thoughts on the weather

It rained this morning.

It is still raining now, but it started early this morning, pattering soft and full against the ground.

I slowly filtered up out of a dream in which I already was very late to work, and I couldn't manage to get everything together, not my lunch, not my keys and wallet, not my umbrella. And as I ran around trying to figure out where my umbrella could have gotten off to, I started to panic about having lost it, because of course it was raining and I needed it.

I woke up and thought "well, at least I haven't lost my umbrella."

But when I got to the shelves by the front door, I had my lunch, my keys and my wallet, but my umbrella was not there, and it was not in my backpack, and I had the horrible realization that I had left my umbrella at work. Because, you see, sometimes it rains in the morning but stops before the time I leave for home, and it has not rained here in a long, long time.

So I considered my options. I could hail an Uber, but rain like this causes terrible surge pricing.

I could walk outside as is, and arrive at work looking like a drowned rat.

I could put on the closest thing I have to a raincoat, which is my winter jacket. But although it was raining, it was not much cooler than it had been yesterday, which was not very cool at all. I shrank at the thought of the warm winter coat.

I french-braided my hair in the bathroom but without facing the mirror, because my mirror-twin is no help when it comes to my spatial awareness. My arms burned. It was warm in the apartment. I longed for last weekend, when the apartment was 67 degrees and dry, instead of 80 degrees and humid.

Winter jacket it was. I left the zipper undone, held it loosely together in front of me, hoping it would have less luck insulating my body with a large vent. It funneled rainwater down to my thighs. My hair and shirt stayed dry. I did not look at passersby with umbrellas. I pitied myself enough to want to avoid the possibility of seeing more in someone else's face.

My rainboots are not very comfortable. They wear little blisters into the bottoms of my heels and then grind away at them. But at least my feet are dry.

I arrived at work to see my pink polka-dotted umbrella peeking cheerily out from beneath my desk.

There is a section of my legs, from thighs to mid-calves, that is completely drenched. I am trying to tell myself that this would have happened with or without the umbrella. I greatly dislike wet jeans.

I greatly dislike rain.

The weather is gray and sullen, and so am I.

payday

It is the 15th of the month, which means that it is payday and also that the month is halfway over. And at some point I feel like I'm just rolling over and letting the tides of time drag me around. Because, really?

Halfway over?

And speaking of the passage of time, where did 2015 go?

The other day I was looking sadly at my sidebar here on the bloggaroo because I have had material aplenty but no inspiration, and I could have sworn that it was this year, in 2015, that I blogged 500 words 5 times a week in January, but no. It was 2014.

2014 is kind of a black hole in the timescape of my life. I mean. I know what happened in it, but WHAT HAPPENED IN IT?

Apparently my blog can tell me, at least, what happened in January.

Anyway, it being payday and all, I paid my credit card, moved some surplus funds from checking to savings, and then ordered a bunch of vanilla beans.

I am a little baffled by my own methods, here. Usually I wait until the end of the pay period and then reward myself for staying under budget by buying whatever it is I've been dreaming about right before I clear the card and start fresh. For some reason, I decided starting fresh this month would be accompanied by spending some money on vanilla beans. After the clear. Oh well. They were on sale and I feel good about what I paid for them. Now I get to wait happily for the package to be delivered!

I'm very obsessed with both vanilla beans and with French braids this week. It's a weird time in my life. The weather has also confused my stomach, so I am never sure what I want to eat, but I am usually pretty sure that it is nothing that I have available to me.

Between last night and this morning, I ate three huge, perfect peaches that dripped juice down my face, and I regret nothing except that I have no more peaches to eat.

vanilla bean weekend

It rained last week.

I mean that in only the most positive way, because it rained last week and before the rain it was summer and after the rain it was autumn!

I haven't been so good about watering the plants on the back porch lately, and sometimes the basil droops sadly when I go out to check on it. Since getting back from the greatest vacation I have ever known (sun! sand! surf! tan lines that are persisting even several weeks later!), my groove has been a bit, let's say-

thrown off.

Also, something is eating the mint and I just don't have the emotional energy to expend on stressing about it.

This weekend, I sat around the apartment in shorts and loose t-shirts and my fuzzy pink snuggie. Snuggies were a big laughingstock back in the day but AS IT TURNS OUT, snuggies are basically the perfect couchwear when the weather is cold. The sleeves let you keep close all that body heat you've been dutifully pumping out to help stay comfortable.

