How Did You Cook That

Tips

Home Roasted Coffee

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Home Roasted Coffee Beans

How do you take your coffee? I take mine home-roasted with a little cream.  Since I discovered roasting my own beans at home over the stove, my morning ritual has never been the same.

I’m always up for re-purposing little-used kitchen items.  I experimented with a vintage Jolly Pop stove top popcorn popper and it worked like magic!

The lid of the Jiffy Pop has a nifty little crank handle that turns a slim bar inside the pot that shuffles the beans as they roast. The result is a perfect, even roast. Adjust the heat of the stove as necessary in order to get one, two or three “cracks” from your beans. If you’re impatient like me, cheat a little and open the lid to peek inside and check the color of the beans. Shake the pot occasionally in order to prevent the beans from burning. There’s nothing worse than a burned tasting cup of Joe.

The entire roasting process takes about 15 minutes but you get the best tasting brew 3 days after roasting. Roasting and brewing on the same day will not deliver an ideal cup of coffee. Patience is key here.

In California, I buy my beans locally from Kean Coffee, a roaster in Orange County. If you do a little searching, you can find distributors online who will ship green coffee beans directly to your house.

My little coffee experiment turned into a passion and I didn’t spend a fortune getting into it. The Jiffy Pop fits my hiking and camping lifestyle too. It travels with me, entertains the heck out of me over the camp stove and usually gets a chuckle out of the barista and coffee roaster when they ask what kind of roaster I use.

No More Plastic!

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Last week I had the awesome, humbling experience of cleaning up a stretch of the LA River with a group called FoLAR and a couple thousand local volunteers. What a great community we have here in Los Angeles.

The biggest take away for me was a renewed conviction of reducing and, ultimately eliminating, plastics from my kitchen, my closet and my home. We drink plastic, eat plastic, cook with it, wear it on our bodies, sleep in it and on it and store our food in it. Last weekend I filled huge trash bags with it.  Literally tons of plastic bottles, bags, clothes, Styrofoam, straws, children’s toys, and storage containers were floating in the river. More waste from our everyday lives than any city realistically needs.  We are conditioned to believe that plastic is the cleanest and most convenient option for storage available. It’s easy and often it’s the only option we are given.

I posted these waxed cotton food wraps on Instagram last year when I saw them in my local Trader Joe’s. (No, this isn’t a pitch for Trader Joe’s. As you can see from the image, there is a display of plastic bottles right behind this basket…case in point. TJ’s just happened to be the cheapest and most convenient place, at the time, that I discovered these, outside of the internet.)

If reducing your plastic consumption is high on your list this year, consider giving these little goodies a try. I love them and use them to wrap up veggies, leftover dinner, condiments, sauces…anything. If you don’t like the sizes, grab a pair of pinking shears and trim away!

Prepping and Storing Cilantro

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Cilantro has a love it or leave it reputation. It is a highly fragrant herb that is a defining ingredient in many Latin and Asian dishes. Those who turn their nose at it will tell you the fragrance and taste remind them of dish soap. I, for one, love cilantro, but I acquired the taste.

Cilantro is a very affordable, abundant and tender herb. In the market it looks a lot like flat leaf parsley. (I still have to take a nibble of it every time to be sure it is cilantro and not parsley)  Cilantro will wilt quickly once you bring it home from the market so you need to have a plan to keep it fresh until you use it. I have opened the fridge enough times, ready to whip up a batch of tacos, only to find a soggy mess of wilted and yellow cilantro in the crisper drawer.

  • Rinse it well to get the dirt and sand out of it.
  • Place it in a jar of water like you are putting flowers in a vase for your table, stems in the water and leaves blooming out the top.
  • Cover with a paper towel. (In an effort to reduce plastic consumption I use a paper towel to cover it rather than plastic.)
  • Refrigerate.
It’s that easy. The life of your cilantro will be extended by about 3 days using this method.
 
If you have a tried-and-true way of storing cilantro that works for you, please share your tips with us.