Eating Out

Eating out has always been a chore – I’d much rather cook and eat at home. It doesn’t take long, it tastes better, and I can do several things while cooking and eating.

When we do eat out, it’s always with friends and always so we won’t be distracted by other things when we eat. The whole point of eating out isn’t the food (although it helps if it’s edible), it’s like a ritual with the entire focus being the other person. We meet, we go to the restaurant, we read the menu, order, talk, eat and talk, tidy up, leave a tip, pay for the meal, and leave. It generally takes about 2 hours. It almost always follows the same routine. What imbues it with magic and power is what we do during it with one another. Words are tools of enormous power. The breath we expend to make them is so small in comparison with the end results. Fuel that power with food and the emotion of friendship, and the magic wrought is among the strongest magics in the world.

Some of the mightiest deeds have arisen over a ritualized meal. Treaties signed, wars declared, peace made – and those are just the gloryhounds of the magic. Novels are created at such meals, charities developed, projects imagined and implemented, business born and nurtured to success. How many times has the humble napkin borne the magic sigils of adventures and good works and formed the basis of numerous organizations and charities? An entire forest of napkins, I’m sure.

Eating out is not something we do lightly.

If the restaurant provides a place to sit, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a pizza parlor or a burger joint or height of haute cuisine. What matters is what transpires between the people.

What happens in a restaurant is precious and important – unless it’s become so routine that eating out is just a way to gather nourishment.

A lot of things we have in America has been made ordinary and boring by its very commonness. We think nothing of drinking a 32 ounce soda, having dessert with every meal and between meals, too. Snacking is a national pasttime, and as a nation, we are highly over-hydrated with our ever-present bottles of water. Some experts lament the loss of the family dinner, and claim cooking is too complicated for the average American. They proclaim restaurants as our “home away from home”. And just like that, the power and the magic fade.

We – and by “we”, I mean Numenists – have incorporated food into our rituals so intensively that it’s hard for us to look at food without thinking of magic and divinity. The meals we prepare and eat at home are full of the power of community, of bonding, of communicating with one another and with Dea Nutrix.

But the meals we eat away from home have a different power – a power of creativity, of innovation and ideas, of bubbling adventure with just an edge of danger.

Eating out too often would destroy that. Dining out would take on the aspects of eating at home, truncated and missing some of the vital connecting activities a home meal provides, but still more an act of community and communion than of daring and adventure.

So, we eat out, but we ration it as we do all good things. And we hedge dining out with formalities and rituals so it keeps that edge, that excitement, that allure of thinking new things.

I just found a box with a lot of those old napkins, and reading over them, I see so clearly the scribbles and sketches and notes that became much larger things. So many of the roots of Numenism are in those napkins – our first inklings of combining food and ritual, of forming our charities, how our Houses are set up – it’s all in those restaurant napkins. The napkins are fragile with age, but the magic they started endures.

Sandwich Saturdays

A year ago, $30 worth of food would feed 80 – 90 homeless people on Sandwich Saturdays, and $5 gas would get the food to them.

One one hand that’s not many people; on the other, that’s 80-90 people who got to eat a decent meal one day a week that otherwise would have had no food at all.

Now, with rising prices, to feed those same numbers of people, I need $80, and I spend $15 in gas. I know how to find food cheap, the problem is the cheap food isn’t there to be found. The bread at the day old bakery was 35¢ a loaf, now it’s $1.10. Lunch meats, cheese, peanut butter – all have risen substantially in price. Eggs have gone from less than a dollar a dozen to almost $3 a dozen – and that’s not the free range organic eggs.

I’ve cut back and pared down in as many areas as I can. I have nowhere left to pare.

What I’ve decided to do is to increase the classes I teach on guerrilla gardening and wildcrafting and dumpster diving and frugal cooking.

I have all the tree bits from the recent tornado cleaned up and put away.  I mowed this morning.  I have meetings to go to all afternoon.  Tomorrow, I clean house.  Monday I make goodies for the monthly birthday party at work – it’s my month to make them.

I think I’ll carve a watermelon, and skewer cheese, olives, and gherkins, and maybe roast some garlic, blend it with Brie, and squirt that into those puffed crackers.  With spiral sandwiches, that should be good.

May 1

Today is a pretty significant day.

First, last night was Walpurgisnacht. We don’t celebrate that in American. In fact few Americans not of German descent even know what it is. When I was growing up in Germany, Walpurgisnacht was a lot like Halloween is here. We dressed in scary costumes, went door to door to collect treats or perform tricks. We had a bonfire and the oompah bands were playing and there was beer and dancing and really bad jokes. And during all of this, people would slip away to make cones of flowers to hang on doors all through the village. We kids would eventually straggle off to bed. Come morning, we’d get up early and hang flowers on the doors of people we liked. Then, as the day progressed and the adults would wake, we’d bring in the flowers and start our May visits. We’d visit everyone, and sip from the Maibowle and have coffee, or hot cocoa, or tea, and cookies or cakes and admire the flowers they got and secretly compare their bouquets to our own to see who was the more favored.

I’d say it was one of my favorite holidays, but honestly, they all are. I love all the holidays.

This May 1 also has the dubious distinction of being the 30th anniversary of the first ever spam email, thank you Gary Thuerk.

This May 1 is also the National Day of Prayer, once again we had a small ritual on the Capitol steps followed by a windy picnic. I think the Christians are beginning to resign themselves to our presence. There were more of us than them because it was threatening to rain and it was very windy. It was so windy our picnic was consumed hiding inside cars so we wouldn’t blow away. It was kind of funny, all of hunkering in cars eating our sandwiches and waving at one another through the windows.

Now, we have tornadoes. Itzl alerted on tornado sirens three times so far. I have no clue if they actually went off as there’s no one here but me and the critters. There’s sun shining and the wind’s still high. Clouds are scudding past. Sometimes, this not hearing well stuff is a pain. I turned the news on when Itzl alerted the first time, so the sirens probably went off then because all we’re getting is tornado chaser coverage. It’s all to the east of here heading east, so all we’re likely to get is rain.

All in all, it is a good May day.

Convenience Foods

Grocery stores sell a lot of their products based on convenience – pre-made and all you need to do is add one or two things, heat and eat.  You can get the same degree of convenience at home for much less money and really not a lot of your time.

There is some equipment you will need to accomplish this.  You will need a freezer for this.  It doesn’t matter if you use a chest freezer or an upright freezer.  If you are a single person or part of a couple, the freezer section of most refrigerators may be enough.  In case of short term power outages, an inverter and a marine battery or two will power a freezer until utilities are restored.  A 750 watt inverter with 1500 watt surge capacity will power most freezers, and will cost less than $200.  Freezer bags are essential, as is heavy duty and/or quick release foil.

Not essential but certainly guaranteed to speed things up and make it easier to prepare your own convenience foods are things like a vacuum sealer, either one of the little handheld ones (http://www.amazon.com/Reynolds%C2%AE-Handi-Vac-Vacuum-Sealer-Batteries/dp/B000XY8PDW or http://www.amazon.com/Packmate-95000-Vacu-Seal-Starter-Handheld/dp/B0011FJS4M) or the fancier tabletop ones (http://www.amazon.com/FoodSaver-Ultimate-V1505-Vacuum-Sealing/dp/B0002795OS, http://www.amazon.com/Rival-Press%252c-Release-Sealer-VS240, http://www.amazon.com/Deni-1830S-Freshlock-Vacuum-Sealer/dp/B0002AZ0G2), a food processor (I like the Big Mouth – http://www.amazon.com/Hamilton-Beach-70590-14-Cup-Processor/dp/B00065L68Y), scales, dry and wet funnels, and a set of knives and cutting boards.

The method is to discover what your cooking style and needs are and then to develop your plan for making your own convenience foods.  You don’t have to do this alone, either.  You can buy in bulk with family and friends, and spend a day socializing as you make up your convenience foods for yourselves.