Laugh all you want. I love my snuggie.

Inspiration, as happens sometimes, struck. I had two vanilla beans living semi-permanently in a mason jar on top of the refrigerator and hadn't been feeling particularly inspired. And the thought occurs: cream soda is the greatest soda!

This is not, of course, strictly or always true, but when it's true, it's true. There's something really special about the flavor of cream soda. Which, naturally, is not actually cream-flavored, but delicately caramel-and-vanilla-flavored, creating a rich, light, creamy texture that bubbles on my tongue.

Now, I know soda is the opposite of health food, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that (1) the sugar is real, if plentiful, and (2) I wasn't adding phosphates.

So I caramelized some white sugar on the stove, scraped and then steeped one of my two remaining vanilla beans, seeds and pod, and came back in an hour.

Vanilla beans inspire a sort of reverence in me. I bought them from Beanilla and they arrived, oily and plump and oh-so-fragrant. The smell fills the room when I take them out of the packaging or their mason jar home, and it is richer and deeper than any vanilla extract. I can never decide whether I want to try to make my own extract from precious beans, or just use the beans as-is. So far, I've just used them as-is.

I plan to buy more, in bulk, later this week when my paycheck rolls in. Tomorrow. They are running a deal that is pretty phenomenal, less than $1/bean (Madagascar) and free shipping and I think, hey. I can treat myself once in a while. Besides, I'm running out of beans.

I should treat myself to new clothes, but that's not something that's fun for me.

Anyway, the syrup, once cooled, was thick and strong, and I swirled it into seltzer and drank it greedily. Yes. This is something worth doing. I already want to try making another batch, taking the sugar to a deeper, darker amber. I was afraid of burning it, but I erred on the lighter side and ended up with something still delicious (it is my curiosity, not my tastebuds, that remains unsated).

Anyway I think that the rich vanilla flavor that cuts through so sharply is really where the soda is going to continue to shine. This is one thing for which vanilla beans are definitely necessary.

I ... don't really have anything else to say here, so I suppose I'll sign off.

Oh right. I figured out, spur of the moment, how to French braid my own hair a couple of days ago and it is changing my life. I think my hair is going to be less greasy because it will come in less contact with my face and also this is THE ONLY way to style your hair and know you're going to avoid headaches. It is just so perfect.

I feel like the french braid is to hairstyles as the triangle is to bridges.

YEAH.

Only I can't do it while I'm looking in the mirror because my spatial intelligence is not so good, so instead I fly blind every time. Hey man. Still fancier than regular-braid. It does make my arms ache something awful though. I figure I'll get faster the more I do it.

summery things

We had a brief respite from the heat this weekend, windows flung wide-open, the fans still working overtime. I slept with the sheet, the blanket, and the duvet because the nighttime temperature fell to the low 60s. It was glorious.

The temperature swing is brutal, though. I woke up bathed in sweat and threw off a few layers, rolled back over and tried to sink back down into sleep.

We're looking at an absolutely brutal stretch, now, for the next as-long-as-my-weather-app-can-predict. The nighttime temperatures look good, but I have this fear that as we get closer, they will creep up to the mid-70s nightmare where you just can't gain enough traction to cool down the inside of the apartment.

I dunno, man. It might be enough to make me give in and buy an AC window unit.

Last night, Kate and Ben went out for dinner together, and I stayed back, slapping a flank steak into a fajita marinade for dinner tonight - it will have to do with pico de gallo and maybe some smashed avocado, if mine are ripe, rather than classic fajitas - and then eventually hardboiling a couple of eggs. I had a lot of water, a peach, and two hardboiled eggs for dinner last night.

Although I ran the eggs under cool tap water for a minute or so prior to eating them, they still practically blistered my fingers as I peeled them, impatiently. Sprinkled with salt and riding the too-hot-for-my-mouth line, I wolfed them down. I would like to submit hot, freshly hardboiled eggs as perhaps the easiest-to-prepare ultimate comfort food.

Think about it, though. Even macaroni and cheese from a box requires you to boil water, then drain the pasta and cake on the powdered cheese mix. I suppose mashed potatoes from a box are easier, but there's something less homey about them. I think I can appreciate instant mashed potatoes for their general palatability and ease, but they lose their comforting edge when you take the shortcut.

