Encore. No, really, I need to see The Dark Knight again.
And maybe I'll be doing that today at CinemaSalem. I know it probably won't compare to yesterday's IMAX experience, but still ... NEED. Or, rather, very much want.
The first show is at 1145. I wonder if they're sold out for the day already. It's worth a shot, and it only takes me five minutes to walk over there and find out.
Picked up books 9 and 10 of Fables at Harrison's yesterday evening. My original idea was to look for a copy of Watchmen to flip through and decide whether or not to read. And then I came to a spinning rack of the Fables books first, which kind of doomed anything else's chances.
Things that are far too convenient at present: the gelati and coffee at Jaho, the incredible wealth of comics and other fandom paraphernalia (yes, they have Whoverse) at Harrison, CinemaSalem (which may only have three screens, but knows how to pick 'em), and the Derby book store. These are practically all of my favourite vices contained within a half-mile radius of home.
In relation to a previous entry, the cold-brew turned out quite well. I may mess with the ratios in future attempts, but this was not disappointing.
Showing posts with label coffee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label coffee. Show all posts
20 July 2008
makes you stranger
16 July 2008
from the New York Times: Iced Coffee? No Sweat
Because I know I'm not the only one who ridiculously pours hot coffee over ice in order to have my coveted iced coffee. BEFORE I go telling everybody that the secret to great iced coffee is already in the kitchen, my friend Keller wants me to confess: I didn't know from iced coffee until he showed me the light. It's important to cop to this now, because not a summer goes by that he does not painstakingly remind me, a rabid iced-coffee drinker, that he's the one who introduced me to the wonders of cold-brewed iced coffee. The funny thing is, when the subject came up we were holed up in a summer rental with three friends off the coast of Puerto Rico, on a tiny island not exactly swimming in upmarket coffee houses. Our first morning there I brewed a blend from the local grocery in the coffeepot, laced it with a little half-and-half and sugar, then let it cool. Classy, I thought, carrying the pitcher to the table. ''I'll just take it hot,'' he mumbled, while I blinked in disbelief. Clearly, this boy didn't know any better. A drink has a time and place. Surely he didn't subscribe to drinking hot coffee in summer? ''No, I only drink iced coffee if it's cold-brewed,'' he said. For five days we watched him sullenly sip his hot coffee on a broiling Caribbean island in the dead of summer. We chided him for his pretensions, ridiculed him, tried valiantly to break him, but he patiently waited us out. Once we tried it we would understand, he explained. Like friends disputing a baseball stat in a bar with no access to Google, we had no way to settle the argument. Two weeks later, back in Brooklyn, I saw a sign: ''Cold-Brewed Iced Coffee Served Here.'' Fine, then. I threw down two bucks and took a sip. Though it pains me to admit, the difference was considerable. Without the bitterness produced by hot water, the cold-brewed coffee had hints of chocolate, even caramel. I dropped my sugar packet -- no need for it. The best brews hardly need cream. It really is the kind of thing a gentleman might spend five days in hot-coffee solitary confinement for. Most days I'm too lazy to hunt down the elusive cold-brewed cup. But recently I discovered an interesting little fact. Cold-brewed coffee is actually dirt simple to make at home. Online, you'll find a wealth of forums arguing for this bean or that, bottled water over tap, the 24-hour versus the 12-hour soak. You can even buy the Toddy cold-brew coffee system for about $30. But you can also bang it out with a Mason jar and a sieve. You just add water to coffee, stir, cover it and leave it out on the counter overnight. A quick two-step filtering the next day (strain the grounds through a sieve, and use a coffee filter to pick up silt), a dilution of the brew one-to-one with water, and you're done. Except for the time it sits on the kitchen counter, the whole process takes about five minutes. I was curious to see how it would taste without all the trappings. The answer is, Fantastic. My friend Carter, something of a cold-brewing savant, turned me onto another homegrown trick: freeze some of the concentrate into cubes. Matched with regular ice cubes, they melt into the same ratio as the final blend. Very fancy. Can't wait to tell Keller. Recipe: Cold-Brewed ICED COFFEE Time: 5 minutes, plus 12 hours' resting Time: 5 minutes, plus 12 hours' resting 1/3 cup ground coffee (medium-coarse grind is best) Milk (optional). 1. In a jar, stir together coffee and 1 1/2 cups water. Cover and let rest at room temperature overnight or 12 hours. 2. Strain twice through a coffee filter, a fine-mesh sieve or a sieve lined with cheesecloth. In a tall glass filled with ice, mix equal parts coffee concentrate and water, or to taste. If desired, add milk. NOTE: To make hot coffee, dilute concentrate one-to-one with water and heat in the microwave.
