The New Coffee Bar

My Mom & Dad aren't real big coffee drinkers.  They enjoy hot tea.  We keep an assortment of teas when they come to visit.  Mom likes Raspberry Zinger.  Growing up, my Grandparents drank coffee.  I can remember spending the night at their house and waking up to the delicious smell of coffee percolating.  At my maternal grandparents, they drank Seaport Coffee Between Medium and Dark Roast.  At my paternal grandparents, it was Community Coffee Dark Roast.  Each had a distinctive aroma.  We would make what we'd call "coffee milk."  That's where you pour half a cup of coffee and half a cup of milk along with a couple of tablespoons of sugar.  It was so good!  At the end of the cup you'd hold the cup up to allow the not dissolved sugar to drip into your mouth.

My wife and I enjoy a cup (or three) of coffee.  I am in charge of making the coffee.  The coffee machine is near the stove and when I make it at night to set for the morning coffee, I find myself quite often incurring the wrath of my bride because I get in her way in the kitchen.  There's an old saying that says, "If you can't stand the heat, get outta the kitchen."  That became my goal in life, so I began on a project.

If you've read the blog for any time, you know I like re-purposing old things.  In fact, there's no joy like the joy of finding a use for something that you've set aside (for years) thinking that you might need it in the future.  Well, when we installed a ceiling fan in my office, we removed the old fixture and I set it aside for "later use."

Here's where things start coming together.  In our den we have an armoire where our TV and stereo sits.  We don't watch much TV and the armoire is a big bulky piece of furniture.  Perhaps we could move it to the kitchen and turn it into a coffee bar!  That's just what we did:

I hung the old fixture to the top of the armoire and screwed some plywood to the back.  Tricia picked out some rustic/vintage looking tile and we had it affixed to the plywood on the back.

And here is a shot of our new (old) coffee bar!:

It sits in our kitchen, welcoming coffee drinkers and has enabled me to abide on the outskirts of the kitchen away from the triangle work stations of the refrigerator, sink and stove.  Coffee is set to begin brewing at about 6 AM sharp tomorrow morning.  After morning milking, we'll sit and drink coffee and read the Bible.  It is a perfect way to start the day!

I Am A Pie Guy

I leave the house each morning about 5:30 am and drive approximately 42 minutes to work.  While driving, I enjoy a thermos of coffee, sweetened slightly by a half teaspoon of local honey with pour of heavy cream from our cows.  I was about 20 minutes into my trip and had finished about half of the coffee.  I reached over and took a sip of coffee, but something was odd.  There was something solid in my mouth.  Coffee is supposed to be liquid.  I spit the solid substance into my hand and turned on the light.  It looked like a raisin.  Who put a raisin in my coffee? 

Wait a minute!  That's not a raisin.  It's a FLY!!!  I spit it out and sat there driving.  Should I pour the rest of the coffee out?  The coffee that has been marinating in fly juice?  Nah, I just finished it and tried real hard not to think about it.  It took every bit of concentration I could muster.  Let's think about more pleasant thoughts, shall we?

Since the land has been purchased across the road and plowed, our dewberry patch is gone.  We found some growing in the back and picked three quarts, and that's not bad.  It's just not the 3 gallons we used to pick.  Our thornless blackberries are growing nicely, but with two bushes, we primarily pick them just to eat one by one. 

One evening a friend dropped by with a bucket of berries he had picked from his blackberry patch and wanted to give them to us!  What a blessing!!  Big, plump, sweet blackberries...

You'll never see my turn down dessert.  I have a sweet tooth, so I like all types of sweets.  I think my favorite, though, is homemade pie.  Coconut cream with a tall meringue, pecan, apple, peach, chocolate.  I've not found a pie that I didn't like, although I heard in England they serve a kidney pie.  I don't think that sounds good.

Anyway, Tricia decided to make a blackberry pie with our bucket of berries.  She made up a homemade crust, added flour, berries, and butter...

It wasn't long before it was ready to come out of the oven.

I attempted and failed to get a slice of pie without it falling apart. 

