All Coffee Recipes

Some cool coffee images:

Coffee Fascination

Image by mtsofan

Day one hundred fifty-three/365. This morning, I was thinking about the town in which I live. Although we seem to be a miniature New York City, we don’t have a Starbucks. Matter of fact, the nearest Starbucks is a half hour from here. I wonder why?

Where I used to live, (a more rural area!), you could buy a cup of coffee at a counter in the clinic where you get an x-ray, see a doctor, or have your blood drawn. The clinic here doesn’t offer coffee. Likewise, the grocery stores have no coffee counters.

If you want to buy a cup of coffee, the most convenient places are the bagel shop and Dunkin’ Donuts.

Maybe that’s better, anyway. What’s our fascination with coffee? Do we really need the caffeine? Why is coffee getting more exotic, more entertaining, using many languages in its marketing? Why are we willing to pay so much for a cup?

What if we made more coffee at home and used travel mugs . . .then saved the money we would’ve spent at Starbucks? What non-profit organization could use our savings over six months or a year? Would giving to that charity make us feel better than the coffee makes us feel?

Rack of Venison with Beet Strudels and a Cocoa-Coffee Sauce

Image by ilmungo

Last Sunday we hosted a Winter Feast in honour of our friend Indre, who successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation. Nick and I cooked a seven course meal. Most of the dishes were taken from the French Laundry cookbook, by culinary sensei Thomas Keller. Some others were recreations of dishes that Nick had at his brother’s restaurant in Aspen. Each dish was carefully paired with its "perfect" wine.

This was another one of Nick’s creations, from a recipe in Wine Spectator. The beet strudels were pretty simple to make, just some roasted red and golden beet chopped up and wrapped up in alternating layers in phyllo dough.

The venison had been marinating in something delicious-smelling, then it was roasted in the oven. The sauce was incredibly rich and complex, with a lot of the intensity coming from juniper berries, which Nick found at this gourmet spice shop in Santa Monica that had some semi-dried berries.

This was paired with a 2002 Provenance Cabernet Sauvignon.

A collective blog of our experiences of that evening is taking shape at edibles.blogspot.com/.

kape (coffee)

Image by ernesto guillermo

On 23 January, together with my girlfriend and my friend went on backpacking in batangas. we hiked up to the top of mt. manabo and stayed there for the rest of the night.

The location is very abundant on coffee trees.