Gay Coffee

Gay Coffee...  Who Knew?!?

Certainly not moi - until just a couple of days ago.  A dear friend of ours found out about it and posted a link on her Facebook page.  I followed the link, loved what I saw, and decided I just had to give it a try.

It just arrived and Oh Boy!  It's just what I wanted!

I know most of you will find this difficult to believe, but I can be a bit of a food snob now and again.  Well...  maybe not really a snob - just slightly opinionated about certain things.  Okay...  REALLY opinionated about certain things.  Kinda.

But I digress...

I like good coffee. 

My very first memory of coffee goes back to when we lived on Potrero Hill in San Francisco - circa 1953... The Hills Brothers Coffee plant was at the bottom of the hill and the scent of roasting coffee was everywhere.  I didn't know what it was, then, I just knew that I liked it.  We didn't live there that long, but every time we were anywhere South of Market or along The Embarcadero, that familiar friendly smell was there.

The folks didn't buy Hills Brothers.  I grew up with Lady Lee coffee made by a fireman.  (Lady Lee is the Lucky Market store brand.  Pop had the ability to make bad coffee taste good.)  Or Farmer Brothers - the restaurant brand at the Donut Center and most of the early restaurants where I worked.

Really good coffee wasn't an expectation back then.  Adequate was adequate.  And for me, all coffee pretty much tasted the same.

But somewhere along the line, coffee changed.  Expectations changed.  People started drinking more coffee.  Better coffee.  No longer was coffee relegated to the back burner, so to speak.  Coffee came out of the closet and started getting respect.  Single origin beans, quality blends, roasts that actually enhanced beans instead of destroying them.

It was a good thing.

And then Gay Coffee came out and it was even better.

When I first visited the Gay Coffee website, I was enthralled.  How can you not love a coffee named Good Morning Mary or Second Date?  And the fact that all of their beans are organic and fair trade only added to my delight.

I started shopping.

I'm a dark roast coffee-lover.  I like coffee brought right to the edge. Juuuuuust to the edge.  Coffee roasting is an art and not all coffee roasters are artists.  Into my burr coffee grinder the beans went.

**Okay, a bit of snobbery here, but a burr grinder makes for a much better cup of coffee than a blade chopper.  The blade chops the beans and the end result is an uneven grind of big pieces and little pieces.  A burr grinder grinds all of the beans to the same uniform size resulting in a superior brew.

After sampling my first cup of Red Hanky Roast, the Gay Coffee Roasters are artists!

The coffee beans are just the right shade of dark and glisten with their natural oils.  The scent is wonderfully rich.  And the brewed cup is nothing short of steaming sensuality.

I'm in love.

Gay love.

And a bit of coffee-overload at the house right now.  We have bags of Peet's French Roast and Kimberton Roasters Black Lab in the cabinet along with our three new Gay Coffees.

Did I mention I'm in love?!?


Sausage, Peppers, and Raclette

I first had Raclette cheese when I lived at Lake Tahoe in the '70s.

There was a bar in Incline Village called the Gasthaus zum Jägermeister that was a bit of an employee hangout after work.  It was where I first had raclette - and the infamous Jägermeister.  I may have had more than that, but to be perfectly honest, my memory is shaky about the place.  I don't even remember exactly where it was.  But I do remember ooey, gooey cheese atop potatoes and more ooey, gooey cheese and french bread.  It's surprising I remember anything, considering the copious amounts of Jägermeister and the German beers that were consumed.

I have a hangover just thinking about it.

But massive quantities of alcohol aside, the Raclette was really good.  I think.

Raclette is an alpine cheese made from cows milk that hails from Switzerland and is also made in France.  Raclette, itself, is a French word that means "to scrape" because the traditional serving of raclette is to have it sitting by a fire and scraping off the cheese from the wheel as it melts.  Raclette is also a dish of boiled potatoes, pickled onions, vegetables, and the like that is topped with the melted cheese.  One of the Hyatt's I worked in served a raclette in one of the bars... I don't remember which one - I worked in too many of them - but they had a gizmo that held a quarter-wheel of raclette and an electric heating element that could quickly melt the ooey goodness.

An interesting note about raclette cheese is that it really is only good melted.  It is not the type of cheese one would put on a cheese tray.  It wants to be melted.

So I melted it.

Tonight I cooked up a batch of Italian sausage, peppers, onions, garlic, and potatoes.  When everything was properly browned and cooked through, I placed it all in a casserole dish and topped it with slices of raclette.  Into the oven it went until the cheese melted.

It was good enough to bring forward a lot of (vague) memories from 35 or so years ago, so I think I will call dinner a success!


Canned Cream of Chicken Soup

My mom used to make a dish she called her "Chinese Casserole."  It was a chicken and rice casserole with Wild Rice Rice-A-Roni, green onions, mushrooms, chow mein noodles... It was about as authentically-Chinese as I am, but damn!  It was good.  It made a lot, so she only made it on those occasions where massive quantities of food were needed - and in our family, that could be fairly often!

Back in October when we were approaching the 10th Anniversary of her passing, I was playing with several of her recipes and thought I might make the Chinese Casserole as a bit of a tribute to her.  During one of my weekly shopping treks, I picked up two main ingredients - Campbell's Condensed Cream of Chicken Soup and Campbell's Condensed Cream of Mushroom Soup.  Neither item is on my weekly shopping list.  In fact, I really don't know the last time I bought any condensed soups.  Only because I can be such an idiot sometimes, I actually toyed at one point with the idea of making my own soups, but quickly realized that even I couldn't be that stupid.  Besides, this was supposed to be about Mom's Chinese Casserole, not some Cooking Light Makeover. I bought the soups.

And then they sat on the shelf because, after looking at the recipe, I just didn't have an occasion coming up where I needed a casserole for 16 people.  There's really not an easy way to make it smaller (although, I suppose I could freeze it....) But I digress...

I didn't make it and those two cans of soup have been sitting in the cupboard mocking me since October.

Tonight I decided to take control!

I sauteed a bit of onion and celery, added a bit of minced garlic, and then added sliced chicken breasts.  And then I pulled the pop-top off the can of Cream of Chicken Soup.  A pop-top!  How convenient!  Staring back at me was a mass of silk-smooth pudding-like substance.  It looked like banana pudding.  Really.

I broke out a bottle of sherry...

I added about a quarter-cup of sherry and let it cook down a bit before adding the gelatinous mass from the can.  Into the pan and then - because it seriously needed something - I added about a cup of homemade chicken stock from the other day.  I let it simmer away a bit and then added fresh asparagus.  When the asparagus was juuuuust about done, I pulled it from the heat, added a bit of salt and pepper -yes, it needed salt! - and over rice, it went.

All-in-all, it wasn't bad.  It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad.