Name a store that you wish still existed, and why!
Strange brew! (And cold.)
So I’ve been intrigued for a while about the idea of cold-brewing coffee. This is a method whereby one extracts the flavors and oils from coffee not with hot water, but with cold. (Duh!) Basically, you mix ground coffee and cold water and let it sit out, at room temperature, for a long time: 12 to 24 hours. Then you strain out the coffee, resulting in a concentrated coffee extract that, because it was done at a low temperature, cuts down on the coffee’s acidity.
So I acquired a really nice glass bottle, hunted around for recipes (eventually settling on this one), and away I went! Here’s the pictorial tale.
First, I measure out coffee: 4.5 oz of it. Which turns out to be quite a bit of coffee.
Into the bottle goes the coffee. Most recipes I’ve looked at say to use a fairly coarse grind, since the long steeping time will be used and since it’ll be easier to strain it out later on.
Then, into the bottle goes the water: 3.5 cups of it.
This results in a pretty gross-looking sludge. Don’t worry! This is normal.
Now came the waiting game. I did the prep part of the job at 4:30 in the afternoon, and I did the straining around 8:00 the next morning.
Straining turned out to be…problematic. The recipe I used said to simply put a standard paper coffee filter into a fine-mesh strainer and pour the sludge through there, slowly, and let it drain into a bowl. The problem is that when I did this, the paper filter clogged up almost immediately; the initial slow pour of coffee slowed in minutes to a slow drip, and then stopped altogether. I tried another filter, and the same thing happened. This was a problem, obviously. So I dispensed with the paper filters: I poured the coffee mixture through the fine-mesh strainer into the bowl, and then, after cleaning the glass bottle, I strained the coffee again, through the same strainer, back into the glass bottle.
The result? Here’s my coffee concentrate, after double-straining and several hours of refrigeration.
Yes, it’s only half the bottle. But it is, after all, a concentrate, so you’re not going to use that stuff straight. (Well, I suppose you could, if you wanted to. It’s your nervous system, folks. I’m not the bossa you!) The idea is to dilute the coffee concentrate, with whatever it is that you typically like. You could use water, I suppose, but that seems goofy. I used milk, in equal portions. Here’s what I ended up with:
And then:
I have to tell you: this is really pretty tasty. In the future I think I’ll use the half-size tumbler for this, though; a glass that size is a lot of this stuff to drink at once. And I’m kind of wondering if I don’t need to use one percent milk or maybe even two percent, because we only keep skim milk around, and for this kind of drink, I kind of miss the mouth-feel I get from a little bit of fat content.
And of course, there’s a virtual galaxy of flavorings I could add to the mix. On a future iteration, I may well try adding a teaspoon of cinnamon to the coffee during the steeping. And if I get into this in a big way, I might start keeping the finished concentrate in smaller glass bottles (of which I have a few floating around, from commercially-prepared iced tea) so I can start the process over again with my main bottle.
Ah, coffee. You make things possible!
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A brief quote about writing
From William Goldman’s indispensible book, Which Lie Did I Tell? (More Adventures in the Screen Trade) (salty language alert):
Mr. Ziegler, referred to earlier [Evarts Ziegler, once Goldman’s agent], was once told that technology was going to change everything. He shook his head no. “I don’t care,” he began, “what you say. I don’t care if your fucking technology figures out a way to beam movies from the moon directly into our brains.” And here he paused a moment before finishing with this: “People are still going to have to tell stories.”
Hear, hear.
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Sentential Links
Linkage! Some of these are new to me, blogs by folks I’ve met through Instagram.
I am, in the end, just me. (Aren’t we all? Labels are such a pain in the ass…but they make talking about stuff so much easier. Weird.)
:: Kat Dennings is an almost-perfect choice for Maddy. She is witty and sarcastic, but can turn on the dramatic when the scenes call for a bit of seriousness. Although Maddy is described as only 5’1, Kat’s curves are exactly how I pictured my MC when I wrote her character. (I can’t say I haven’t pictured Kat Dennings as the older of the two Princesses In SPACE!!! [not the actual title], but I haven’t mentally cast her, either, mainly because she’s likely unconvincingly old for that part. Alas!)
