The Food N00bs

Once a n00b, redux

By Sorcha

There I was in my kitchen, half-awake, fixin' to make myself some coffee. I poured the beans in the grinder, closed it, plugged it in and pushed the switch...

...and nothing happened.

"Bwa?" said I. I tried again. Nothing. Took the grinder to a different outlet - our house is wired in some bizarre Escheresque configuration that means two outlets on the same wall are likely to be on different circuit breakers. Still nothing. Just as I was berating myself for having bought the cheap grinder and trying to figure out where I was going to get the money for a new one, I looked again...

...and realized the damn lid wasn't latched.

Yeah. Just call me Brainchild.

In other news, if you missed the Cleveland ep of No Reservations, it sucks to be you. It was awesome. Ruhlman and Bourdain are terrific together, as always, and the episode is gritty, fun, and even heart-warming.

I read The Bobby Gold Stories last night. Great read; Tony manages to put in cool cooking stuff without it being obtrusive, and Nikki is fucking awesome - the closest most of us will probably ever get to meeting the legendary Grill Bitch. This one is going on my private shelf, though. While we're pretty liberal with what we let Littlest watch/read/listen to, I just don't think he's ready to find out that sometimes grownups like to put their tongues in places that are normally considered to be, ahem, off limits to tongues. (Kind of like the time we were watching "Family Guy" and the word "sodomy" came up. He asked, "What's sodomy?" After thinking about it a while, I said, "You wouldn't believe me if I told you. It has to do with sex, and that's about all you're ready to hear.")

Parenting, Food N00b style. It's a never-ending odyssey of learning, laughter, and "What the everliving fuck?"

DOMA Part Dos

We've tried two more blends from DOMA - the Sumatra Gayo Mountain and the Tanzania Peaberry. Both are delicious, and I find myself delighted by the teeny little beans of the Peaberry. Though my usual blend is Stumptown's version of SGM, I liked the Peaberry even better.

That's all I wanted to say. Y'all can go about your business now.

Sorcha

A Short Walk On a Long Beach

by Sorcha

This week, the Sorcha family has been relaxing on the Long Beach peninsula in Washington. Mr. Sorcha's folks live here and there were relatives visiting from Planet Kiwi, so we came up to join in the festivities. In between playing tag with the sea, having a staring contest with the bald eagle that hangs out on the beach near the house, and polishing off Chuck Palahniuk's new novel, I got the idea to post just a snippet about a couple of places here worth checking out if you're ever around.

Heading into Long Beach, there's Surfer Sands Sandwich Shoppe, on your left just before you enter the main drag. (It being a peninsula, you'd probably be coming from the south, unless you like, sailed across the bay from the mainland.) The sandwiches here are huge, fresh and tasty. My favorite is the Philly, though I get them to make it with provolone instead of American cheese. Not authentic, I know, but I'm picky.

Long Beach Coffee Roasters is a little way north of the Surfer Sands, in a little strip mall that also boasts a tattoo shop and a psychic. The coffee here is excellent and they do their roasting on the premises. At the end of the month, they clean out the roasting equipment, and the resulting hodgepodge of coffee beans cannot be sold. It will, however, occasionally be given to their regulars. My father-in-law, being one of those regulars, got me a bag of it. He calls it the Shivering Denizen blend, and it's actually, well, pretty good. Very, very strong, but good.

We never leave Long Beach without hitting the Cottage Bakery at least once. The pastries are enormous and delicious. My favorite is the devil dog. They also have deli sandwiches, which I haven't tried yet. The coffee's only middling, though - better to get your coffee at the Roasters first, then hit the bakery for your pastries.

The Castaway Seafood Grille has decent burgers, good clam chowder (according to Littlest) and phenomenal fries.

South of Long Beach, in Ilwaco on the waterfront, there's The Imperial Schooner. Teeny place, great food, and you can see some of my in-laws' paintings on the walls.

Not really food-related, but no visit to the Long Beach peninsula is complete without visits to Marsh's Free Museum (home of Jake the Alligator Man) and Jack's Country Store. (Their motto is, "Contrary to popular opinion, we do not carry everything." This is not entirely true, my friends - I'm pretty sure they actually do. Once, I needed an ethernet cable to hook into my in-laws' internet router. I asked one of the store employees if they carried them, and even as she was replying, "No, I think you'll have to go over to Fred Meyer's in Astoria," I spotted a single lonely, lovely blue cable in a bin behind her.) There's even a goat dairy where you can taste artisanal cheese - I haven't been yet, but it's next on my list.

The weather is cool here even in August, I've eaten well, and the ocean and I were glad to see each other again. It's been a lovely week.

Sorry, Reality Doesn't Exist Before My Morning Pot of Coffee

Recently, Terry Patano of the DOMA Coffee Roasting Company very kindly sent us some of his coffee to try. Not only did Terry send this without us even asking for it, he didn't ask for anything in return - he was just being a nice guy and sharing his love of coffee and his company's product with us. And boy, are we glad he did. He sent us very generous quantities of three different blends, extremely fresh-roasted (like, the same day he mailed them), which we sampled one at a time, three different mornings in one week. Yeah, we could've researched how to do a proper cupping and compared them all at once, but that's not how we drink coffee, so we figured it was best to taste the coffee under actual consumption conditions.

Now, being Portlanders, the N00bs are no strangers to delicious coffee. We're no strangers to delicious, ethically produced coffee either, and between the tasting of DOMA's coffee and the exploration of their website, we can say without reservation that DOMA is just as good as anything Portland-based on both counts. Yes, even Stumptown Roasters.

Our testing took place in Sorcha's kitchen, with her Hamilton Beach Brewstation and cheapo Black and Decker burr grinder. We thought about pulling out the French press, but again, we wanted to do the tastings under usual drinking conditions, and Sorcha hasn't used the ol' French press in a while.

