We're All Addicted
I've been holding off on this post for awhile, to see how things would take shape before I drew any conclusions. For those of you who don't know me, my favorite hobby for the past few years has been learning how to roast green coffee beans and extract the best flavor possible from them. While I don't drink as much of the stuff as most people assume upon hearing that I've decided to cut out the middle-man and roast my own, it's fair to say that I'd be very sorry to have my supply cut off. In fact, despite trying to find local sources for almost everything we use in daily life - with very mixed results - for me, coffee is one of those untouchable items that are beyond examination. Over the years, I've built several coffee roasters and learned how to make coffee according to the traditions in Cuba, Vietnam, Turkey, and Italy (well, it's real espresso, at any rate). I've roasted in modified popcorn poppers, cast-iron skillets, and most recently a custom-designed drum roaster made from a pasta pot and attached ...
Posted on June 22, 2008 9:49:14 PM EDT
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Assumptions
At the risk of posting something that will sound like an ego-centric rant, I'm interested in responding to something that came out of a comment I posted on Red State Green. Her post was about much more than the thing that I locked onto, but I was struck by the fact that she's growing wheat (I assumed for flour) in her home garden. This made me realize that I've been reading quite a bit from certain blogs (see my sidebar for some of them) about some pretty original attempts to recapture some of our lost agrarian heritage. I have similar conversations with Emily all the time about how many recipes are nearly forgotten in the wake of so many boxed cakes and potatoes. Now, I've broken through the despair that came with the realization that we've created a monster with our fundamentalist free-market philosophies (especially as applied to our food chain, which consists at least in part of living things). As a result, I'm starting to see that what we used to talk about with respect to recipes can be applied much ...
Posted on June 22, 2008 5:20:23 PM EDT
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