Category → Coffee
Can You Love Bad Coffee?
- Image via Wikipedia
I have a passion for great coffee and tea. I have not really mentioned tea here yet, but I intend to down the road. Great tea was out of the question while I was living in my car, as it’s rarely served anywhere in cafes and there are so very very few tea shops. I will leave more on tea for another post, though.
Today, I made a cup of coffee for myself using canned evaporated mill. I sweetened it with my usual product, DiabetiSweet which is, in my opinion, the best artificial sweetener in the world. DiabetiSweet does not contain aspartame, saccharin, sucrose, fructose, sorbitol, maltodextrin, or dextrose. DiabetiSweet is sweetened with Acesulfame-K, a high intensity non-nutritive sweetener. It also contains Isomalt, a heat-stable bulking agent that adds volume to cakes, breads, and other recipes. Again, DiabetiSweet does not contain aspartame, saccharin, sucrose, fructose, sorbitol, maltodextrin, or dextrose.
It measures like sugar, and unlike all the other non-sugar sweeteners I’ve tried, it works perfectly in hot as well as cold uses, both in beverages such as coffee or tea and in baked goods. According to Wikipedea: Acesulfame potassium is a calorie-free artificial sweetener, also known as Acesulfame K or Ace K (K being the symbol for potassium), and marketed under the trade names Sunett and Sweet One. In the European Union, it is known under the E number (additive code) E950.[1] It was discovered accidentally in 1967 by German chemist Karl Clauss at Hoechst AG (now Nutrinova).
Now, this is not a post about artificial sweeteners, though I might do one later. However, I’ve been out of DiabetiSweet for a long time. I just got a case in and now, I ran ou
t of both half and half and milk. BAH. So, I made my morning coffee today with a combination of DiabetiSweet and Evaporated Milk. (Not sweetened condensed, just evaporated.) Yes, I drink my coffee light and sweet. Actually, I go back and forth depending on my taste at the tine between black and light and sweet. Drinking my coffee with evaporated milk this morning triggered major taste memories for me!
For almost all of the 80s and part of the 70s, I lived aboard a catamaran (two hulled sailing boat) in the Caribbean, moving from island to island as the mood and season moved me. On most of these islands and, indeed on my boat which had no refrigerator, coffee was usually sweetened with canned condensed milk. It’s a favorite all over the Caribbean and Central and South America.
I am now completely hooked on drinking my coffee this way, Down in the Caribbean, I usually drank the local bean which ranged from fantastic in some islands such as Puerto Rico and Jamaica to the truly miserable in I won’t name where. Mostly it was all mixed with condensed milk if you wanted it anything but black. As with office workers who come to prefer coffee lightened with Powdered Coffee Lightner, I and many others have developed a taste for coffee made specifically with sweetened condensed milk! This extends to the point, in fact, that I even miss the out and out sour coffees that where served in the area, even occasionally the horrid instant coffees! I love great, properly and recently roasted Arabica coffee. how is this possible?
What are your secret coffee loves? And other secret likes in general?
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Cafe Du Monde
If you are a coffee lover, this is one of the must see places of US Coffee tradition. OLpen since 1862
, yes, I said 1862 at the north end of the French Market in the Historic New Orleans French Quarter, Cafe Du Monde is something else. It’s not a pretty place. It’s not beautiful to behold. It’s not particularly friendly, not that it’s cold either and it’s not the kind of place where “everyone knows your name”. It is open 24/7 save for Christmas and Hurricanes. And it does serve some of the best Cafe Au Lait you will find in the country! You will be drinking a cuppa history here, and a damn fine one at that!
You can have your cuppa decaf is you like, or you can order french roast coffee (which does not have chicory blended in as do the regular and decaf coffee’s, chicory in coffee is a New Orleans hallmark) And to go with your coffee, you can have fresh, hot out of the oil and mounded with powdered sugar Beignets A Beignet is a french sty deep fat fried pastry that is basically a raised doughnut, without the hole. Fresh and hot as the always are, served three per order, there is nothing finer to go with that cuppa in the world!
Just a few blocks down Decatur St. from the cafe is the Cafe Du Monde shop, which sells the coffees, beignet mixes, and lots of fun souvenirs. I like the fact that ther cafe and store as separate, makes the cafe feel like a cafe and not a commercial.
;)
My swag From tire CafeYou can find the Cafe Du Monde on Decatur St, on the northern edge of the French Market. Just ask anyone in the French Quarter, they will be happy to tell you where it is!
It’s Damn Hot In New Orleans
“Surprise, surprise, surprise!” — Gomer Pyle, USMC
Did he say New Orleans?
Yes, I said New Orleans. I’ve been debating with myself for a week since I found I would be crossing the US to head to a new, short term, contract job. The job will last 2-3 months, but I would have been willing to relocate even if it had only last 2-3 weeks. (Always assuming the job paid for the relocation or paid enough to make relocating worthwhile. As I said, I’ve been debating saying something in advance of setting out or waiting until I got to my destination. I finally compromised and decided to wait till I was about half way, give or take, to say something. It is just as well that I decided to wait, as there really wasn’t much to talk about in eastern California, Arizona, New Mexico or Texas. Those four states cover more than half the trip, but can largely be covered by the words: Hot Desert. And that’s it. At least when driving along I-10. The interesting and beautiful parts of those states are not along I-10.
