Morning Coffee

I really enjoy coffee. It's an important part of my daily routine. I begin and end my day with coffee. I drink coffee in the mid-morning, early afternoon, and occasionally in the evening. Dark roast, French roast. Iced or hot. Yum! I'm often inspired by Jearlyn Steele's Black Coffee Song from Prairie Home Companion. Makes me giggle every time I hear it!

I've enjoyed coffee with and without sugar, usually without 'cause I'm sweet enough. I've had lattes (had a great pumpkin pie spiced latte yesterday, a seasonal favorite) and cappuccinos and espressos. Not so fond of the espresso. I like coffee on it's own and with a little something. Once, a long time ago, when the situation arose and there was no milk or half & half around I even had black coffee and enjoyed it. Really.

Coffee is the one non-water beverage that I actually bring with me in the sewing room. On a day like today, it's chilly here, coffee is essential. I'm very careful when I have coffee in the sewing room. I can be a bit of a klutz in there, well anywhere really and I spill stuff. I can't tell you how many shirts I own that have coffee stains. It's sad really, wasting coffee by spilling it on my shirt.

Every once in a while we have a coffee mishap in the morning. It starts the night before really, but we don't know it until the morning. For years my sweet husband and I had a our coffee pots on timers so it's ready when we go downstairs in the morning for coffee. Last year we finally purchased a coffee pot that has a built in timer. It's a treat really, however it takes a bit of work. We don't mind the extra work that it takes - making sure it's set for the correct time. Sure it only takes 12 minutes to brew a pot of coffee but good grief, with the timer you'd think it'd be ready on time. I guess this would be considered "user error" when it's not. Oh well.

Back to the coffee mishap. As we're grinding the coffee beans and filling the reservoir with water and setting the timer we occasionally forget to make sure that the pot is on the warmer correctly. So when we come down in the morning, the timer has done it's thing and started the coffee brewing. Instead of this wonderful, warm liquid streaming gracefully into the pot what happens is that we get this muddy brown, semi warm liquid and coffee grounds all over the counter. What a great way to greet the day.

The counter has to be cleaned, the pot rinsed out (more than once to get all of the grounds out, because no one likes crunchy coffee), the basket has to be cleaned, the place where the basket goes has to be cleaned. And sometimes we even have to figure out a way to rinse out the reservoir. Who knew that coffee could back up that far?!

Then we get to make a fresh pot of coffee, and wait the entire 12 minutes until it's done brewing. Now, if this happened to me this morning, I would have cleaned up the mess, brewed the pot and waited 8 minutes for my first cup. Pause & serve is a great feature on a coffee pot. Did I mention this before? The pause & serve feature is what helps us get into this mess, the thingy is open just enough by the slightly askew coffee pot to let some of the liquid through and closed enough to keep most of the brewing coffee in the basket to back it up and create this mess.

Now, here's why I only wait 8 minutes. I'm impatient in the morning for my first cup. If I wait 6 minutes the coffee won't be as flavorful later for my sweet dh (who cleaned up this mornings mess, thank you sweetie) and he likes coffee too you see. Between the two of us we drink between 10 & 12 cups of coffee in the morning. See for us it's only 1 to 1 1/2 mugs, our coffee mugs hold about 16 ounces of this amazing liquid. Sigh.

So, I just brewed another pot of coffee. I'm going to head into the sewing room with my energy renewed and Prairie Home Companion playing in the back ground.

Happy Quilting!

Teri