Eggs, you just pop into a pot with water, bring it to a boil, snap off the heat and let them sit for however long you can wait. Or forget about them until later.

Then I ate a peach that I sliced into eight mostly-even slices. It was a little mealy, but the flavor was still there.

Speaking of. We're having some serious fruit fly problems with the trashcan, of all things. Maybe it is actually very common for flies to multiply in great numbers in the kitchen trash, but I don't know what the solution is. When I lifted the bag out this morning, I was pretty revolted by the great fruit fly exodus of July 27, 2015.

I mean, what do I do? Do I waste trash bags and take the trash out more frequently? Do I have to bag up all of my produce waste and take it out separately, like I sometimes do with chicken waste if the can is still pretty empty? We have traps everywhere and they work, but I don't understand why we can't just eradicate them.

This is all Stop and Shop's fault. Ben and Kate use Peapod, which is their delivery service, because they hate going to the grocery store. As a weekly grocery-store-goer myself, this sounds better and better every time I trip over a small child or wait ten minutes for someone who is texting to get out of the way of the milk.

Anyway, a couple of months ago (yes, it's been that long), they ordered a pineapple and ended up with a questionably overripe monster that carried the pests in with it. The produce conundrum is my main complaint with delivery groceries. I like to pick out my fruits and vegetables myself. Since then, we have not been able to get rid of the fruit flies, and there are just a couple of mass fruit fly graves in the kitchen and pantry.

I think I will clean out the red wine trap this evening and refill with fresh wine plus just a dash of dish soap. Then again, the presence of hundreds of dead fruit flies doesn't seem to stop any of the rest of them from diving in to their vinegary demise.

On a happier note, we made ice cream on Saturday. Kate found a recipe for maple bacon crunch ice cream. She is a bit of a maple syrup aficionado, hailing from Vermont, apparently land of the maple syrup festival. I kind of wanted to go to that sometime, but neither of us have cars, so it may never happen. Her parents have supplied her with what I believe is a half-gallon of maple syrup, and it's lasted close to a year now.

Side note: today marks the one-year anniversary of our living in our apartment here. July 27.

Anyway, this recipe was kind of a weird one, I thought. Half as many egg yolks in the custard, a full cup of maple syrup, no other flavoring, just milk and cream, and all of the cream was reserved so the custard was made with just whole milk, sugar, a little salt and some egg yolks. Then stir in the syrup. I strained it afterward, nervous about having scrambled some egg yolks. My fine mesh strainers get a lot of work in the ice cream process.

After it cooled, I stirred in heavy cream and dumped it into the ice cream attachment for Kate's Kitchenaid. It took 10-15 minutes longer to freeze appropriately than I had expected, and that made me nervous, but it got there eventually.

I also made bacon brittle with sugar melted down to caramelized amber, a little butter, some baking soda (? I don't know either, maybe for texture because I suspect it releases carbon dioxide bubbles to help make the sugar brittle instead of hard-as-diamond?), then stirred in the crumbled bacon bits and a generous couple of shakes of cayenne pepper, and poured it out onto a buttered cookie sheet to set.

The brittle is interesting. Ben likes it a lot. Kate thinks it tastes a little like burnt popcorn, but not in a bad way, and I don't think she's too far off. I like it too, for the record, but it's a hard flavor to describe. Ben likes it plain, but I like it the way I swirled it into the ice cream. It adds texture and crunch, smashed up into shards, and the creamy almost-vanilla maple flavor with a dark little peppery crunch...

I don't know how to explain it, but I like it. One little scoop at a time.

Maybe someday we'll try some plain chocolate ice cream. Then again, maybe we won't. I think this is one of the prettier ice creams we've made, in a purely aesthetic sense.

I sat out on the porch last night at dusk, because it was kind of sweltery in the apartment and because I'd forgotten to water the plants in the morning. I sat by them and slowly tipped water into each pot, watching it sink into the soil. They are fragrant now, the mint especially, and thriving. I hope the hot weather will be good for them. I will be vigilant about getting them enough water.

There was a breeze last night, and the sky was blue until it wasn't, the moon a bright constant in the sky. I sat and didn't think. I sat and I was, until the air grew cold enough to prickle my arms with goosebumps. It was quiet except for some small noises from the surrounding apartments with open windows, one playing some Bruno Mars song. It was a moment where I wondered if I'd remember it because it seemed so inconsequential, but kind of heavy at the same time.