:: My father loved to write crap down. He’d dream up some idea or another, and he’d jot it down in one of a half-dozen little notebooks he used to carry around with him. I remember one time as a kid when I asked him about something, and to answer me he produced one of his older notebooks. Hell, I can’t remember what it was I asked. But I clearly remember him ruffling through page after page of drawings and scribbles, trying to find the answer. He paused on one page, which contained a crude (but surprisingly precise) drawing of a suitcase with two different kinds of wheels on it. “I really should’ve done something about that,” he said, tacitly suggesting he’d scooped the originator’s patent. (At work, I always carry a notepad with me. Always. I have to. If I’m working in one part of the store and I realize I need to cut a piece of material, it’s easier to take my measurement on site, jot it down, and go make the cut. That’s just one example. Oddly, I don’t carry any kind of notepad around when I’m just me, being Joe Blow Writer Dude out and about. This seems odd, but it occurs to me that I rarely have any big writing ideas when I’m out and about being Joe Blow Writer Dude. I’ve come to a point where The Muse seems to only drive by and chuck shit out the window at me when he knows I’m gonna be right here, ass in chair, banging away on the keyboard.)
More next week!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: I saw this candle on Facebook, but without any information as to where it comes from. Which is a bummer, because it’s one of the coolest-looking things ever. Imagine burning this in a room as the only light source, and tracking the shifting of the shadows on the walls and ceiling over time.
Again, I have no idea where this is from.
:: Apparently the Swedes have decided to take movie-making about the Vikings into their own hands. Cool!
:: Over the last few years I’ve had some folks comment on my nice-looking skin…hmmmmm….
More next week!
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This means something. This is important.
So The Wife and I took a few hours a couple weeks back to wander the aisles and corridors and back corners and nooks and crannies (but, sadly, no dimly-lit basement!) of the Orchard Park Antique Mall. This wonderful space, of which I’ve written before, is an old supermarket that was converted to an antique mall when the supermarket built itself a spiffy new location a mile down the road. It’s always a great place to kill some time, as I always find something cool there, whether it’s something I want to own or something I want to look at. Take, for example, this glowing art deco airplane lamp:
Or the Space Needle cigarette lighter (which is about eight inches tall):
Or the creepiest damned lamps you will ever see, ever, for the rest of your life.
I almost always find something to buy, however. On this trip I snagged a really lovely set of sushi dishes (photos forthcoming, I haven’t taken them yet), and, from one of the Used Book cabinets, this bit of movie memorabilia:
If it looks like a plain stiff paper folder, of the kind you used to use in school to keep your class papers in a semi-organized state, it is. But what’s neat is that inside the folder are the real goods. See, this is an actual Official Press Kit, issued by Columbia Pictures, for the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition. Inside the folder are a number of items: a synopsis of the movie, a bio of Steven Spielberg (to that point in his life, obviously), and a complete roster of the film’s cast and crew. All these are typewritten on regular paper.
In addition to that, there’s a brown paper envelope that contains about a dozen black-and-white production still from the film.
Note the Columbia address down in the lower right corner.
I have absolutely no idea on the sequence of events that led to this thing sitting in a cabinet of an antique emporium in Orchard Park, NY, but I’ve got it now. Huzzah!
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Teevee Report
This is how The Wife and I look when watching teevee. Although we usually watch stuff on the laptop. When we’re sitting in bed at night. Often I’m wearing overalls. And in general, we don’t look very Nixonish. Other than that, we look very much like these folks.
So, the 2012-2013 teevee season is in the books. How were things this year?
:: As always, favorite show goes first. So, Castle: after finally ending a kind-of rocky season 4 by finally putting Castle and Beckett in bed together, where did we go from there? Well, it was very much vintage Castle. Some of it was predictable, some of it was surprising, and most of it was a lot of fun. Seriously, Castle had a really strong season, with only a couple of “meh” episodes along the way.
I think what I like most about Castle is the fact that it’s just solid, well-made and almost always well-written traditional teevee. It’s entertaining, its got a great cast playing characters who are all different and all likeable, and there’s generally a minimum of dank, depressing stuff. That’s huge. Not everything has to be really grim and feature characters suffering through joyless lives before succumbing to violent ends.
Anyway, Castle did a lot of fun stuff with the Castle-Beckett romance. (I refuse to call this romance “Caskett”, fandom be damned!) They did the standard “We gotta keep this secret!” thing, but everybody found out in reasonably organic ways – especially Captain Gates, who at the end of one episode just matter-of-factly states, “Yeah, I know about you two. I’m not a cop for nothing.” It was nice to see the two leads get to enjoy one another, and the writers generally kept this pretty fresh, after four seasons of cat-and-mouse stuff that was starting to get a bit long-in-the-tooth. But as much as I pounded on the writers last season for stretching things out longer than they should have, they really did redeem themselves by showing, once again, that the fabled “Moonlighting curse” is pure bullshit. As I’ve said before and will continue to shout from the rooftops, Moonlighting suffered after the two leads slept together because that was the only interesting thing about them.
