Waiting For The Good Stuff

To roast, or not to roast, that is the question.

I have only enough home roasted coffee on hand for one more day. It's as close to ideal roasting weather as we are likely to get in Central Alberta this time of year, yet, I hesitate. No, I have not lost my mind, nor have I lost my enthusiasm. Nope.

I am, instead, pinning my hopes on Canada Post, and the promise of coffee goodness sent over the border twelve days ago by my friend Brett. Brett is one of the truly amazing and helpful members of the Sweet Maria's home roasting list I belong to, and one of the organizers of the homeroasters.org holiday bean exchange. He was encouraging list members to participate in the bean exchange a few weeks back, and I wrote to him applauding him for his hard work, and suggesting that next year, we do a Canadian version, as cross border mail can be a PITA.

In any case, Brett mailed back, saying he would exchange home roast with me, despite the hassle of having to actually go to the post office and fill out a customs declarations form. I warned him that sending fresh coffee in a timely way was expensive and that even if you pay relatively big bucks, fast delivery was definitely hit or miss.

He mailed his beans to me a week ago Saturday, and I'm still waiting. He got the beans I sent him in six days.  We both did the big-bucks-airmail thing.

On Tuesday, I got a notice from Canada Post stating that I could pick up a package at my local postal outlet anytime after 1 PM yesterday.

Our postal outlet is in a drug store, the aisles of which are so jammed up with yet to be processed packages that no one could possibly buy an aspirin there. I waited until 3 PM before getting in line to get my package, only to be told that it was probably in one of those aisles. I'll try again this afternoon. 

A Canadian only exchange is looking like a better idea, eh?

 

posted by taming at 06:37 | link | comments (2)|
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Happy Birthday Old Man

Today is RT's 55th birthday. That means I get to call him "old man", at least until my birthday in early June. There will never be an "old woman" in this house.

I bought him a gift that puts us, once again, squarely in the middle class, and perhaps, in middle age as well. I spent enough money to keep him in beer for an entire year on the equipment needed to make his own heady brew. Only the solidly middle class do time intensive things as hobbies that once were done out of necessity.

Choosing quality over convenience is a luxury. This is equally true for the truly rich, who can routinely buy artisan breads, handcrafted chocolates, or $60 a pound cheese, and people like us, who have reached that stage in life when we have free time and a little bit leftover at the end of the month.

The busy single mom juggling childcare and work can't find the time to roast coffee or make her own bread. Heck, she's lucky if she can find the time to sleep. People living on the edge financially can't plunk down the chunk of cash needed to get going on one of these hobbies, even if the end result might be cheaper (and better) than what they can afford to buy at the grocery store.

My great grandmother roasted her own coffee, baked her own bread, raised her own chickens, and smoked her own meats. I'm not sure if great grandfather had a still, but knowing a bit about what life must have been like with my great grandmother and their ten children, his life would have been more pleasant if he had something alcoholic going on in the cellar.

Fast forward to my parents' generation. In the 50s, being able to choose convenience was the hallmark of financial success, even if it meant nasty powdered instant coffee and squishy white bread. It's hard to believe that opening a box of Kraft Dinner was ever seen as a testament to modernity and class, but it was.

It's a wonder that any of us baby boomers learnt to cook.

Developing an interest in these almost lost arts is probably one part leftover adolescent rebellion and a strange twist on the same thing that drove our parents to lust after the burgeoning load of truly crappy shtuff appearing on TV and in local stores. Advertising works, and getting home cooks to invest thousands upon thousands of dollars on fancy shmancy kitchen toys had to lead to attempts to actually cook.

The Internet has helped this along. I became something of a coffee snob back in the early 80s, when a chi chi little store introduced me to the Bodum Press. Along about that time, I realized that I could buy supermarket whole bean coffee and grind it myself. It took the 'net, and a concurrent increase in income, to get me roasting my own beans and dreaming about grinders that cost more than I earned in a week back in 1972, when Folgers tasted good to me.

In any case, life in Casa Taming involves smoking my own meat, baking my own bread, roasting coffee, and now making beer. My mother is, no doubt, bewildered, and my great grandmother is either turning over in her grave or lecturing great grandfather about the sins of the father being passed on to yet another generation.

 

posted by taming at 07:33 | link | comments (2)|
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The Annual Fruitcake Post

Lest you think that I'm all about technology and coffee roasting, I should probably tell  you that I bought mayonnaise yesterday.

As I scraped the bottom of the Hellman's jar, hoping to magically collect just enough of it to make one more tuna sandwich, I realized that I could no longer avoid getting dressed and going to the store. I briefly considered making mayo, after all, it's not hard, and I had the ingredients (urmmm, we're just talking eggs and cooking oil), but, somehow I knew that making my own mayonnaise was going beyond too far, and it was time to leave the house.

I guess it should have been a clue that staying locked up inside was not really a good thing when I started talking about a broken toilet as if it were a misbehaving Microsoft program. I got one more clue when I got into the car and had a bit of trouble remembering how to put the car into reverse, a necessary step in getting the car out of our roasting shack /garage.

It's easy to see how something unfamiliar, like tech work or roasting coffee, can seem complicated, especially if we don't do those things ourselves, but we don't always recognize how complex things we do every day really are.