When I went back in, Kate and Ben had returned from dinner and were watching something on television, but I didn't join. I took a shower and washed the sweat and grease out of my hair, and eventually I went to sleep.

it's too hot.

It was 79 degrees at 8:30 this morning. Outside of my apartment. I think the inside maintained at a balmy 82, while every fan we own is desperately trying to circulate the heavy, wet air that blankets everything, thwarting our every attempt at relief.

I didn't have coffee this morning. I could have. Ben bought a Kona blend at Trader Joe's this past weekend, apparently struck by a crisis of conscience when he realized

1. he really likes cold brew, and
2. I make all the cold brew that he drinks.

It's a source of some quiet pride to me even though the process is simple. He orders cold brew from Starbucks sometimes on Wednesdays, when we wander down to the farmer's market in Kendall Square and contemplate produce.

So the Kona has been steeping away in the French press in the refrigerator, and it's the best $10-20 price range item I've bought in a long time, in terms of the usage it gets. Hot coffee from it in the winter, cold brew from it in the summer.

Cold brew is nice. I know I've talked about it before, but it's more mellow, less acidic. More suitable for those hot mornings when you wake up and all you want to do is bathe in ice cubes, because you can water it down with coffee or with milk and it doesn't taste heavy. We go through a lot more heavy cream in the winter, but it's just too much in the summer.

The Kona smells nice. I haven't tried it yet. I pressed it last night and poured it off into a ball jar, started a new round so that we'll have plenty come the weekend. This weekend is supposed to hit 88/90 and I'm thinking I might go in to work just so that I don't spend the entire 48 hours lying limply on the futon watching the fans oscillate. Breeze, still, breeze, still.

I mean, I'm still making the cold brew. I just didn't buy this particular set of beans-ground-coarse. But there's no real work to cold brew coffee. I weigh the grounds out, just because we have a food scale. 120g, usually, or thereabouts, then I dump them into the French press and pour in cold water from the pitcher we keep in the fridge. Stir to wet the grounds, let them steep. Stir once more several hours later when the grounds are saturated. Then wait.

Ben broke that pitcher a couple of weekends ago, the pitcher I used to keep orange juice in, sometimes, in my old apartment in New Haven. Water is a much better candidate for it, because it never goes moldy. I'm fairly cyclical about what I like and what I don't. Hot and cold. Inevitably, orange juice would just kind of fall out of favor and then months later I'd pull the pitcher out of the back of the fridge (nothing nice lurks at the back of the fridge) and try not to gag as I disposed of the juice that maybe wasn't very orange anymore. This doesn't happen with water.

Anyway, it's so hot that condensation is a constant these days, and he was lifting it up to take it out of the fridge and it slipped from his fingers and broke, spilling cold water and glass shards across the linoleum. He felt bad about it and ordered us a new one. This one is exactly the same, but it has a red stopper in it. "Cherry red." I picked glass shards out of my toe pads with tweezers all through the following week even though I vacuumed relentlessly. Glass shards and one single deep splinter from the back porch.

We keep our tiny herb garden on the back porch, basil and rosemary and now mint, and they're all growing like weeds except, oddly, for the mint which is supposed to basically be a literal weed. I think it's just not used to its pot yet. The others took some time to cultivate, too, anyway. The leaves smell good when you rub them between your fingers.

Work before noon is a quiet place. I don't know if it's scientists in general or scientists here, but no one seems quite on top of things until after lunch. We wander the hallways, frequent the Keurigs, cradle hot cups in our hands and murmur greetings sotto voce to each other. I'm pretty sure everyone is just doing variations on "morning", but for all I know, we could all be saying things like "I hate your guts" with tired smiles.

Doubt it, though.

My MBTA card is apparently dying. I'm unreasonably (well, I don't think it's unreasonable) irritated that the RFID is giving up one week into the month, because I don't know if I should try to ride this out and then replace the card so I don't have to revisit the MBTA DMV to have the pass transferred, or just give in and make the trip. I mean, I paid $75 for this pass and shouldn't have to sketchily jump turnstiles to get to work.

The hot weather is apparently phenomenal for fruit flies, and I'm fighting a losing battle with them, trying to keep all the fruit in the refrigerators or in closed containers, a couple of ball jars converted to mass graves with apple cider vinegar or red wine as lures. They work well, but even one or two flies is a tremendous annoyance to me. Bugs make me feel itchy and dirty.

I am not enjoying summer. I'm not longing for winter, either, with blankets and shivers. I just want some of that in-between weather. We didn't ever get any real spring weather. You'd think we were far enough north to not have miserable summers, but you would be wrong. I'm just not cut out for this climate.

grilling for summer

We're here, folks. We've hit the summer weather, the days are sunny and breezy, and the weekends are cooperative. It's like the great outdoors wants us to enjoy it.

So this weekend, we used the little grill that Kate bought from Amazon for $30. We used it Saturday, we used it Sunday and we used it earlier today, because we had some sausages that were just begging to be charred up and eaten with a generous dollop or two of spicy mustard.

Saturday afternoon, we fired her up and ate burgers and guacamole with tortilla chips. We piled our burgers high with toppings and ate them in the shade of the overhang on our tiny little porch. Kate made raspberry lemonade with fresh raspberries, that earthy, sour-sweet taste that rings true on your tastebuds, and we sparkled it up with seltzer water, served over ice.

We more than doubled our usage of the tiny little grill this weekend, feeling indulgent but also resourceful.

On Sunday, we had kebabs (kabobs?), and parroted "ke-bab" at each other over and over, laughing as we threaded cubes of meat and vegetables on soaked bamboo skewers that blackened on the grill but did not burn. I marinated the chicken and beef both in a concoction of oil, freshly squeezed lemon juice, worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, dijon, garlic and black pepper, and the meat sat out in a ziplock bag for three hours or so, more than enough to soak in and stick.

We all agreed that, surprisingly, the chicken was nicer than the beef. It was juicy and moist and just-so, the lemon coming out on a high note when you bit into the chicken, the other flavors seared appealingly on the outside. The beef was tougher and the flavor didn't come through as clearly, but I did think it might have been an artifact of beef+chicken, because one might like medium-rare beef but one does not like medium-rare chicken. Honestly, though, it might just be that I didn't get the right cut of beef.

We didn't really have sides for the kebabs, because the meal is fairly complete on its own. We chopped up squares of white onion, elephant garlic, bell peppers, summer squash; whole baby bella mushrooms and grape tomatoes; cubes of pineapple. Some larger slices of pineapple were saved to be seared on the grill on their own, affording a burst of hot flavor when we, impatient, bit into them.

Grilled pineapple, on and off kebabs, is going to be a staple this summer. It just is.

However, we've also agreed that the relative ease of kebabs plus the lovely customizable, delicious results mean we have to do them again and again, and maybe with just chicken from now on because it was better and cheaper than the beef.

I made watermelon limeade that also went with seltzer water, and was surprised how thoroughly the delicious flavor of watermelon floated over the top. We used an old quarter of watermelon for it, all the sweeter for being older, and pureed it into a simple syrup. Squeezing enough juice from limes for the limeade portion was a rather thankless task, though.

This morning, we woke up and leisurely headed outside; we had the aforementioned sausages and another entire watermelon that I cubed into big pieces the way that Mom used to do and put into a large tupperware container, told Kate and Ben that we needed to eat at least enough that we could fit the top on to store it in the refrigerator.

We achieved the watermelon goal, and we also had potato wedges rubbed with chili powder and cumin, then roasted over the grill. We went through one small cylinder of propane this weekend and ate most of our meals outside.

With our lunch this morning (I headed to work later than usual because of Memorial Day and enjoyed my respite), I had iced coffee from the cold brew I made during the week. Ben made coffee ice cubes from the same batch of cold brew at some point yesterday, so we popped the cubes from their silicone mold to ice our coffee without diluting it (although I did add a lot of milk and enough water to thin it a bit, so the iced coffee cubes seem almost a little silly in retrospect). The cold brew is milder over ice, soft rich tones that actually do achieve a dark-chocolaty flavor without any added chocolate.

Last Wednesday, Kate bought a rosemary plant and a basil plant at the farmer's market, and I repotted them into plastic planters designed to look like terra cotta pots, set them out on the back porch to catch some sun. I'm strangely invested in their success. The rosemary is tall and spiky; the basil is squat and rounded. We've named them Sonny and Cher - Cher is the rosemary, naturally. I watered them this morning, misted their leaves (didn't last long with the sun beating down around 80 degrees by noon, but I think it's the thought that counts) and hoped that they were perky and happy.