The “Once a Month” (http://www.once-a-month-cookingworld.com/, http://realfood4realpeople.serverbox.net/oamc.html, http://organizedhome.com/freezer-cooking-guide, http://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Assets-Deborah-Taylor-Hough/dp/1891400614, http://www.amazon.com/Freezer-Cooking-Manual-Day-Gourmet/dp/0966446755) method works for a lot of people and the assemble and freeze method  (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Panic-Dinners-Freezer-Great-Tasting/dp/0800730550, http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Dinners-Dinnertime-Assemble-Freeze/dp/0060784229) method works for others.  If you use one of these methods in conjunction with the “make a mix” method (http://www.amazon.com/Make-Mix-Karine-Eliason/dp/0762426020, http://www.amazon.com/Mixes-Prepared-Foods-Cost-Calories/dp/156825007X), you will circumvent almost all of the store bought convenience foods, saving time, money, and getting exactly what you want without all the chemicals and additives.  I tend to do a mix of these methods and store them all in the freezer, labeled, dated, and ready to go.

And this book, Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes (http://www.amazon.com/Artisan-Bread-Five-Minutes-Revolutionizes/dp/0312362919) is utterly amazing, quick, and delicious – fresh, home made bread in minutes.  It takes a little longer than 5 minutes a day until you gain some experience with the method, so stick with it.  Once you get the routine and don’t have to pause to read the instructions every step of the way, it really does pare down to 5 minutes or less in preparing fresh bread every single day – rolls, loaves, buns, specialty breads – fast, easy and made fresh by you.

Other little suggestions for building up your freezer repertoire without spending all day cooking is to simply double or triple whatever recipe you are making and freeze the rest for later.  Casseroles lend themselves particularly well to this trick, as do pancakes and waffles.

You can prepare ingredients in advance and freeze them to add to future meals.  Chop vegetables such as onions, celery, bell peppers, broccoli, carrots, parsnips, summer squashes, edible pod peas, and green beans for soups, stews, casseroles, sauces, stir-fries and breads, then divide them up and freeze for later.   Brown ground beef and divide it up into meal-sized portions to freeze.  Cooked roast beef slices can be frozen in advance for sandwiches or to form salads or entrees later.  Poultry can be deboned and chopped or cut up for recipes for later and frozen, too.  You can package these individually or blend them in recipe-sized portions.

Gravy itself doesn’t freeze well, but the roux of flour and fat that thickens it freezes marvelously, so make roux in advance, freeze it in tablespoons sized dollops in an ice cube tray, then transfer to a freezer bag – it only takes a short time to plop a cube of frozen roux into a pot and stir in your liquid – gravy faster than a mix!

Cooked rice and bulgur freeze well, thaw well, and can form the base of many recipes faster than Minute Rice – and tastier, too.  Package it in recipe sized portions.  It can be reheated in the bag in boiling water, or thaw slightly and add to cooking food.  It stir fries best when mostly thawed.

You can bake rice in the oven along with casseroles and other dishes – 350º for about an hour in a covered dish. Use the same water to rice ratios you would for stovetop cooking.  The rice will come out fluffy and unburned.  You can bake large batches of rice for freezing much easier this way.

Line casserole dishes you plan to freeze with quick release foil before you bake and freeze it in the dish in the foil.  When it’s frozen, just lift it out of the casserole dish, seal it in a freezer bag, and you’ll be able to re-use your casserole dish sooner.

Place newer foods at the bottom or back of the freezer.  Pack your freezer in “zones” – meats, breads, recipe ready vegetables, recipe ready fruits, snacks, freezer inserts for lunch boxes, ice, prepared entrees, appetizers.  That way when you go to pull what you need or want, you’ll know which zone it’s in and can remove it faster, reducing the energy strain on the freezer.