Meanwhile, and more importantly, Castle also finally filled in all the blanks with the mystery of the murder of Beckett’s mother. This is huge. An ongoing mytharc central-mystery story is all well and good, but this one was getting pretty maddening with the constant peeling back of yet another layer of the onion. Now we finally have our culprit: a ruthless politician, currently a Senator, named Bracken. Beckett hasn’t managed to tie him directly to her mother’s murder yet, but she knows it was him. The storyline continues, but now it’s a different tale, a “How will they get him” instead of a “Whodunit”.
So yeah, Castle had a good season. I even forgive their use of the usually-annoying ‘clip show’ device, because the clip show they did was an extra episode ABC ordered late in the year so they had little time to throw an episode together, and they used it to set up some of the doubts leading into the show’s season finale.
Nice year, Castle!
:: And on the other side of that coin, we have Bones.
This show sucks. I’m sorry, it’s just crap. The only reason it gets play in Casa Jaquandor is that the Kid likes it, and even she is starting to lose patience with it. This show is getting truly terrible, and the season finale was one of the worst I have ever seen. And believe me, folks, I have street cred when it comes to identifying terrible season finales. I remember Emma Samms getting abducted by UFOs on The Colbys, for God’s sake.
Bones has in the past had a particularly nasty killer recur throughout an entire season, and this year was no different. The problems, however, were numerous: this guy, named Pelant, is first of all played by the least charismatic actor I have ever seen play a major villain. And believe me, I have street cred on that too (remember the name of the guy who played the main villain in the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies? No? Well, neither does anybody else). Worse, Pelant is written horribly. He’s one of those superduper computer geniuses who can do anything with a computer, so when we see him, he’s sitting in a room somewhere with a single keyboard and several monitors. And he does things like take over an aerial drone so he can destroy a town someplace, while at the same time emptying the bank accounts of one of the main characters, so their choice is: save the town or save the money.
Or in the season finale, when he was able to use his computer to literally bring several blocks of Washington, DC traffic to a complete standstill, immobilizing one of the main characters long enough for someone he’s been manipulating (oh yeah, he’s also a psychological genius) to kill him. Now, it seems to me that if the FBI knew that there was a guy out there who could do stuff like that, they would make capturing him one of the country’s highest priorities. There would be a massive manhunt, comprising nearly every federal, state, and local law enforcement body. Not Bones, however; after this guy strikes, the leads go for a picnic. Ugly, stupid writing. And worst of all, they didn’t even catch the guy! So the worst villain on teevee will still be kicking next season, and the writers have already intimated that he may well last quite a lot longer than that.
There is nothing worse than when a teevee show’s creative team falls in love with something that sucks.
:: And then we have The Mentalist, which just kind of ekes along, never really great, never actually bad. This show’s cast deserves much better writers, too. The show will quite often start to show signs that it’s about to do something very interesting – but then they rope it back in. It’s almost as if the writers are timid; I get the sense that they are literally afraid to actually go in the direction it seems they want.
There was one episode that had Patrick Jane hallucinating his dead daughter at the age she would be had Red John not killed her. It was a fascinating trip into the darkness that must lie at Jane’s heart, but the show stepped back from that brink just as it was getting really good. Later in the season, one of the CBI higher-ups was revealed to have a very grim secret of his own from his past, and it was frankly the type of dark secret that feels too gutsy for this show. So The Mentalist keeps on trucking. I like it and still watch it, but man, does it feel like missed potential.
(I’ve given up hope that they have any intention of ever wrapping up the Red John storyline. I think that will still be unresolved when the show gets canceled. We’ll never get an answers, because at this point, Red John is too mythical in his amazing status to really be dealt with as a criminal. This is a shame, because even A. Conan Doyle knew that eventually we had to actually meet Moriarty.)
:: I’ve already written about the frustrations of being a Once Upon a Time viewer. Needless to say, the show carried those frustrations right up to the season finale, which amped things up to a cliffhanger. No big deal, that – cliffhangers are the lay of the land nowadays – but one problem with this show has always been that the writers generally are not quite good enough to maintain all the storylines they have going at once. So of course they did what such writers tend to do: they created even more storylines. The show is still fun to watch and I still love the cast (although frankly I’d watch a show that consisted of Lana Parrilla and Robert Carlyle sitting at a table, reading the phone book to one another), but it’s constantly toeing the line beyond which the show will spin out of control into a giant mess.
