Again With The Coffee?!

Again with the coffee??

Well, uh, yes. We've been doing all kinds of experimenting with our coffee essence, from desserts to main dishes to quick breads as well as iced in a glass. Coffee, it's not just for breakfast anymore.

This is a lamb loin roast, marinated for about five hours in thinned coffee essence, 2 cloves worth of minced garlic and a big pinch of mixed dried herbs. Then thrown on the barbecue grill over gray coals for 10 minutes on the first side and 6 on the second side. Let it rest for an additional 10 minutes before slicing.

It was amazing. The temptation to overeat was palpable - I had literally to leave the table and go into another room while My stronger-willed Beloved put it away. He may have snagged an extra taste on the way to the fridge, too.

Rich and deeply flavorful, we could taste the garlic but not really the coffee. It was there as an undertone but didn't intrude - a well-dressed bouncer at an upscale night club that you don't notice until the patrons get rowdy and you need the muscle. To say we recommend this method of preparing meat is a gross understatement. Try it. You must try it. Try it now. You can thank me later.

The Bitter With The Sweet

What has a bowl of ice cream to do with life? Both bring you bitter and sweet. At least, they do if you drizzle just a tablespoon or so of the cold-brewed essence of coffee over vanilla and coffee ice cream as we did this week.

The coffee drizzle is so strong that you can hardly stand it straight - bitter as betrayal and strong as Samson - but gentle it down with some really nice ice cream and you have a treat work talking about. It freezes on the ice cream in an icy shell and makes a little puddle of dark pleasure at the bottom of the bowl, to be scraped up at the end when it has mingled with the melting ice cream. One of life's little sweets, to balance the bitter.

The Secret Ingredient

Are you one who shares their recipes, secret ingredients and all? Or are you the kind who gives your recipe but sneakily leaves out that one addition that makes it great? I recently discovered, almost by accident, a "secret" ingredient - strong coffee.

A few weeks ago, I made cold-brewed coffee and My Beloved and I have been enjoying tall glasses of iced coffee ever since. It's a hit in this household - powerful and smooth, it has jazzed up several sagging afternoons.

Fast forward to last night, when I was making a quick pasta sauce with meatballs. Squeezed Italian sausage out of its casing to brown in a wide skillet, then removed the "meatballs" and sautéed garlic chips, chopped onion and chunked mushrooms in the same pan. Added a 16 ounce can of organic tomato sauce, two fresh chopped tomatoes, a handful of dried herbs (use your imagination) and a big glug of red wine. Simmered for about half an hour, then turned it off and went about my day, returning at dinner time to simmer it again. It was good in that rich and friendly way that Italian food always is, but not spectacular until I added the secret ingredient.

A splash of that crazy-good coffee. The sauce darkened and deepened dramatically, changing from Margaret to Sophia Loren. The coffee also made the sauce just a little too bitter, so I added about two teaspoons of sugar and stirred it all in together. Tossed with some straw and hay fettucine from Eduardo's of San Francisco, it was like love - messy, delightful and lifegiving. Next time you make red sauce, don't forget the secret ingredient.

Fertilizing Hydrangeas

In the foodie world, trends seem to come and go every few months - crisped prosciutto, duck fat in everything and, now, cold-brewed iced coffee. Of course, it's easy enough to make a few extra cups of coffee in the morning and keep the rest to cool for iced coffee. But, because I have read about cold-brewing at least four times in the past two weeks, I wanted to give it a shot, so to speak.

I took my recipe from the San Francisco Chronicle article by Janny Hu. I added a full pound of coffee grounds to 10 cups of water and let it sit for 12 hours. It's not a pretty process - why are wet coffee grounds so nasty-looking?

After the coffee has steeped, you must strain it to remove the grounds. I did this by lining a strainer with a paper towel, resting the strainer on the top of a pitcher, and ladling the coffee in a bit at a time as the liquid drained into the pitcher. It took quite a while as the coffee grounds quickly clog the "filter," slowing the process to a lazy drip. I was working in the kitchen anyway, so I just got on with my other tasks, returning periodically to monitor the process and refill the strainer.

The result was about nine cups of stand-your-spoon-up-strength concentrate. Don't try drinking this stuff straight - it's lethal! After refrigerating, where it will keep happily for weeks, I added water in about a four-to-one ratio to the coffee concentrate, lots of ice cubes, and half-and-half.

I do love iced coffee and I have to admit this stuff is superior. Robustly flavorful, even when smoothed with cream, it is to me the essence of summer leisure drinking. It's a bit of a nuisance to make but, once made, you have many tall glasses of iced coffee to enjoy without further ado.

The bonus for your garden plants is that you can throw the full pound of wet grounds around the acid-loving azaleas, camellias or hydrangeas to give them a shot of caffeine as well. Keeps snails and slugs away, as well.

Lithuanian Coffee Cake

Another treat we enjoyed at Claire's Corner Copia was her signature Lithuanian Coffee Cake. It comes with or without buttercream frosting; if you are a regular reader of this blog, you already know that we chose with.

The coffee cake is rich and heavy, like pound cake but with spices and the occasional knot of small raisins and walnuts dotted through the crumb. The buttercream icing was plopped in a big mound on the side of the sunny yellow plate for us to take as much or as little as we wanted.

Claire's recipes are available in any of three cookbooks reminiscent of the fabled Moosewood Cookbook, and I found the link to the recipe for the coffee cake online. If you are in New Haven, however, do stop in at Claire's for a piece of Lithuanian Coffee Cake and a cup of her espresso hot chocolate. Then, go do something smart.

Good Advice from Down Under

When I kvetched about my snail problems in a previous post, I got some great advice regarding organic solutions to my dilemma in the zingers that farflung bloggers left for me.

Diatomaceous earth, sawdust and beer were all suggested but the idea that seemed to me the most doable came from the Land Down Under.

Dancingmorganmouse from Oz (Aus) suggested that I try coffee grounds so on one of my morning walks, I stopped in at Starbucks to inquire about their used grounds. Turns out they give them away, neatly packaged in recycled coffee bags, free to people like me! I piled some around each plant on top of the bat poop. Miraculous to imagine that my little plants will take those lowly ingredients to make lovely veggies for us and that, via the almost equally amazing internet, I can get gardening solutions from halfway around the world. Shazam!