All weekends should be like this one: warm, leisurely, full of piping hot food fresh off of the grill so that we can walk back into a cool, dark apartment afterward. It just feels so good to be outside. The air is fresh and the sun hasn't quite roasted us yet (although we're supposed to feel the heat this week, that's for sure). Combined with today being a holiday, I think I'm going to carry the refreshment from this weekend right on into the week.

commuter life

But, really, everyone's a commuter when you "grow up". No one lives at work.

This morning wasn't necessarily a rough morning. I did manage to gouge a little piece out of my hand with my opposite thumbnail, which has drawn a little sprinkle-sized pool of blood and hurts a lot. Probably because public transit is dirty and because fingernails are dirty. It's like the Daily Double. I should wash it out pretty carefully, I guess.

When I exited the T station, I headed to the left, as always, to take myself to work. One of the minor streets that branches off of Main is plain, unmarked, no stop sign or light or crosswalk. This is almost never a problem, because there is almost never anyone trying to turn onto this street.

Not so this morning!

A woman in a black sedan was crawling up, signal winking, and I couldn't quite figure out what to do, having used up all of my aggression in exiting the train car to begin with (there is an unreasonable amount of pushing, some mornings). I wasn't far enough away to conclusively stop, and I wasn't close enough to enter the road without being the kind of pedestrian that (if we're honest) I sometimes dream of being.

Lawlessness.

So I was watching the woman in the sedan very closely for any kind of indication. If she waved me forward, I would cross. If not, I'd wait. Unfortunately for me, she had one hand on the wheel and one hand on the phone she was talking on, so she couldn't make any gestures.

She slowed to a stop. I started to enter. She jerked forward. I stopped. She stopped. And so on and so forth. If she called me names (I couldn't hear her), I'm rubber and she's glue, etc etc. Don't care. You have to be the duck and let it roll off in these situations.

When she finally cleared the intersection, painfully slowly and probably giving me a death glare the whole time (DON'T CARE, GET OFF YOUR PHONE), I also cleared it, feeling like an amateur. Then I heard a voice from behind me, low and that deadpan monotone.

"Never trust that any drivers around here know what they're doing."

"Yeah. Yeah, I see that," I replied, turning to see the man with small round glasses.

"There's a reason they're called Massholes."

I laughed.

"You new here?"

This didn't help with my feeling like an amateur, but he meant well. Just wanted to make a connection by complaining about drivers in the city.

"No," I said, "I've been here a while, I just..." I shrugged. "This morning, you know? I used to have a car for the first few months I was here, but actually, getting rid of it was the best thing that's happened to me."

He looked at me. "If I had to drive to work every day, I'd slit my wrists." No smile, just the same deadpan monotone. Then he turned off to enter a building and wished me a nice day.

What a world, eh, Boston?

cold brew: an adventure

It's funny that the last time I posted was in the beginning of December. I guess I'd like to say a lot has happened since then, but I'm not sure that it would be entirely true.

The weather has warmed up an awful lot, though. In some ways it's nice - our gas bill has fallen to half of what we paid just two months ago, and will fall further as we desperately try to keep the apartment from becoming a functional greenhouse

Which, I suppose, begins our discussion of what isn't so nice about the weather.

On Sunday, it hit 90 degrees outside. This was some serious temperature whiplash, up from 50s and maybe low 60s during the week previous. We kept all of our shades down, but cracked all of the windows, and in desperation plugged every fan we own into any outlet we could find. I did not sleep well on Sunday night, tossing and turning fitfully under a single sheet until 4:00am, when I can only assume my brain finally shut itself down and I woke up four hours later to a cheerily chiming alarm.

Needless to say, yesterday was a tough day. I climbed out of bed, brushing at the sheen of sweat already beading on my skin, and put on the lightest shirt I could find. Exhausted, hot, and miserable, I entered the kitchen and couldn't even think about heating water for coffee. Hot coffee when the apartment is 80 and muggy? No thanks.

As it turns out, cold brew coffee is easy to make in a French press, and I have a French press (I'm slowly moving along the path to fancier and fancier coffee, although the internet laughs at my sad little attempts because I don't roast my own beans - who has the time?! - but more importantly, because I drink my coffee with a little cream. I, coffee plebeian.). So I did a little research and tried to figure out where I wanted to pick up some coffee beans.