:: Person of Interest had a terrific second season. This show seems to me fairly underrated…either that, or I just happen to not have any friends who like it, because of all the folks I know online and off who talk about teevee shows, none of them watch this one. A pity, that – it really is a good show. This season they injected more humor, as left to its own devices, PoI can be pretty dour. The leads adopted a dog, and they have a recurring screw-up/trickster character who has the dubious distinction of being the first person whose number came up twice.
This season they finally explained just why Harold is always limping, and they moved some of the other outstanding storylines downstream a bit. Best of all, PoI doesn’t so much introduce new storylines as find interesting ways of continuing old ones. I respect that, as well as the way the show deviated from formula on occasion this year.
:: The Big Bang Theory is still hilarious, although I’ve noticed a troubling trend in which the show is moving away from treating geek-culture with loving respect and gentle kidding and toward outright mocking. But it’s still the funniest thing, week-in and week-out.
:: Two Broke Girls is my go-to for stupid sex jokes and ogling Kat Dennings. I’m still waiting for this series’s inevitable pie fight. It’s got to happen, sooner or later.
:: We actually did not adopt any new shows this year. Nothing got sufficiently high reviews from people I know to make me want to start watching any of this year’s new stuff. (Actually, not quite true – I did hear good things about The Following.) I tried Elementary, and I found it boring. We did watch Sherlock, but that deserves a post in itself. I thought I’d try Mad Men, but the pilot did nothing for me. And I just don’t have a lot of interest in the “blood, guts, and gory dysfunction” that seems to me the main motif in any “adult” series on HBO or Showtime. And yes, I know that Game of Thrones is very well made. I read the books, I know what’s coming story-wise, and I don’t care to watch what I already didn’t like reading.
:: Reality shows? Less and less. Mostly the Gordon Ramsay stuff and The Amazing Race, which is kind of dull now. Still a lot of nice travelog stuff, but I think they need to find some ways to shake up format to stay interesting.
And, that’s about it.
The single best thing I saw on any teevee show this year? This bit from Jon Stewart and his merry cohorts at The Daily Show.
We still don’t know the Russian for “Holy s***balls”, which seems to me a gaping hole in our linguistic development….
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Something for Thursday
I got up this morning to rain. So here is something ridiculously peppy and cheerful! It’s “Bugler’s Holiday” by Leroy Anderson. This particular recording is played by Russians, which amuses me for some reason I can’t fathom. Maybe it’s because you wouldn’t expect such pep and zazz coming from people who are steeped in Tolstoy.
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Heckuva job, Boomers!
My generation got a cheap college education when we were young, and we’re getting good retirement benefits now that we’re old. Pretty nice. But now we’re turning around and telling today’s 20-somethings that they should pay through the nose for college, keep paying taxes for our retirements, and oh by the way, when it comes time for you to retire your benefits are going to have to be cut. So sorry. And all this despite the fact that the country is richer than it was 50 years ago.
But at least today’s kids don’t have to worry about being drafted. That’s something, I suppose.
Look, just what kind of country do we want to be, anyway? This stuff didn’t happen out of the blue, and it’s not an unforeseen consequence that nobody could have known might happen. This is the fruit of our choices.
So again: what kind of country do we want to be?
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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
I saw this question on Twitter one week ago, and it intrigued me, so here it is. This goes to the very heart of who you are as a person, and who we are as a society.
Here it is:
When you’re in line at the grocery store, do you put the plastic separator on the belt after your last item? Or do you leave it for the next person in line to do it themselves?
RANTY UPDATE: Damn it, Google, would you PLEASE, for the LOVE of GOD, change the way Blogger’s comments moderation works so that if I accidentally click “Delete” instead of “Publish” — especially if I’ve selected multiple comments — I get asked a simple “Are you sure?” I swear, the Blogger “Delete Comment” button is the ONLY time, anywhere in the entire wonderful world of computers, that I know of where if you click “Delete” you aren’t prompted with a “Are you sure?” dialog so that if you DID click the wrong frakking button, you’re not completely screwed.
For those of you who commented earlier: Ayup, that means I accidentally deleted them all. My fault, but Blogger/Google could very easily implement a safety feature on this. Sorry, folks. Go ahead and resubmit if you see this.