A slice of homemade pie and a cup of coffee (minus the fly).  One of life's simple pleasures.

If You Break It, You Buy It

"If you break it, you buy it," was a quote I often heard as a boy.  I think it probably originated from shopkeepers who tired of young boys going in their shops, rough-housing and breaking the merchandise.  They wisely instituted a rule that made the parents have to buy the items that kids broke.

I hadn't thought about that in a long time until just recently.  At my last place of employment, I had a company car.  I figured since I was driving a company vehicle, I had no reason to keep the old "beater" that I was driving, even though it was paid for to save paying insurance on a car I wasn't driving.  So I let it go.  It seemed like a wise move until my employment came to an end after a year and I suddenly found myself shopping for a vehicle.

We scoured the Internet looking for a dependable used car and found it right in our home town.  On a recent Saturday morning, Tricia and I poured ourselves big mugs of coffee (this will be an important part of the story later on) and drove approximately 4 1/2 miles into town to the used car dealer.  And there she was: A pearl white 2017 Hyundai Sonata with only 31,500 miles on it and reasonably priced.  It was a rental vehicle like our existing car.  They must turn them in after 31,000 miles as that was the same amount of mileage that our existing car had.

We were pretty certain if we could get the price down by $400 or so, we'd make the purchase.  I sat in the driver's seat and turned on the ignition.  I heard Tricia open the back door on the driver's seat and lean over.  She may have said, "uh oh."  Or she may have said, "Doggonit!"  I'm not sure, but when I turned around, she had a funny look on her face and said, "I spilled my coffee on the backseat!" 

She went and told the car salesman what she had done.  He said, "That's okay.  We'll get it out."  I told him, "If we break it, we have to buy it?"  We laughed.  A few days later we went back and closed the deal.  Tricia's coffee stain still graces the back seat reminding us that it okay to laugh at ourselves.

No one else probably notices it, but we do.  Everyone always says after you buy a new car, that sooner or later you get that first 'ding' in the door that initiates a vehicle's rapid depreciation.  Our first 'ding' or coffee stain actually happened before we officially purchased it!

The Best Part of Waking Up

The best part of waking up... (sorry Folgers), is Community Coffee in your cup.  Tricia and I switched from Dark Roast to Coffee and Chicory a while back.  We like the extra "bite" of the coffee.  Each night before bed, we get the coffee all prepared and the water ready and in the morning on the way out the door to milk the cows, I'll turn the coffee maker on.  When I come back inside, the aroma in the kitchen is wonderful!

We have a regular "Mr. Coffee" type coffee maker, but on weekends and special occasions, we will brew the coffee in a french press.  Coffee in a french press always tastes richer.  I've been told that it's because in a regular drip coffee maker, flavorful oils get trapped in the paper coffee filter, but I'm not sure if that is true or not.  Away from home, I'll drink it black, but at home, I'll add some fresh cream from our cows and a teaspoon of honey from our friend's bees and it is delicious.

This morning I fixed a big thermos of coffee as I headed out the door.  I was driving to Baton Rouge for work today.  Baton Rouge is about an hour and a half away and is due east on I-10.  I sipped on my coffee as I drove and observed night gradually becoming day.  On the Atchafalaya Freeway the rising sun glimmered on the water in Henderson Swamp.  It was a chilly morning (53 degrees) and water vapor was rising off the water, shrouding the cypress trees - a beautiful sight.

The Atchafalaya Basin Bridge is almost 19 miles long and is the third longest bridge in the United States.  As I exited the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge, I finished my thermos of coffee and could see the Louisiana State Capital building due east, perfectly framed in the eastern sky with the trees on either side of the Interstate.  It wasn't long before I was on the Mississippi River Bridge heading into Baton Rouge.

Traffic soon came to a standstill on the western side of the bridge in Port Allen and I could see light smoke wafting across the bridge.  At first I thought there was an accident and then I remembered!  I quickly unrolled my window and breathed in deeply.  Sounds weird, right?  Let me explain.  Community Coffee has a roasting plant on the western side of the Mississippi River in Port Allen, right near I-10 where they roast coffee beans.  At certain times from your car as you ride over the bridge, you can smell the great aroma of roasting coffee beans.  Looking on the bright side, being in stalled traffic on the bridge, I could at least enjoy the soothing aroma of roasting coffee right from my vehicle.  Aroma therapy, you might say! 