The first blend we tried was the "Guatemala Trapichitos."

Sorcha: This is a delicious, full-bodied but smooth coffee. I drink my coffee with cream and Splenda, and GT welcomes them both. One thing I noticed about this coffee is that the second cup was as good as the first. Lots of coffees are terrific in the first cup, but the second cup is just kind of meh. This one stood up to time really well.

Kal: When I'm trying a new coffee, I like to give it a try straight, then add Splenda (this is how I drink most of my coffee), then toss in a little half-and-half -- to my palate, some coffee, like this one, really benefits from just a little dairy.  I'm a slow coffee drinker most days, and I liked how this one held up to cooling down.  A good "sippin' coffee," you might say.

The second sample was "Carmela's Espresso Blend."

Kal: YUM.  This is definitely one of the better espressos I've had, really tasty and clean.

Sorcha: Yeah, this was my favorite out of our three samples. Like the GT, it was smooth, but with that espresso darkness to it that wakes you right up.

"Marco's Blend" finished off our sampling.

Kal: My favorite!  Although it didn't quite hold up as well when it cooled, the flavor while hot was definitely in the top four or five coffees I've had (and I've had plenty).  I found myself going back for more, not because I was thirsty but just because it tasted so damn good.

Sorcha: This was good, but it was my least favorite of the three we sampled. It had a bit of a winey tang to it, and I tend to like my coffee without that. However, that was totally my personal preference at work, and it was still a good cup of coffee. Since this was Kal's favorite, I sent the rest of it home with her - again, Terry was really generous with the samples.

Kal: Thank you, Terry!  I haven't been this excited about coffee at home since I discovered Stumptown's Sumatra Gayo Mountain.

Sorcha: Speaking of which, DOMA has SGM as well, and I think I'm gonna order some to do an at-home comparison. Their roasting and wholesale practices are very similar to Stumptown's, which leads to an intense level of quality control and thus to an incredible cup of coffee. I'm thrilled that Terry stumbled across us and gave us the chance to try DOMA. If you love good coffee, give yourself the chance to try it. You won't be sorry.

Coffee: Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!

by Sorcha

Anyone who knows me can tell you: I loves me some coffee.

No, seriously. On an average day, I'll consume anywhere from 16-64 oz. of the blessed bean. If I'm drinking it in a restaurant where they so kindly come back and top off your cup, it'll be more than that, but I'm not keeping score.

It wasn't always this way, mind. When I was small, the big treat on Sunday mornings was being allowed to drink a half-cup of heavily doctored coffee out of my mom's mug, but the allure of that was as much the fact that it was a grownup drink as the taste. Once I got a little older,  I lost interest in it. In those days, of course, most people where I grew up got their coffee out of a can. When I got my first apartment, after I married Mister, I don't think I even kept coffee around.

Then I found Starbucks.

Yeah, I can hear it now. "Blah blah over-roasting blah blah evil empire blah blah black Starbucks helicopters in the middle of the night blah." I'm not going to get into a debate over the quality of their coffee or their business practices. What Starbucks did was to make a whole lot of people care about what they were putting in their cups. People woke up and realized coffee could be a whole lot more than they were used to.

I had my first Starbucks coffee in 1992, when Mister and I came out to Portland to visit his family right after we were married. At the time, we were still living in southeastern Virginia, where the only "premium" coffee to be had was from the Coffee Beanery, which was entirely too spendy and precious for my tastes.

Then came the grande vanilla mocha - a gateway drug if ever there was one. I returned to Virginia after our visit, cursing Starbucks for having given me a taste of something I wouldn't be able to get again for another year. When that year passed, Mister finished his indentured servitude his Navy service, and we moved to Portland, I began my love affair with coffee in earnest. I moved from mochas to lattes and thence to Americanos, and at home, I bought quality coffee, ground it myself, and brewed it strong.

I'm rambling about coffee for a reason, to talk about my newest toy. I'd been reading that using a burr grinder for your beans, rather than a blade one, produces a much better cup of coffee. The skeptic in me said, "How much of a difference can it make?"

The coffee lover in me said, "GIMME GIMME GRABBYHANDS."

I did my research and found out that burr grinders can be really fucking expensive. No, seriously, there are some that cost more than my first car. (Granted, my first car was a third-or-fourth-hand Maverick that was older than me, but still.) Now, Mister and I are not wealthy people, and I earn my frivolous-and-foolish-spending money by working in the day care at my son's school. Raising other people's children does not pay as well as you might think, and as my little Braun blade grinder was giving me perfectly fine coffee, I was reluctant to spend even the $50 on the cheapest burr grinder I found on Amazon.

But wait! I was wandering aimlessly around Target yesterday, as I am wont to do, and found a Black and Decker burr grinder for the low, low price of $25. I fought the impulse to snatch it up right then and came home, checking the product reviews on Amazon first. Some of the complaints were just silly (static cling in the plastic cup for the grounds, having to hold the button down to keep it grinding), and some didn't matter too much to me (didn't really grind fine enough for espresso, but I rarely make espresso at home anyway.) I went back and bought it yesterday afternoon (lucky I did, because two of the four that had been on the shelf earlier were now gone, oddly enough) and I used it for the first time today.

My first clue that this was going to be A New Experience was that as I started to grind, the aroma of the beans was released into the air. I breathed deeply and realized that yeah, this was gonna be good. I brewed my coffee (Hamilton Beach Brewstation, though I have a French press too) and grabbed my big 20 oz. mug that Mister gave me for Christmas a few years back. I filled it, dressed it, and took a sip.

Oh, yeah. $25 well spent, my friends. Well spent indeed. If you're ever in Portland, swing by and I'll make you a cup, so you can taste for yourself.