We don't watch a lot of TV at all, but we have a free TV channel called Pluto, and they have all the Gunsmoke episodes on, and we went back to the very first one where the series was opened with John Wayne recommending it. It turned out to be a good endorsement as Gunsmoke ran for 20 seasons! So most nights after chores, we sit down and watch an episode. It runs for about 26 minutes, but to finish up all 20 seasons, it'll take us until 2030, I suppose. We enjoy watching Gunsmoke. The only bad thing is the commercials that Pluto requires you watch. (We don't watch. We mute them all.) All of them are pharmaceutical commercials, and it drives me nuts.
Watching Gunsmoke puts me in a time machine and transports me back to around 1976 sitting in my Grandma and Grandpa's house. We're in the den that was paneled in knotty pine paneling and we're watching Gunsmoke. My grandma would bring us bowls of Ozark Black Walnut ice cream - my grandpa's favorite, and we'd watch Marshal Matt Dillon save the day. He put many a gunfighter on Boot Hill. I didn't realize it at the time, but there was a budding romance between Matt and Kitty that never quite materialized. Darn it!
The topic today is coffee. I'll pull in why Gunsmoke is involved in just a skinny minute. We enjoy coffee. We'll put a pot on in the morning and another one after lunch. We aren't coffee snobs with a fancy expensive coffee maker. We use a simple Mr. Coffee drip pot. However, when we get some good fresh roasted beans, we'll grind them coarsely and use a french press. Talk about a good cup of coffee!
For the morning pot, we'll put three rounded tablespoons of coffee and make a pot. In the afternoon, (you might consider us uncivilized savages), we put another two tablespoons of coffee on top of the morning grounds and make another pot for after lunch. I thought that we were the only people that do this, but as it turns out, Chester from Gunsmoke does it too.
Chester Goode famously said on Gunsmoke, "Shoot, you don't make a cup, you build a pot. You don't really get a good pot until you've been usin' it about a week. Then it's coffee!"
Now, I don't know if we'll stretch it that far!! Ha Ha!! We have an old fashioned drip coffee pot, and I think we're going to make a pot in this old family heirloom and enjoy a cup like Chester and Marshal Dillon and Doc Adams might have sipped right there in Dodge City!
Although Chester might have been run out of modern hipster coffee joints, he was a true connoisseur of coffee. Here is an excerpt of Chester's doctoral thesis on the art of making coffee. Click on the arrow in the middle of the image below and enjoy!:
It's time for me to get the heck out of Dodge! Until next time...