Even though Starbucks is conveniently located both directly next to the building where I work and about a three minute walk down the street (WHERE IS YOUR DUNKIN DONUTS NOW - it's in many of the T stops and also everywhere else), I didn't particularly want to pay for Starbucks beans for an undertaking that I wasn't even sure whether or not would work for me. Especially since I prefer lighter roasts for hot coffee, but the general consensus on the internet is that lighter beans don't have a bold enough flavor profile for cold extraction, which would lead to, what, caffeine water? Would that be so terrible?

Quick sidebar: I tried some iced coffee on that self-same hot Sunday, made by the pourover method over ice. It was pretty delicious but I can't justify paying $3.21 for a relatively small cup of iced coffee every time I have the urge. Cold brew is supposed to be easy!

So. Anyway. Yesterday as we left work, the temperature had dropped to a relatively balmy 65 or 62 or something that was exquisitely lovely after the unforgiving 80 degree heat in the morning. (Also, wow, what a change!) I asked Kate as we were boarding the train if she wanted to take a walk to Trader Joe's with me, because I had never been to this one and she had never been to one, period, and the weather was nice.

I have somewhat complicated feelings about Trader Joe's, mainly because I don't totally understand the praise that it gets. To me, it is far more a specialty store than an all-purpose grocery store. I would never do all of my shopping at Trader Joe's. Still, for the sweet tooth that I undeniably have, Trader Joe's has a truly impressive stock of various chocolate-type things. I bought some dark chocolate toffee with roasted pistachioes - what?? I came in well under-budget for this month and sometimes you just want to treat yourself a little - and then headed slowly around the store with Kate. I narrowly avoided buying cookie butter by remembering that even if it tastes amazing, I don't have anything to eat it with, and do I really need something that tempts me to have it straight from the jar?

We already have Nutella at home, I guess is what I'm saying.

So eventually we found the coffee, and I stared at the wall of colorful cylinders for a while before I just picked a dark Italian roast. Who knows? This could be a total bust. But the beans smelled pretty good, and I figure cold brew is supposed to be forgiving.

I guess I haven't been totally straight with you about the reason I wanted to go to TJ's for coffee, and it was that they have a grinder right there in the store with variable grind sizes. Perfect! I poured the entire cylinder of oily brown beans in, selected the coarsest grind (gotta filter that sediment with a French press grate, after all), and hit start. I won't run you through the whole gory process, but I did eventually figure it out.

Also, grounds take up way more space than beans. I sort of felt like I was cheating myself out of some coffee, so I took a break, tapped the can around to try to get everything to settle, and ground those last seven beans. Ah, life.

I bought chocolate and coffee; Kate bought milk and grapes. Oh well.

When we got back, I read approximately thirty different recipes for cold brew coffee, and thought that I had maybe stumbled on a ratio of grounds to water that would suffice. It's all very complicated. Luckily for us, I have a food scale. Talked Jonathan into buying it for me for Christmas with the intention of using it for bread (flour weight is way more reliable than volume because it packs so easily), and then discovered that to actually make a good loaf of bread, you have to trust your hands to tell you when enough flour is enough.

So I started to weigh out 140g of coffee grounds and got a little concerned around 50g when I already had probably close to a cup of coarse grinds. I compromised by filling the container I was weighing them in for a grand total of approximately 120g, then dumped them in the French press.

"Kate," I said, laughing, emerging from the kitchen with a French press literally half-full of coffee grounds. "Look at this."

She humored me by looking and laughing about it, and then I poured in about 3.5 cups of cold water, tried to figure out how to saturate the mountain of grounds, then rubber-banded some plastic wrap over the opening and pushed it into the refrigerator.

This morning was nice and cool; the temperature outside was right around 60 as we left for work, the temperature inside hovering around 68 if the thermostat is to be believed. Today is supposed to be hot, but sitting in my climate-controlled, air-conditioned workplace wearing a sweater over my clothes, I couldn't tell you whether or not it's living up to the hype.

I think, ultimately, that since cold brew coffee is meant to be brewed as a concentrate and then diluted, that this will work out. But if it doesn't, at least I still have my dark chocolate roasted pistachio toffee to remind me that the trip wasn't a waste. Anyway, in about six hours, I'll be pouring off what is hopefully a dark brown, caffeinated nectar.

It's a good thing I have a lot of milk in the fridge. I'm excited.