with absolutely no bitterness. I’m hoping a longer roast time will bring out the deeper flavors and more of the oils. Our directions said that the beans should be glossy with oils and our beans didn’t get that way. Any suggestions from experienced roasters?

Here are some photos.

Dark beans after roasting compared with green beans.

 Here are the beans in a metal colander--they have to be shaken to cool properly.

The Great Under-Thirty Conspiracy

Do you know what I hate/abhor/become homicidal about? I loathe being twenty minutes into writing an email or blog post, and then for some reason my finger touches the wrong button and whatever text I’ve written disappears into the electronic abyss. Of course, there’s an “undo” button, but I type very fast and by the time the text vanishes I’ve typed a couple of letters. When I hit the undo button, a “d” or an “s” pops up.

I’ve spoken to the technological geniuses of my home about the situation. Their response is “you shouldn’t type so fast.” Right, that makes me feels better. This morning I was halfway through a blog post and the computer ate it. Who programs these text-eaters? I imagine it’s some skinny kid who’s almost 18 and has been working at Microsoft for 5 years. I don’t know why he wants to make my life miserable. But I’m guessing it’s something like the following: he stayed up too late and his mom had to wake him up to get to work on time. She had to nag him to shower. Then for breakfast she gave him oatmeal instead of Coco Puffs. Then, horror of horrors she ran out of the good coffee and made Folgers instead. (Being forced to drink Folgers would do it for my kids. Folgers would make them ready to lock and load. Actually, when we run out of good coffee, my children send very whiney emails to my mother begging for good coffee since their mother is poisoning them with the cheap stuff.)

At any rate, back to our skinny programmer. He determines to punish all fast typists who are over the age of thirty, of whom his mother is one. So he programs in a “short cut,” which is something along the lines of “double shift Z” or “shift alt.” Some combination of keys that pre-arthritic fingers stumble over. Then he laughs and tells all of his buddies.

A child (Jacob) reading over my shoulder just announced to me, “Hey, Mom, the short cut to delete chunks of text is ‘shift, page-down, and then hit any other key.’” How does he know that?! We don’t have a Short-Cuts Manual lying around the house. I’m sure it must be some great under thirty conspiracy.

A Wet Slipper

This morning dawned dark, and rainy, but that was okay because I let myself sleep an extra half hour—what else are dreary days for? I dragged myself from my warm covers to the kitchen to boil water for coffee. Yes, we use a French press—it’s the only way to experience caffeine the way God intended. After I put the kettle on, I stepped into a puddle in the middle of the kitchen.

Normally, any unexplained puddle of water is blamed on Jezebel. But even my befuddled brain knew that since she was still in her kennel there was no way that I could blame her. I took off my wet slipper and sniffed. Rainwater. Not good. So not good. That this point a little adrenaline made its way to my brain, and I heard a dripping sound followed by a splash.

Rainwater was leaking from the middle of the window frame, splashing onto the ledge, spilling onto the counter, racing over the edge, pouring to the floor, and streaming to the puddle into the middle of the kitchen floor. Heavy sigh.

Cal got up and said, “How’s the basement?”
Me: Basement’s good. Kitchen’s bad. (See, I really need that first blast of caffeine.)
Cal: The kitchen?
Me: My slipper’s wet.
Cal: Right. (Cal knows that there’s a connection somewhere, and I’ll get around to it.)
Me: The window frame’s leaking, hits the ledge, flows onto the counter, hits the floor, runs to the middle of the kitchen. And I stepped in it.
Cal: Oh, guess we’ll have to do something.
Me: I cleaned it up and put a bowl under the drip.
Cal: I mean so it doesn’t leak anymore.
Me: Right.
Cal: I was thinking of sealant and flashing. It might be a bit ugly.
Me: But the kitchen will be dry, and my slipper won’t get wet. (I really hate wet slippers.)
Cal: Precisely.
Me: I can live with ugly. Now, if only there were a way to uglify the basement.

I Need A New Hammer

I’m blogging now, not because I have some hilarious thought or incident to share. Nope. I’m blogging because I’m so sick of editing. I’m working on another edit of my Young Adult novel, Screwing Up Time. My hope is that if I do a really great edit, I might land a literary agent even though the publishing industry is in freefall. (BTW, whenever a massive publishing house like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt decides not to acquire any new books, the situation is bad. I used to work for Harcourt back before I had kids, which was a long time ago, and doesn’t mean they look at my work.)

At any rate, I’m editing yet again. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve edited this book. The fun part of writing is, guess what, the writing part. Writing is amazing—it’s like an addictive drug. (Caveat: the only addictive drug I’ve ever had is caffeine, but coffee is a legal stimulant so I’m good.) Writing is way, way better than coffee—why else would people write fiction, the chances of getting published are non-existent.

But the down side of writing is editing. Editing is like slamming your finger with a hammer repeatedly—it’s only great when you’re done, but then your finger still hurts. See, I can edit and edit. But then, you can always edit again (and you probably should). The accepted wisdom is that any writer can write, but the great writers know how to edit.

So, here I am slamming my hammer onto my finger, telling myself that it really doesn’t hurt. Maybe what I need is a new and better hammer. Yeah, maybe a rubber mallet would work better…