Last night, I stopped in a Motel 6 in one of my favorite towns in this part of the world, Baton Rouge, and now, I’m,up and about, getting ready to drive on to New Orleans where I will stop for a late (by local time zone, but perfect by my internal clock which thinks it’s two hours earlier) breakfast of Chicory Coffee and Beignets in the French Market at the Cafe Du Monde (assuming that both the French Market and the Cafe Du Monde) still exist – I’ve not been to New Orleans since the storm.
I’ll keep you all up-to-date on the remainder of my trip from here on out, as things become much more interesting from this point onwards, not to mention bringing you all up to date on happenings in general that brought me to this point back in California.
Stay tuned! Don’t touch that dial!
Homeless and Starting a Business? Is This a Joke?
In my previous post, I mentioned both looking for grants to start a business and starting one just out of pocket as a homeless man. How is that possible, you ask? Can you start a business when you cannot even get a month of rent together?
Oh yes, there actually are businesses that can be opened on little or no money at all. I will give you just one example that I’ve considered:
Find a landlord with too many empty properties (not hard to do in this economy) and you can get months of free, up front rent. Pay the electric and water deposits to get started, haul your own trash to the dump to avoid the trash pickup fee, get a coffee machine and an espresso machine and cups and such on loan from your coffee supplier (yes, this is not at all unusual, coffee suppliers give such items in order to get you to buy their coffee, it’s coffee they make money on.) Get furniture from the Free section of Craig’s List and the yahoo group Freecycle and off you go. One business ready to go for under $300.
If I gave up food and camped in walking distance of a cafe I use for internet access and was frugal to the point of starving me but not Butters, I could pull this off. But San Diego is a bad place for this, and so I would need to move first.
My new Favorite Coffeehouse
Krakatoa is not perfect.
It has stairs and a really scary wheelchair lift. Scary or not, kudos for having the lift.
It closes WAY too early, 8 PM, 6 on Sunday.
Despite all this, I love the place. The people who work there are friendly and cheerful and helpful and into what they do.
The coffee is outstanding and they have created great, unique specialty coffee drinks. I recommed the Smokey Mocha in particular! Yhe food is oitstanding
The outdoor tree shaded veranda is the best feature though. I will leave it to these images to tell the rest of the story.
Krakatoa is located on 25th Street in San Diego, between B and C streets. It’s a converted house with logs of greenery out front, which makes it a bit on the hard side to see. But it is worth searching for. This is in the number one spot now with your friendly neighborhood car camper!
[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]
New Look, New Blog, What Do You Think?
I’ve been doing some work on the site as you can see, a totally new look is in place! Isn’t it amazing what you can do with Cascading Style Sheets? I would really love to hear from you, gentle reader, as to what you think of the new look.
Please note that the navigation has changed too, way on the far right. There are now drop downs there, with my blogs listed in them and with my archives and with contact methods, ways to get in touch with me. Please, I encourage you to use them!
Please do sign my guestbook, it is very depressing knowing people come here and read only because I see it in the log files. Comment! Sign the Guest book. I do get emails from some of you and that is good, but I’d rather you signed the guest book, found under “Contact Me” on the Navigation Menu to the right.
In addition to the new look, you will find a new blog here, my coffee blog. Talking about coffee and the places that serve it really wasn’t going to work mixed into one of the other blogs. Since I can only get online at a Cafe or other venue with WiFi, I spend a lot of time in these wonderful coffee making and roasting and serving places. I have a passion for coffee and tea and I want to share it with you! Please, read and enjoy! Find it under the “Blogs” drop down in the navigation to the right!
My Favorite Way To Have Coffee
Let me discuss my favorite way to have coffee, and I have two. I love drip coffee and french press coffee, and these two make up type one. When I visit a place that offers french press, I always choose this over drip, otherwise drip is the way I go. The second coffee type I like is a venerable favorite of many throughout the centuries, Mocha, the heavenly blend of Coffee and, ideally, Cocoa, though more often today, just chocolate syrup.And what is my favorite coffee varietal? My coffee of preference is a high qualityMocha(not to be confused with the coffee/chocolate drink of the same name) or Celebes Kalossi coffee. Sadly, Celebes or Sulawesi coffee is difficult to find. I can also derive great pleasure from a good brisk cup of Ethiopian Harrar, Yirgacheffe, or Ghimbiin the morning!
Whatever the coffee, there is much pleasure to be had from that first cup of the day. Is there anything better to start your morning than the smell of fresh brewed goodness? That first sip, the heavenly taste, flowing down, warming and restoring, waking and reviving all at once! So good, so perfect.
Coffee must exist in heaven.