Never freeze foods you want to eat crisp and raw, like lettuce, celery, onions.  Heavy whipping cream will not whip after freezing, but can still be used for coffee, tea, hot cocoa, and as an ingredient that doesn’t require whipping.  Creamed cottage cheese will get gritty, so only freeze uncreamed and dry-curd cottage cheese.  Sour cream will separate when frozen and thawed.  Potatoes will become mushy if frozen raw, and tough if boiled and then frozen.  Whole raw eggs need to be separated before freezing.  Cooked egg whites will get rubbery and gross when frozen.  Never put glass containers in the freezer.

Freeze small items like meatballs, berries, or cookies on cookie sheets, then vacuum seal the frozen items.  They will retain their shape better, freeze faster, and won’t stick together when frozen.  They’ll also thaw faster.

Grains, cereals, and flours can be stored in the freezer to increase their shelf-life and reduce pest infestation.

One Seed

Dill, Chives, Parsley, Nasturtiums

Originally uploaded by nodigio

I’ve been mulling over Al Gore’s movie, and the way we faced food shortages in WWI and WWII, and the energy crisis of the 70’s, and life as a hippy, and Numenism and its Bounty Ministry, and life as we know it today, and I wonder. I wonder just how we got from the united purpose of the World Wars and the dedicated activism of the hippy era and even the more recent bonding of the Murrah Bombing in Oklahoma City to the disenfranchisement and isolation of now – the “I can’t do it” attitude so many people now espouse, and the willingness to let “specialists” handle all of our affairs outside a narrow range of things we feel competent to do.

I’m not a social scientist to pinpoint when this decline began, but I have dedicated my life to studying patterns. The earliest ripples may well have seeded themselves all the way back at the founding of this country – or earlier still. When it began isn’t anything we can change and knowing the beginnings won’t alter how we proceed into the future. The pattern itself is the issue here – the fact that we did change, and the knowledge that having changed, we can change again. “Change Is” and “Everything She Touches, Changes” are two chants frequently sung among the Pagans, yet it doesn’t seem to have sunk into the psyche of the Pagans. Or maybe it did, but the zeitgeist overrode the message.

The point is, we have changed. We’ve become specialists. We produce one tiny thing (whatever it is we do for work) and we consume a great many things. Occasionally, a few of us vote. We depend upon a lot of other specialists to meet our needs and desire: the wheat farmer, the doctor, the teacher, the film industry, the music industry, and so on. Maybe we have a hobby that lets us expand our one tiny thing – maybe we knit caps for preemies, or play the guitar, or bake our own bread. We’ve severed our connections with so many things to build a society of innate specialists. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – specialization has given us computers, cars, and Fair Trade coffee. Specialization freed us to concentrate on one thing at a time. Specialization allowed us sell our skills far outside our local community, making us wealthy. Specialization allowed us to sell our skills far outside our community, destroying that community and severing our ties with our neighbors. Specialization allowed us to sell our skills far outside our community, taking away any personal responsibility for how we destroyed our communities.

Maybe specialization is a good thing, but it comes at a very high cost to us.

What made specialization on this scale possible was cheap energy. It allowed us to pay distant others to provide all sorts of things for us, from entertainment to food to problem-solving. It’s inconceivable to us to live without energy – how will we eat, what will we do for entertainment, who will heal us, who will make our decisions for us? We’ve become so specialized we can’t imagine doing things for ourselves – we wait for a specialist to come up with a solution – a politician or a scientist. Hopefully the solution will be elegant and easy and not cause us to change our lifestyle very much. We’ve put our faith in market-driven solutions on the presumption that those same market-driven solutions got us into this fix in the first place so of course they will get us out.

I was so frustrated at Al Gore’s movie because he presented us with a wide-sweeping problem and then told us in the closing credits that we could “change a light bulb” to fix it. The puniness of what he asked against the enormity of the problem told me clearly that Al Gore was a dedicated specialist. His mind could not conceive of the average American being able to do anything more. His is a mind divided and reliant, compartmentalized, and unimaginative. That is the curse of specialization – the inability to think beyond one’s specialties.

