on the menu: Paradise Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Kochere coffee

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Trying coffees that sound appealing, most often those that claim to taste of caramel. For the last few weeks, this one from Paradise Roasters.

This didn’t really come through on the caramel front, at least not in the aeropress (and if not there, where?). Light*  and sour with some tangy citrus element that was maddeningly familiar but I couldn’t put my finger on it (and it faded over time, eluding me). Not artichoke but something like artichoke. It isn’t love this time, Paradise. [I do really like your Romance blend, though.]

*Which I like – a dark roast is too much for me for these relatively early forays into coffee drinking, and probably too much for me altogether, comic levels of dilution aside.

Deciding today what to try next. I am not [yet] an avid coffee drinker but I want to drink enough to learn what I like, and what I like a lot.

I am in good company:

“Coffee glides into one’s stomach and sets all of one’s mental processes in motion. One’s ideas advance in column of route like battalions of the Grande Armée. Memories come up at the double, bearing the standards which will lead the troops into battle. The light cavalry deploys at the gallop. The artillery of logic thunders along with its supply wagons and shells. Brilliant notions join in the combat as sharpshooters. The characters don their costumes, the paper is covered with ink, the battle has started, and ends with an outpouring of black fluid like a real battlefield enveloped in swaths of black smoke from the expended gunpowder. Were it not for coffee one could not write, which is to say one could not live.”  – Balzac

try this: tomato jam

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Quita do Freixo red tomato jam

This is my new jam.

I was introduced to tomato jam at a cheese tasting at Formaggio recently. Blue Chair Early Girl Tomato Jam served with a delicate sheep’s milk cheese from the French side of the Pyrenees, made in the fruity, nutty, creamy (single-source/family operated) Basque style. Wonderful. The jam is sweet and fruity yet still vegetal, not too sweet. Delicious on toast and a refreshing alternative to standard jams with the same savory applications, I would say, as a hot pepper jelly. This particular example is made in Portugal and maybe a bit sweeter than the one I tried but still very good.

A few boutique jam producers (jammers?) make tomato jams, and it doesn’t look difficult to make it yourself. You go through the same process as for any fruit jam, with the option of adding enhancers like hot peppers, vinegars, or spices. This kind of tinkering appeals to me and I intend to try it when the jar runs out. As added incentive: the artisanal jam, she is not cheap.