I'm doing 41 things
Today I am grateful for:
shallots. We make a lovely meal for dinner each night and always from fresh ingredients. One of the hardest items to always have on hand is green onions. You never know when you will need them and they go slimey so quickly in the fridge. In the summer we grow chives in the garden, but they die back in the winter. This year we discovered that shallots produce an excellent green onion top and have exactly the opposite season from chives. A never ending supply.
my morning coffee. This is a deep one. Yeah, coffee is wonderful and we all like it, but truly great coffee is divine. I know just what I am looking for in a great cup of drip coffee. It should be potent and dark without being acidic or bitter. It should have a bit of half and half in it and the result should taste like chocolate. That is a lot harder to achieve than you might think. I first experienced it about 24 years ago when there was a small roaster up in Monterey with these small beans that just roasted up so nicely. Then they went out of business and the hunt was on. 3 years later our local roaster started roasting what they called “Guatemalan Pea Berry.” Again, very small beans and very oily when French roasted. Bliss lasted about 8 years until they stopped using that bean. A long dry spell ensued until a friend turned us on to Café Mam. They are a coffee roasting cooperative in Oregon and they use fairly traded shade grown beans from Chiapas. It turns out that these were probably the beans we had been drinking all along. The shade growing makes a smaller bean and it more intensely flavored with heavy oils. The crazy thing is that the prices are great and if you get some friends to pool their orders, the shipping is very reasonable (we usually order 50 lbs. at a time). Great cup of coffee.
our dinner china. We eat dinner on my wife’s family china every night. It is something her grandmother brought back from England when she was on holiday. My wife rembers it being in the china cabinet when she was a child and only once remembers using it. We use it every day. We have picked up a few more pieces on e-bay to handle large crowds of guests, but the interesting thing is that we have never broken a single piece. I love the way it makes dinner seem like a celebration.
the killing pole. This is a telephone pole that is on the route I drive to get to my boat each day. For some reason hawks like to lurk at the top of this pole and often they are up there tearing apart their lunch. Just today I saw a Red Tail, a Red Shouldered, and an American Kestrel. I feel honored that they choose to go about their hawk business where I can so easily watch them and I am grateful that it is a place I pass frequently so that I am reminded what a splendored world this is that we live in.
the narcissus that grow in my office. They are stellar. They are bulbs that I planted in stones in a glass vase last December. They are 3 feet tall and blooming up a storm! The thing that I can’t figure out is if I take bulbs from the same package and plant them outside, they only grow to 6” and put out a piddly effort at blooming. Deprive them of light and nutrients in the house and they shine. Go figure. I love having them near by while they last.