I can, though. See, I’m a Numenist and deeply involved in our Bounty Ministry. Our goal isn’t sustainability, nothing that paltry. No, we’re striving for a thriving, bounteous environment. We can have it, even if we must go through a Little Ice Age or a Long Drought. We can do much more than change a light bulb. We can plant seeds. Real seeds, as in planting radishes, and tomatoes, and strawberries, and seeds as in ideas and suggestions and inspirations.

The specialist mind looks at this huge, overwhelming problem and it freezes up. The problem has so many parts, is so wide-spread, so large, they can’t fit into any of their compartments, can’t imagine any single thing they can do to change things. Someone else will have to take responsibility, and they go back to their lives, convinced that by having thought of the problem, they’ve done all they can do.

We Numenists are people of patterns, of change. And we say we can all do something. Yes, even Al Gore’s little “change a light bulb” thing – it’s a start – a seed. If you change just one thing today, you can influence others to change that same thing. By changing one thing, you open the way to add another little change. Maybe this time, you’ll be influenced by someone else’s change. Over time, those changes will add up. This is a viral social change. If we all pick just one small thing to change – maybe we choose to eat less meat, or use cloth and net bags for shopping, or to ride our bike to work or out shopping or to the park or the movies instead of driving, or to unplug things that are energy vampires (how many clocks do we really need in one room anyway? – the kitchen has one on the oven, the microwave, the refrigerator, the toaster oven, the coffeemaker, etc. Only one needs to be accurate – I pick the refrigerator – unplug the rest when they aren’t in use), or to pick one day a month or a week where we don’t go shopping, don’t drive anywhere, don’t use anything electronic, where virtually everything we do is powered by our own muscles. One thing. One seed to get the others all going.

It’s easy. I know you can do it.

We’ve also been advocating locavorism and growing your own food. Putting in a garden is easy. Our ancestors did it without all the nifty tools we have now. We have better information on soil testing and amendments, and easier methods of getting good plants growing without a great deal of labor or expense. If you plant it from seed, nourish it from your compost and don’t need too many drives to a garden center or nursery, you can grow a free lunch! Not only that, but you’ve grown the freshest tastiest food you can eat with a carbon footprint so small it hits the negative numbers – meaning you’re actively healing the earth and making things better. Your compost is reducing the bags of garbage hauled away from your house even as it feeds your garden – a double positive! You’ll get free exercise, too, and reduce the trips to the gym – that means you’ll be healthier, stronger, get lots of good Vitamin D, and still reduce your carbon footprint. And when you’re in the garden, you won’t be depending on other people to entertain you – a further reduction in your carbon footprint.

If you live in an apartment or condo or hi-rise, you can garden in an abandoned lot, or on the roof, or in window boxes or join a community garden or work with your city council to get gardening land allotted to people who want to claim it (like Germany does).

More importantly, by planting and tending a garden, you will heal not only the earth, but your community and yourself. You’ll meet your neighbors (maybe for the first time!) and form bonds with them (zucchini bonds!), and you’ll gain personal power through your increasingly diverse abilities. You won’t be trapped into a specialization mindset, but will become the creative problem solver who can provide for yourself and your family not only without diminishing the world about us, but by actively increasing the bounty of the earth. Our relationship with the earth is not and should not be a zero-sum game – and gardening is proof of that.

Pick your seed. You can do it. We can do it.

Garden Update

This morning, I harvested rosemary, sage, parsley, nasturtiums, chives, dandelion leaves, dandelion blossoms, the last of last year’s potatoes, radishes, carrots, and the first green tomatoes.

I plucked daffodils, hyacinths, and marguerites to adorn the flower vases.

Year round, I can harvest something from my garden.  This year, the weather was kind enough to allow me to harvest rosemary, parsley, and sage even in the depth of the ice storm.