For the original article:
ICED COFFEE? NO SWEAT
By CINDY PRICE
Published: June 27, 2007
13 February 2007
part-time cutter
contemplating Dilbert
Scott knows. I'm not sure why he knows--probably from some horrible experience of his own, but one doesn't usually imagine these kinds of awkward situations between two men. Well, not outside the realm of Steve Martin comedy anyway--if that makes sense. It might not. It's early. I don't have coffee yet.
This strip made me giggle a lot. Most days Scott Adams is a ho-hum experience for me, but the theme of yesterday's strip into today's has struck a chord. (Click the little strip for full disclosure.)
It was probably because of that peculiar man in 99, and then reading about Christina's experience with "Paul who wouldn't go away" and the IRA man in Belfast. And, you know, being reminded of every other time some strange person got too much into my personal space or shared too much information in too short a span of time.
It's like that. And when it happens to me or my friends, it's creepy; but having it happen to Dilbert, and to such an absurd extreme, is hilarious.
Schadenfreude? Vielleicht.
the tax refund and a brief lament for yesterday's coffee
I keep checking my ING account for my direct deposit from Federal and Massachusetts.
Federal says it should get there by the 23 February (though, with a tiny-font post-script that "cannot guarantee the actual date"), but Massachusetts isn't making any promises at all.
Oh, well. I'll keep watching. [Edit 1125: It figures that the State refund would get there before Federal. Not that I'm complaining. It's a good refund. It's just kind of odd that the people giving me no sense of waiting time should get my money to me quickest. End edit.]
I want coffee sooooo bad right now. Hopefully it will be better than my sour-milk experience of yesterday. Ugh, that was horrible.
movies movies movies:
Having had some coffee (yes, a great improvement on yesterday's), I'll now write on upcoming entertainment.
First, this. I'm sorry, what?
WHAT?!?
John Travolta is NOT Edna Turnblad. At all. Ever. The end!
It's not even so much that they're re-making Hairspray that bothers me. That actually doesn't bother me at all. It's the Divine versus John Travolta thing that irks me.
Divine ... (Let that sink in.) ... Travolta? Eh?
Maybe it's not as ridiculous to somebody who's seen the stage production, but that seems really miscast to me. Other arguments are quite welcome.
So why did I hear about this? Because I've been checking the release calendar on IMDb to see how much the movies are going to set me back this summer. So far I have six must-see movies on my list:
*Harry Potter Part V (which is bumping up against the release of Deathly Hallows)
*Live Free or Die Hard (yes, it's probably going to be awful--and I don't see how they can top Bruce Willis and Sam L. Jackson running around NYC mouthing off at one another--but I'm faithful to this franchise, so I'm going to see it)
*Ocean's 13 (I've really enjoyed the last two, in spite of the fact that I went into them feeling dubious; I'll go into this one just as dubious, and hopefully be pleasantly surprised again)
*Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End (Hi. It's Johnny Depp. And Orlando Bloom. And PIRATES. Short of the theatre catching fire, nothing is going to keep me away ... and, in case of fire, I'll be running into the cinema to save the precious reels ... my preciousssss)
*Spiderman 3 (Peter. Parker. The end.)
*Transformers (Hey, it's a remnant of my childhood being made larger than life--I'd probably go see a movie about The Smurfs if they CGI'd it to death)
phone and television technology:
I'll just keep adding things as they come to me rather than creating a whole new entry; that way, people won't have to read any of the extras if they don't want to. Well, not that they have to read the original entry or any of my entries, but there it is.
My phone has now lost the ability to take a charge for more than thirty minutes. If it's not plugged into the wall, it'll die within half an hour. I don't know why. The battery is brand new (since November). My only guess is that the phone is going bad and sucking the power out of the battery at a quicker than normal rate.
It's frustrating. I never know what time it is (yeah, I should just wear a watch; but I never needed [and, so, do not own] a watch when my phone was working).
