April 2012
1 post
Basics of Coffee Brewing
Coffee, at it’s very basic, is coffee grounds combined with water. To most people, making coffee involves putting a paper filter into an automatic drip brewer, scooping in a bit of pre-ground coffee and pressing ‘start’. What you may not know is that coffee is very complex and can have a variety of complex flavors and profiles, similar to wine, that can be influenced by the way it’s brewed.
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July 2011
1 post
Curry Experiment
I recently decided to try making curry because I had a pile of onions in the house and a bunch of spices that I bought a year ago that I knew should be used and replaced soon. I tried to do some research online on how to make a good indian style curry, too many of which started with “add curry powder too….”. The brief references I found on making a curry from scratch detailed...
April 2011
6 posts
Pot Scrubbers
I have a strong dislike for sponges. I grew up in a household that never had a single sponge and any time I interacted with one at another house it would be smelly and dampened with questionable water. Once I moved into my own apartment I tried to give sponges a chance, thinking that maybe it was poor quality sponges that harbored nasty bacteria. I explored many different brands of sponges made of...
Lemonade
I’ve been in search of the perfect lemonade for a year and a half, attempting to recreate a lemonade from a cafe I used to frequent. Their lemonade was perfectly sweet and tart with floral vanilla notes. I’ve made and tasted many lemonades over the past 18 months in search of a similar lemonade and none have compared.
My most recent trial was Meyer lemonade. I was handed a bag of...
Baking Soda
Baking soda is one if my favorite ingredients in the house. I use it in pretty much every room to clean, polish, deodorize and scour. It’s one of the most versatile substances for the household. Most of us stock a box of baking soda for adding to cake batters and another box to go in the fridge to capture yucky smells, and that’s about the extent of our experience. My most common application for...
Muffin Method
Searching for a new recipe always yields interesting results. Sometimes recipes are exactly the same, as is the case with most chocolate chip cookie recipes, and other times recipes are so vastly different that it’s hard to know where to start. A few weeks ago I went looking for a cake recipe to use up some applesauce I had just made, and the results were interesting. It seems as though any...
March 2011
1 post
Preparedness
I’ve lived in San Francisco for two years now and haven’t thought once about being prepared for any type of disaster. The recent earthquakes near Japan and living in the “ring of fire” has made me realize that I should be more prepared to take care of myself and my family if disaster strikes. My household currently doesn’t have a first aid kit, let alone supplies to...