Next week and the week after, I have to  put in the rest of my vegetable gardens.  I’ve cleaned out the sacks in which I grow potatoes – something even apartment dwellers can do if they have a patio or balcony that gets about 6 hours of sunlight.  Buy some weedcloth, sew it up into 15- 30 gallon sized bags.  Roll the top down until you have about 8 inches at the bottom.  Fill that 8 inches with a good garden soil – Mel’s Mix (1/3 peat moss, 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 compost) is good.  Plant 3-5 seed potatoes.  As it grows, mound up dirt around it and roll the bag up to hold the dirt in.  Do this until the potatoes stop growing and the tops die.  To harvest, you can either rip the seam out and let the potatoes spill out or you can roll the top down and pull potatoes out.  A 15 gallon bag like this will grow about 20 pounds of potatoes.

The best thing about growing potatoes in bags like this is that you can plant different kinds of potatoes (one kind per bag) without committing a lot of garden space to it.  It’s easier than growing potatoes in discarded tires (although tires are great if you can get them and your neighborhood allows you to have them in your yard/patio/balcony), plus it’s lighter – just some soil and potatoes, no tire weight to add in.

I’ve got several bags of potatoes going – Yukon golds, dark red hortland, German butterball, french fingerlings,  purple majesty, and some baking russets.

All Starbucks are Closing

Kitchen after inventory

Originally uploaded by nodigio

http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/25/news/companies/starbucks/index.htm?cnn=yes

Granted, it’s only for three hours, but they’ve chosen the after work rush hours. Presumably, it’s for training, and do they ever need it! Three hours isn’t enough time, but I’ll take what they will give. If this means the counter help (baristas or whatever they choose to call them) is faster and more accurate, then I’m all for it. If it also means the Starbucks shops will be cleaner, I’m all for that, too.

I won’t be inconvenienced by their shut-down since I stopped going to Starbucks when it took half an hour to get a plain cup of house coffee, black, no sugar. I could walk into any diner or restaurant in town and get a cup of coffee poured in under 5 minutes. But not at Starbucks.

Even Java Dave’s – notorious for being slow – is faster than than all of the local Starbucks I went to. And they were cleaner and friendlier and didn’t play games with your order or subject you to a 10 minute inquisition just to place your order.

For all ya’ll who frequent Starbucks, I hope this makes your ordeal easier.

As for me, I’m going to the Red Cup, or the Red Moon, or Cafe Bella, or Sober Grounds, or the Black Bean, or any of a number of other small local independent coffee shops that have quick, friendly service and clean shops.

For those who need a caffeine fix on your drive home, Dunkin Donuts is offering their small lattes, cappuccinos, and espressos for 99¢ from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. today to make up for Starbucks shut down.

Starbuck’s Sales are Cold

Snowfire Drops

Originally uploaded by nodigio

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7219458.stm

I’ll tell you why I don’t patronize Starbuck’s. I have a long list of reasons, starting with Bad Coffee. Coffee is not that hard to make. People have been doing it for a very long time.

So why does Starbuck’s get it wrong? They get it wrong because they use burned beans. If the bean is bad, the coffee will always be bad. You can brew a bad cup of coffee with good beans, but you can never brew a good cup of coffee with bad beans.

I know they are trying to emulate the Italian espresso – and they use the espresso coffee as the base for all their coffees, which is a bad idea, too. It’s a fine line between an espresso roast and burned. Starbuck’s coffee crosses that line.