While We Are on The Subject of Solenopsis

Solenopsis is the scientific name for the fire ant.  Solenopsis is too nice of a name for those cursed ants that inhabit almost every square yard of our soil.  Last night I posted about how I took great joy in boiling a colony of ants alive with water left over from processing pickled beets.  I looked on with glee as the pile of ant carcasses sat atop their once thriving colony.  Boiling water is a cheap and effective way of killing ants if you don't mind killing the grass around the ant pile.

While boiling water works in eradicating most every ant in the mound, you can't use it in the garden as the boiling water will also boil your plants.  I wanted to show you an experiment I tried using Starbucks Coffee coffee grounds.  Starbucks has a program called "Grounds for Your Garden" in which they will give you (FOR FREE!!) used coffee grounds for use in your garden.  All you have to do is go pick them up.

Below you can see a huge ant colony that has built their sprawling estate on my pepper row.  If I sprayed poison to kill the ants, some of that poison would undoubtedly end up in my peppers.  It is not a wise idea to eat ant-killer flavored peppers.

But that is where my experiment comes into play.  Rather than use poison, I'll use coffee grounds from Starbucks.  I poured out the bags of coffee-drenched coffee grounds along with the drenched paper filters and spread them liberally on the fire ant mound.

Did the Starbucks Coffee coffee grounds kill the fire ants??  No, sadly, it did not kill the fire ants..   However, I thought I could see the ants loading up their tiny ant luggage and hitting the open road with the pepper row in their rear-view mirrors.  It is clear that fire ants do not like coffee grounds, but coffee grounds doesn't  kill them.  But by the next day, when I moved the coffee grounds away, all of the ants were gone!  There wasn't a single ant left!  They picked up their stuff and moved. They likely moved somewhere out of the garden and into the lawn and that's where they made their fatal mistake.  I"m not afraid of using ant poison in the yard - just not in the garden.  If they moved to the yard, I'll sprinkle some ant poison on the mound and eradicate the whole mound.

Starbucks coffee grounds scared off the fire ants.  Just sprinkle a generous portion of coffee grounds over  a fire ant mound and you'll send them packing!

Processing Chicory from the Garden to make Coffee!

In THIS BLOG POST we discussed about how we had determined that the plant in our garden that made the most beautiful blue flowers was endive.  We told you how endive is actually chicory - the same root that is ground up and added to coffee.  That previous blog post explained the history of why it was added to coffee and ended with a commitment to try our hand at making our own chicory to add to our coffee.  This post chronicles that experiment.

First off, chicory has numerous health benefits which can be read about in more detail HERE, but they include aiding digestion, strong antioxidant properties, and provides functional support to the liver.  Here is a photo of the beautiful flowers produced by the endive plant.  While beautiful, what we're after today is not so pretty and resides below ground level.

Flowers of the Endive (chicory) plant

We've pulled the endive plants up because we're after the roots.  You can see that it has a large tap root with a very vigorous root system.

The Root Cause

Processing chicory for coffee is a very simple process.  Once we dug the endive plants up, I clipped off the roots and washed them to remove the dirt.

Clipped off roots ready for washing

I used a sharp knife to cut the roots into little pieces, aiming for nothing thicker than a quarter inch thick.  This was the hardest part of the job.  Next time, rather than using a knife, I'll try some pruning shears or clippers.

Slicing up the chicory root into small pieces

Once I had the roots all cut up, I put them on a pizza pan in an oven set at 325 F and set the timer for 2 1/2 hours, aiming to dry out the roots so that we can grind it into a powder.  About an hour into the process, the house became filled with a wonderful aroma, that smelled nice, woodsy, and chocolatey.

Baking the chopped chicory root to dry it out

Once the allotted time had passed, we pulled the dried root out of the oven and allowed to cool.  We pulled out a coffee grinder that is intended for grinding whole coffee beans into ground coffee.  Today we're going to use it to grind up chicory root.

Coffee Chicory Root Grinder

In just a short while, the root was turned into a fine powder which also had a few bigger sized chunks in it.  It looks almost like a seed starting mix of soil that you use to start seeds in.  But we won't start seeds in it. We're gonna drink it.

Ground chicory root

Now all that is left to do was to taste it.  Tricia and I were pretty excited about it and if the aroma in the kitchen was any indication, this experiment was going to be a successful endeavor.  We used a French Press to make our coffee with our ground chicory root.  We weren't exactly sure about the amounts to use so we added 3 parts coffee to 1 part ground chicory to the french press, added boiling water and allowed the coffee & chicory to steep for a couple or three minutes.

Fresh Ground Chicory Root

We pressed the coffee and poured it into mugs with a little local honey and fresh heavy cream from the cows and prepared ourselves to enjoy this afternoon cup.

Coffee & Fresh Ground Chicory

Here is my review:  As I poured the coffee & chicory into Tricia's mug, the fragrance was great.  Coffee always smells good to me, but this had an earthy (roots come from the earth, duh!), chocolatey smell.  The coffee, even after adding cream looked dark, black, thick and strong.  Tricia added a bit more cream to her cup.  The appearance made me anticipate a bitter, strong taste, but it was smooth, and nice tasting, almost as if cocoa had been added to it.  Benjamin was curious and asked for a taste and LOVED IT!  We have enough ground chicory to make several more batches, but we will try to ration it since we don't have a lot of it.  At least now I know of another great way to enjoy endive (chicory), not only in salad greens, not only with the beautiful blue flowers, but also in its contribution to making a great cup of coffee.

A good cup of coffee

We love a good cup of coffee.  Normally, before we head out to the barn in the morning to milk the cows, we'll turn on the coffee pot so that we have coffee made when we get back inside.  We have a regular Black & Decker "Mr. Coffee"-style drip pot that we use every morning.  It makes good coffee, but I'll tell you what.  There are several things that can take a good cup of coffee and turn it into a great one:

• The type of coffee you're using, and
• The type of coffee maker you're using.

Normally, we'll use either Community Coffee Dark Roast or CDM (Cafe du Monde) Coffee & Chicory.   Both are pretty strong and the chicory takes a little getting used to, but both are good to us.  I already discussed the drip pot that we use, but this afternoon, on our quest for the perfect cup of coffee, we're pulling out the pièce de résistance, The French Press.

The French Press is a coffee maker that uses a simple process to make an exceptional cup of coffee.  In a way it is similar to 'camp coffee', if you've ever had that on a camp-out.  Here's what you do.  Our french press holds 32 ounces of water.  I pour 5 rounded scoops of coffee into the bottom of the french press and put 32 ounces of filtered water to boil on the stove. 


5 rounded scoops of CDM coffee in the bottom of the french press

When the water has come to a boil pour it directly into the press.  

Boiling water added to the press

The lid has a circular screen that can be pushed down by a plunger on top.  What you want to do is just put the cap on top so that you block any steam from escaping.  Don't plunge it down yet.  Let it sit and steep for five minutes.  Sometimes I'll wrap a dishrag around the french press to hold the heat in.


Put the cover on to block any steam from escaping

Once five minutes has passed, press the plunger all the way down.  Doing this will keep all (well, most) of the coffee grounds down at the bottom when you pour.  One of the secrets of the french press is that there are no paper filters to draw any of the oils that provide flavor.  All the flavor is retained in the coffee for your enjoyment.  Every Sunday we have "Truffle Sunday" or 'merienda' where we have a good cup of coffee along with some decadent dark chocolate truffles and visit and plan our up-coming week.  

Coffee's on!

And here it is, quite possibly the perfect cup of coffee!


Escaping the daily grind

One word of caution, though.  There is a national brand coffee that advertises that their coffee is "good to the last drop."  You don't want to drink the last drop of this cup as the bottom of the cup will have a few coffee grinds that the screen didn't filter out.