Tag Archives: coffee recipe

COFFEE AND … HONEY?

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Photograph courtesy ofSleeping Bear Farms Website

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvellous error! -
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.”

 

From the pen of poet Antonio Machado and included in Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation edited by Roger Housden

Note, March 28, 2012: This is one of the most popular posts on this site. It gets some seventy visits a week. I know: That’s not a lot in the great blogospher, but it’s a lot for a small potato like me. So, more to the point of this update: strict vegans don’t use honey. There is a debate about whether or not honey is vegan – nicely outlined HERE - so I guess each one of us will have to decide just what we think and whether we’ll use honey or agave. Some say agave has the lower glycemic index. Raw honey, on the other hand, is good for fighting allergies, unless your allergies include bee stings. WHFoods (my go to site for nutritional info) details honey’s benefits and nutritional profile.

Okay, so I was looking for an excuse to post Machado’s poem, which I love. Hence, this odd post. But coffee with honey is a relatively new thing for me. Honey may not be the first thing you think of when you want to sweeten your coffee.  It wasn’t for me until I saw the CitySon Philosopher add it to his one day.  It turns out to give coffee a nice, mellow, buttery sweetness, distinctive in all the best ways.

Despite the Van Morrison song, I never tracked on Tupelo honey. I got interested in the Tupelo Honey  (pictured above with link below the picture to Sleepy Bear Farms, a manufacturer) after reading The Secret Life of Bees. I suspect Sue Monk Kidd put that honey on the map for a lot of us, giving it a little romantic spin in the process.

A hot cup of honied coffee on a rainy weekend and a good movie sounds wonderful to me. My choices: The Secret Life of Bees or Ulee’s Gold, one of my all-time favorite films.

Honeyed Coffee

The recipe

  • 1 cup of hot,  fresh coffee, not a Sumatra
  • 2  tablespoons of half-and-half
  • 1 tablespoon honey

Add the honey and half-and-half to your coffee. Stir well.

Tupelo Honey, Van Morrison with Pee Wee Ellis on sax. Enjoy! Back with our regular programming tomorrow…

Video posted to YouTube by .

CUTTING THE CAFFEINE, NOT THE FLAVOR

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Picture: Blogger before morning coffee.

Okay, seriously, this little guy is a Virginia Opossum photographed by David Arbour for the U.S. Forest Service.

Swiss Water Decaf process vs. the chemical decaf process: It’s a mildly humorous video, but it appears to cover the basics.


On the ferry, on the last morning of summer,

a father at the snack counter low in the boat

gets breakfast for the others. Here, let me drink some of

Mom’s coffee, so it won’t be so full

for you to carry, he says to his son,

a boy of ten or eleven. ”

Leaving the Island by Sharon Olds from Strike Sparks: Selected Poems for 1980 – 2002.

Coffee, I’ve been told, is good for the liver but bad for the ticker due to the caffeine. On that basis, cutting back on the caffeine may be well advised for some. I found that flavor tends to suffer from the decaf process and, unless it’s Swiss Water Processed, decaf can just present another set of problems. I don’t want to go totally decaf. So, after some experimentation, I’ve found a half-caf combo that works for me.  Using Peet’s Coffee and Tea coffees, here’s my solution. Once a week, I prepare a batch of my blend.  The proportions follow. When I want to have coffee,  I make single cups using a cone.

HAIRDRESSER’S ACID TRIP

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Video posted to YouTube by picklepuss.

This is a re-post from my other blog, Brooklyn In Memory Most Green. Join me there for a taste of old-time Brooklyn.

A camp classic. If you consider Berkeley a genius, this is the highpoint of his career. It’s his first in color, and filtering his kaleidoscope cuties through the garish mixmaster of 1940′s Fox Technicolor is like a male hairdresser’s acid trip: chorines dissolve into artichokes; Carmen Miranda arrives in an overloaded fruit wagon, more animated than any character at Disney, and cha-chas down a boulevard of strawberries. Alice Faye, in her big-budget musical swan song, swoons some sanity into the proceedings with “No Love, No Nothing” and “Journey to a Star,” but she’s overwhelmed introducing the “Polka-Dot Polka” ballet, a description of which wouldn’t do full justice to it anyway. By the time Berkeley’s chorus girls wave huge phallic bananas in rhythmic waves, you’ll swear you’re lost in a giant fruit cocktail. The film enhanced the stardom of Miranda but because of those big bananas, THE GANG’S ALL HERE was never released in her native Brazil. TV Guide Review

The surreal campiness aside, I love this piece because I think it suggests  New York (my hometown) the way it probably was during World War II: lots of style, lots of  attitude, and lots of wartime shortages. Carmen Miranda is her usual wild, witty, eccentric (campy, kitsch), somba-dancing self. I’ve always liked her. I think the TV Guide Review might be wrong about the movie being banned in Brazil. Miranda was revered there. It’s more likely the movie was banned in Portugal, where she was born. The movie also stars Alice Jeane Leppert (aka Alice Faye), a New York girl.

In homage to the marvelous Ms. Miranda, sit back and have a relaxing Brazilian coffee: four parts hot chocolate to one part hot coffee, rum and sugar to taste, and top with whipped cream.

Now watch the last scene of The Gang’s All Here for the movie’s full acid effect.

Video posted to YouTube by picklepuss.

Long before Cher and Lady Gaga there was Carmen Miranda.

Ms. Miranda’s poster is available from AllPosters.com.