See, there are stages to roasting coffee. The lightest coffee roasting stage requires excellent beans because the slightest variation is discernable. The lightest roast is called a Bianco Roast (also White, Butter, Yellow Roast), and the bean is a buttery yellow or pale color. Next is a cinnamon or light roast (also known as Half City, Light, and New England Roast), and the bean is heated to a maximum of 400ºF. The taste is sharp and acidic, and the coffee brewed will only be a pale brown. Next up the line is the American Roast (Also known as Breakfast, Brown, and Medium Roast) which is acidic, but still considered a light roast. Its maximum temperature is 435ºF. The oils haven’t come out yet, and the sugars in the bean are subdued by the acid. Then there’s the Full City Roast (Also known as just the City Roast, Light French, Light Viennese), where the acid and sugars are balanced, the bean is a medium color, and the oils are appearing. Chips of the bean will pop off at this stage, known as the “first crack”.. The maximum temperature is 445ºF. The Vienna Roast (also known as a Continental Roast, After Dinner, European, New Orleans) has more sugars and more oil and is slightly darker, but still a medium roast. It has the most aroma at this point. The maximum temperature is 455ºF. Given a choice, most Americans prefer a Full City or Vienna roast. Somewhere between a Full City Roast and a Vienna Roast, the bean begins to lose its origin characteristics and gain roast characteristics. If you want to experience the flavor of the origin and its particular characteristics, this is where the roasting should stop. After this, what you’re getting is the flavor of the roast more than the bean. Next up is the espresso roast. The aroma decreases, the bean is black and oily, the sugars caramelize, giving the coffee an intense flavor. The maximum temperature is 465ºF. The next stage is French Roast (also known as Full Roast, Italian), where the sugars fully caramelize, the acids decrease radically, the bean is very black and oily. The coffee starts to taste burned. The maximum temperature is 475ºF. The last stage is known as the Dark French Roast (also Dark Italian, Heavy, Noir Roast), the bean is black and dry, all oils have been roasted out, the sugars are just past caramelization, the acids are gone. It tastes slightly burned. The maximum temperature is 480ºF. The next stage is burned. From espresso to burned is just a few degrees difference. Starbuck’s coffee is the French/Italian/Dark French Roast and the coffee tastes burned the darker the roast is.

The darker the bean is roasted, the more inferior the bean can be. Consider it like a fine steak: Bianco roast is raw steak that’s been shown a flame to subdue it for your plate, but it hasn’t even had a chance to start browning, the cinnamon roast is barely heated and the outside isn’t even browned yet. It’s practically raw, but some people like it that way. The American Roast is the next step up, still mostly raw, but bordering on rare. The Full City Roast is like a steak well seared on the outside, and rare on the inside. The Vienna Roast is Medium rare (or medium well, depending upon the temperature range). The French Roast is well done. The Italian Roast is very well done, almost charcoaled. The next step is carbonized steak, if it weren’t so brittle, you could use it in place of pencil lead.

Oddly enough, in comparing steak and coffee, the people who love the darker roasts of coffee like the rarer steaks, and the people who like shoe leather steaks prefer the lighter roasts of coffee. I find that interesting, even if it is irrelevant to the topic.

Once we get past the bad coffee, we smack into Bad Service – when Starbuck’s first started, they boasted the best coffee, fast. I had friends who swore by Starbucks’ because they could get in, get their coffee and be on their way in under 2 minutes, even after waiting in line. That was great. But they slowed down.

When all you want is a cup of coffee, you don’t want it to take 20-30 minutes to order it, pay for it, and finally get it. And they don’t understand the concept of just plain coffee – they want you to specify all sorts of things – skinny, dolce, latte, mocha, frappuccino, cappucinno, misto, au lait, macchiato, and then all the different flavors – cinnamon, pumpkin, peppermint, watermelon (what? They don’t have watermelon flavored coffee yet?), etc. You go in, specify, “House Brew, black, unsweetened” and they grill you for 10 minutes on all those other flavors and things and try to sell you frozen cheesecake, too. I understand they have to offer you the “go withs”, but can they drop all the grilling for flavors and styles when you’ve already placed the coffee order?

From the time you place your order until you get your plain cup of coffee can take half an hour – no thanks. It’s just coffee, not a three course dinner.

Worse still, they demand your name when they take your order, but when they put the coffee up for people to pick up – they don’t call your name. They call out the type of coffee. And what if there are other people with the same coffee order? How will you know it’s yours and not someone else’s? What was the point in insisting on getting the person’s name if it isn’t going to be used? I’ve seen people hover uncertainly at the counter, wondering whose coffee it was and asking one another “Is it yours? Did you order before me? How long you been waiting?”

Their coffee isn’t good enough for that kind of hassle.