I think my parents have talked me into sticking with Sprint (it gets us a family rate and, I think, free phone calls between us), but they understand my desire for a new phone and are offering to get me said phone.
They won't tell me what they're considering, so I have no idea what to expect.
My dad is talking about getting a new phone too. Oh, and a new television. They have four televisions, three of them are ridiculously huge and really nice. the fourth is old, but it works. actually, they all work. And that's not including the 19" Sony in "my room" in the Durham house.
He needs an HD television, because "soon anything that isn't HD will be obsolete, and won't be able to receive the cable feed" ... so, what he's basically telling me is that ALL cable companies EVERYWHERE are going to expect ALL their customers to buy a $1000s+ television set.
For some reason, his logic doesn't fly with me. Cable companies and their advertisers want to be able to reach the lowest common denominator in society, because even poor people have television; and whatever little money they can save, you can be sure that big companies will want the chance to take it back through consumer spending--which happens most successfully if and when people are bombarded with advertisements. So I doubt that television is going to become HD-only any time soon; not unless HD becomes more affordable for the masses.
Also, you don't like your current televisions? Would you mind sending one to us? Because we'd LOVE to have a nice television for our living room. Thanks.
chores left unfinished:
*laundry
*vacuuming
And crafting too, but that's hardly a chore, is it? I swear that I'll at least make the effort to not go home and collapse today. I'll do a load of laundry and vacuum the floor by my wardrobe. There. Now I must do it.
18 January 2007
pride cometh before ...
I've got a memory like an elephant... that's lost its memory.
... a nasty fall up the front steps in the freezing cold. Or something to that effect. I could blame it on pride or my over-large slippers that I happened to be wearing at the time, and in which I have a hard enough time while walking on level surfaces, never mind brick stairs.
The pride being due to the happiness I was feeling from the completion (or near-completion) of various chores around the flat. I'd done my laundry, all the little scraps of useless paper from my desk-side bookshelf had been thrown into empty shopping bags, and the trash-full shopping bags had been placed in trash bags.
And before cracking down on the havoc that is my desk, I decided to take out the two full trash bags I'd already assembled. On my way back in, I was thinking of vacuuming my floor as well.
Zeal is randomly punished.
I misstepped and fell up the brick stairs that lead to the vistibule of our apartment, managing to smash both left knee and left ankle. It's been a while since my clumsiness has led me to fall up the stairs (or down the stairs, for that matter), and I'd forgotten how falling on my knee seems to drain the energy out of the rest of me, my arms especially.
Hobbling back inside, I collapsed on my bed for a minute to groan and let the wave of nausea pass. Then, after a few minutes I shuffled to the kitchen, emptied what was left of an ice tray into a ziploc bag, shuffled back to my room, and crumbled again--only, this time, with a bag of ice to transfer from my knee to ankle and back again.
Thus was my work ethic was fairly well squashed for the evening. After an hour or so of icing my knee-cap I decided to have a shower. I spent it wondering how and when the other shoe is going to drop; clumsiness for me isn't a case of "a little here and there." No, it comes in batches, and there's bound to be something else around the corner.
Natalie Dee knows my pain.
In the end, I managed to put brooding aside by way of entertainment, and fell asleep watching more Netflix deliveries: Series Three of The Vicar of Dibley.
On another note completely, I wonder if an ibrik is entirely necessary to the physics involved in the creation of Turkish coffee--or if, indeed, a small pan would do the job just as well. I get the feeling that the almost Erlenmeyer shape serves a particular purpose, and probably something to do with restricting the surface area of the brew exposed to air.
I was reading several tutorials yesterday about coffee, and came upon instructions for brewing Turkish coffee, a process that involves pulverizing coffee beans beyond even the fine-grind typical of espresso. You also apparently require an ibrik (a very small pan, the shape of which reminds me of an Erlenmeyer flask). The whole business sounds easy enough in theory--though I've been reading the several possibilities of disaster--and I kind of want to try it myself.
What is Turkish coffee like? I've only ever had it once, to be honest. I could say it's like espresso, but that's really not doing it justice, because its flavour is much stronger than any espresso. I suppose it would be like finding an espresso concentrate in a syrup-like form and drinking that straight, hot, and usually with sugar.
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