A Nice Cuppa

Considering a coffee cupping? If you’ve never been to one before, like me before last weekend, here are a few tips to keep in mind.

First, leave your self-conciousness at the door. There are no right or wrong answers when it comes to your tastes and perceptions, but it’s easy to feel unsure and intimidated by […]

There are three simple words for the best latte I’ve ever tasted: flat white, London.  After a few days of decent lattes on Portobello Road in Notting Hill, I was fairly convinced that London espresso drinks wouldn’t quite live up to the quality of lattes that I have grown accustomed to in Seattle.  Portobello Road […]

I am such a sucker for design. A cool box, a beautiful website, and especially the aesthetic of food. So, you can imagine my glee in finding Teality. Their highly graphic website is packed with gorgeous product shots of their various teas, their simple round metal boxes that hold the tea, and of course the […]

Coffee is a well-loved drink in Spain. Its popularity is, perhaps, second only to ???anything with alcohol.??? A Spaniard will drink a coffee for breakfast, at mid-morning break, after lunch and, quite often, after dinner.
Nearly every Spanish home has a chrome, art deco-style, stovetop coffee maker, but coffee is best ??? and most […]

I recently purchased a book on tastings. As a food writer, I’m always on the look out for ways to refine my sense of taste and to better turn the flavors on my tongue into words that my readers can relate to. Simply saying “it tastes good” really doesn’t cut it. So, […]

Once upon a time, all the diet sodas in all the land were chock full of saccharine, and all the diet soda drinkers were oblivious to any broken, skittish lab rats strung out in testing facilities with ugly malignancies of all sorts of horridness, spawned from that very same saccharine.
But the saying goes, ???Ignorance is […]

Call it the coffee lover in me, but I can remember my very first Starbucks Frappuccino. Believe me it has been quite a few years ago, but from that very first taste I was hooked. The same goes for my first spoonful of Starbucks ice cream, it was literally love at first bite. […]

As a baker and a coffee lover sometimes ya just find it necessary to meld the two together. Often I find that the addition of coffee to a chocolate based recipe helps to bring out the chocolate flavor even more. Recently I picked up a copy of Short + Sweet by Gale Gand […]

I overheard the owner Elspeth say, “Don’t outsource your soul”
It’s a sassy tea room in the East Village, NYC sporting a sort of slang Colonial tea gone into the wilderness with 1940’s Jazz. There is an invisible shroud of incense which can ignite a sort of “cronos dysphoria”. Cronos meaning “time”, I […]

Every week, I find myself in the coffee aisle of my grocery store, all sense of time lost, gazing at the wall of fresh coffees. I try to find a new bean or blend every week, and have really enjoyed all my new findings. But some days, I???m just tired. I have […]