The cleanliness varies widely from store to store. I really shouldn’t hold that against the whole chain, but I do. When I walk in and see that the badly placed table with the creamer and sugars and coffee stirrers is covered in spills and crumpled napkins, and there’s suagr and spills on the floor around it, I know it’s sloppy customers who did that. But it’s the employees who let it stay that dirty. When unmanned tables are filled to overflowing with coffee cups, when the restroom is out of toilet paper, when the trash cans are spilling onto the floor, when there’s grime on the edges of the counters, when I can see that behind the counter is as dirty or dirtier than the front of the counter – I walk out. I won’t even bother to order in a place like that. And I’ve walked out of more Starbuck’s than any other coffee place.

There’s competition for Starbucks – places with better coffee served in a friendlier faster fashion among a higher standard of cleanliness. Best of all, many of these nice coffee shops aren’t chains. They’re locally owned, and may even be a shop attached to a local roaster. Double bonus! So I frequent them instead of Starbuck’s. The beans are well roasted, not burned to charcoal. The coffee is brewed well. They understand the words “house brew”, and their counters and food prep areas are clean. The employees recognize you at your second visit, and never forget you. After your 4th visit, they even remember your order if you keep ordering the same thing. If you’re like me and experiment around a bit, they don’t get the chance to do that. But I’ve seen them prepare someone’s order as they walk in the door and have it ready by the time they get to the counter.

I never saw that at a Starbuck’s, back when I was giving them lots of chances to become my preferred coffee shop.

Bad coffee, bad service, and dirty stores are the primary reasons I don’t buy my coffee from Starbuck’s anymore.

Sugar-Free Causes Weight Gain

‘Shrooms!

Originally uploaded by nodigio

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1711763,00.html

I’ve known for decades that people who drink diet sodas, and eat “sugar-free” foods gain weight and keep it on faster than people who don’t. I am always gobsmacked when I read reports supporting this because the reporters always seem so surprised at these findings. Fake sugar is bad for your health. It makes your body store fat instead of burning it off, it messes up your metabolism so your body loses its internal balances and checks, and it keeps you feeling hungry so you eat and drink more – causing weight gain.

Plus, labels on “sugar-free” and “fat-free” foods that have been artificially lowered in fat and sugar content are misleading because the fine print shows the foods aren’t necessarily low in fats or calories.

Artificial food makes the body hungry.

Real food satisfies. It fills people up, provides a balance of fats, sugars, and other essential nutrients in forms the body easily metabolizes, and satisfies their taste and texture cravings. It’s healthier because it’s not loaded with high fructose corn syrup, extra salt, questionable preservatives, soy, and enhancers that shouldn’t be in the food.

Honestly, why do food manufacturers need to add soy to peanut butter? Why do they need to add wheat and soy to garlic salt? Why do they need to add salt, soy, and wheat to canned corn? I picked up a can of tomatoes the other day and the ingredient list was longer than some of my stew recipes – for a can of just plain tomatoes. Not tomato sauce or a tomato blend like the “chili ready tomatoes” or “pizza ready tomatoes”; just plain tomatoes.

People desperate to lose weight will grasp at foods labeled “lo-cal”, “lo-fat”, “sugar-free”, “fat-free”, and other such things in the hopes they will lose weight if they eat them instead of real food, because the media has carried out an extensive demonizing campaign against real food. That campaign began with all sorts of food scares, the “you’re gonna die if you eat (fill in the blank)”. Tomatoes were touted for a while as a poison. Potatoes are regularly demonized, as is bread, meat, spinach, butter, whole milk, and a plethora of other foods. Scientists released studies claiming these and other foods caused cancer, or heart disease, or contributed to a variety of other diseases and early deaths in people. The advertising agencies weren’t far behind in supporting shaky premature science reports.

The demonization continues even to this day. Have you seen the commercials starring the “McButtertons”? Talk about a blatant demonization of real butter while pushing an oil product full of artificial colors, enhancers, and chemicals that bear no resemblance to real food!

Eat real food.