Last night I baked the last of my fruitcakes. And as I did it, I was trying to pay attention to the little tricks that go into making it a fairly simple thing. I'm talking about the things that people who do a fair amount of cooking learn over time but remain utterly mysterious to non-cooks. I lost count, but my list included shtuff like mixing the dry ingredients together with a whisk so that the salt and baking soda really got dispersed evenly and dividing the dried apricots and dates into very small batches as I cut them up in the food processor, thus avoiding a big sticky mass of  dried that I would have had to separate out by hand as I mixed the fruit and nuts into the batter. There's even a trick to cutting the cheesecloth up into neat pieces before dousing it with Jack Daniels so the baked cakes can become thoroughly inebriated as they rest in the fridge.

None of it truly matters, and it is entirely possible to bake fruitcake without knowing any of it. It's just so much easier when you know the tricks.

I'm, assuming that anyone who really is into the fine points of fruitcake baking can deal with an un-annotated recipe After all, not all that many people like fruitcake enough to make it, and folks who do have to know their way around a kitchen, right?

Jack Daniel's Classic Holiday Fruit Cake

1 cup butter
2 cups brown sugar
4 eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey, plus more for soaking cakes
1/2 cup orange juice
3 cups pecan halves
2 cups chopped dried apricots
2 cups golden raisins
2 cups chopped dates

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Grease three 8 1/2 x 4 1/2-inch loaf pans. Line pan bottoms with wax paper. Cream together butter and brown sugar until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Add eggs, beat well. In separate bowl, sift together flour, baking soda and salt. Add flour to butter mixture alternately with whiskey and orange juice. Beat on low speed just until blended. Stir in fruits and nuts. Spoon into prepared pans. Bake about 1 hour and 15 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pans on wire rack. Remove from pans. Wrap each in whiskey soaked cheesecloth. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap then aluminum foil. Store in refrigerator for two weeks before serving. Serve thinly sliced. Makes 3 fruitcakes

Hard Sauce:

1/4 lb. butter
8 oz. powdered sugar
6 oz. Jack Daniels whiskey

SAUCE: Melt butter in tall pan, while whipping melted butter add sugar slowly until blended smoothly. Add the whiskey slowly while whipping until smooth.

 

posted by taming at 14:10 | link | comments (3)|
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The Network Guy and His Geeky Wife

RT is a network guy. He's a very good network guy.

And one of the things that makes him very good, is that, unlike most network guys, he has little or no inclination to fly by the seat of his pants. If he were to be run over by a bus, and his employer needed to bring someone in to do his job while he recovered, the new guy would be able to figure out what RT had done without having to consult Madame Zelda and her crystal ball.

If you have had occasion to work with networking "specialists", you know exactly how unusual that is.

I'm pretty sure that one reason he is able to do that particular thing so well is that he has absolutely no desire to do shtuff that he sees as being outside of the area in which he has big time expertise. That's what consultants are for. Sometimes, that's what geeky wives are for.

This is one of those times.

On the home front, two things have happened recently that impact our home system, not the computer system in our home, but rather, the home as system. In the area of plumbing, we have had a toilet failure. We have also had a basement fluorescent light failure. RT was able to diagnose the first problem. A $15 purchase at Canadian Tire, followed by a two minute install, should take care of it. The basement light is another thing entirely. After a brief period of fiddling, it was determined that it was a job for Lawrence. Lawrence calls himself a handyman; we see him as a deity. 

RT applied a temporary patch, in the form of a lamp brought in from another area of the house.

Whilst the home as system has been breaking down around us, the computers within our home have also needed some attention.  We have made various changes, in an attempt to lower our monthly technology bill, after we realized that with a bit of work on our part, and, assuming our ISP doesn't screw up on their part, we could save $50 or so a month. We needed to do some relatively simple minded things like moving our domain to another server, and taking over management of our domain based Email.

This is where the geeky wife part comes in.

On our new server, I could activate Spamassassin, but I had no control over what version to use, or what plug-ins to use with it. This was not much of an issue, because I use Thunderbird as an Email client, and it has a lot of flexibility in terms of setting up custom Email filters. That, in combination with Spamassassin whitelisting and blacklisting, takes care of any spam issues I might have. I also use my gmail account for most of my mail, and  almost no spam downloads from the Google mail servers to my desktop.

RT, old school network guy that he is, still uses Outlook Express, which doesn't have anywhere near the same ability to filter mail that Tbird has. Yes, you can set filters, but you can't set them based on things like x-spam-flag or other spammish indicators. I had to add SpamPal and a Baysian plug-in onto his machine to manage his spam.

I bet your eyes have now glazed over. I know RT's did.

It seems consultants have that affect on folks, even when the consultant is a geeky wife.

 

posted by taming at 06:35 | link | comments |
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Roasting in a Winter Wonderland

It was warm enough to roast outside of the garage. Note the blue sky. Also note that the heat gun is positioned in a stand-up chicken roaster. My preference is to hold the heat gun and adjust the distance from the bean mass. I think it gives me more control than one gets using a fixed position, but this works when I am truly lazy.

I also took a picture that shows the difference in volume between 50 grams of green and 50 grams of roasted coffee. The roast isn't really as dark as it looks here. It's a nice full city, pulled about 3 minutes after 1st crack had done its thing, and before 2nd crack had begun.

 

There are more pictures of today's roast here, in my Picasa web album. The roast isn't as uneven as it looks, but it is a Harar, and that bean never gives you the uniformity that is prized by home roasters and familiar to everyone who buys Starbucks. Of course, even I could get an evenly roasted Harar if I deliberately burned my beans.

All of you who know RT should really tell him that I need a new camera. Those on good terms with god might try asking her to give me younger eyes.

I don't know if it would improve my roasting, but it sure would improve my photography.

 

posted by taming at 23:54 | link | comments (4)|
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