News

June 2, 2013

Cacao Nibs: Super Tasty Superfood! This started out to be our Top 10 uses for cacao nibs.  Clearly, it didn't work out.  There are just too many good uses.  And, they're an addictive snack as well. High in theobromine, and incredibly rich in stable antioxidants, our organic cacao nibs are a snack that you can feel good about!  Or, you can forget about the uber- healthy aspects of cacao-nibs, and check out Numbers 27 and 30 as a starting point for some very grown-up chocolate drinks. 1. Candied Cacao Nibs—top ice cream, puddings, mousses, pancakes, and anything else your heart desires 2. Crunchy topping for salads, ala Michael Chiarello 3. Topping for Roasted Banana Chocolate Pancakes—for additional chocolate flavor, mix  ¼-¹/₃ C. of nibs into the batter 4. Savory crust for pan-fried duck breasts or fried calamari 5. Crispy Cacao Nib Tea Cookies 6. Flavoring for homebrewed stout or porter 7. Nut, Nib & Raisin Cookies 8. Super-food shake with dark cherries and berries 9. Chocolate tea—add 1 tsp or so of coarsely ground cacao nibs to your favorite black tea (May we suggest our English breakfast tea?) for a woodsy lightly chocolaty cup 10. Homemade hot chocolate 11. Chocolate Featherweight Cookies with Walnuts and Cacao Nibs 12. Ribeye Steaks with Spicy, Smoky Cacao Nib Rub 13. David Leibovitz’s Black Bottom Cupcakes with cacao nibs mixed into the filling 14. Bittersweet Chocolate Brownies 15. Topping for roasted winter squash—split butternut (or similar squash) in half, remove seeds and guts, and place cut-side-down on a lightly oiled cookie sheet.  Roast at 400 degrees F for 40-50 minutes.  Butter generously, sprinkle with cacao nibs and kosher salt, to taste. 16. Raspberry Muffins with Cacao NIbs 17. Cacao Nib and Fennel Encrusted Pork Tenderloin from NPR’s Kitchen Window 18. Italian butterscotch pudding with whipped cream and cacao nibs 19. Mix into banana or zucchini bread in place of, or in addition to, nuts 20. Sextuple Chocolate Brownies—the recipe is for Quintuple Chocolate Brownies, but if you add in cacao nibs in place of the nuts… Voila! Sextuple chocolate! 21. Smoky Cacao Nib Encrusted Pork Chops 22. Cacao-Coffee-Banana Smoothie 23. Chocolate-covered Cacao Nibs 24. Cacao Nib and Espresso Cookies 25. Grown-Up Brownies—sprinkle brownie batter generously with cacao nibs 26. Cacao-infused whipped cream—soak cacao nibs in whipping cream prior to whipping it for a rich, subtle chocolate flavor 27. Homemade Chocolate Liqueur—Can you say “Happy Holidays”!? 28. Averna Buena—using the above homemade Chocolate Liqueur 29. Cacao Nib and Currant Rugelach—Try substituting dried Montmorency cherries for the currants 30. Cacao Bourbon: 2 C. good bourbon, ½ C. cacao nibs, and a 1” piece of vanilla bean.  Combine and soak for 3 weeks, or to taste.  Strain, filter, and enjoy! 31. Biscuits Chocolat et Feves de Cacao—soft, cakey, supremely chocolatey 32. Pear Jam with Cacao Nibs

May 29, 2013

Maybe it's hard to believe, but we're really not coffee snobs.  We love good coffee, but please don't EVER think that we aren't willing to suck down a cup of greasy, burnt gas-station brew when the situation requires.  We're geeks, not hipsters.*  We have a coffee drinking algorithm based on an if:then statement. If two or more of the three conditions below are met, then it is a good time for a cup of coffee: 1) Want/Need something delicious. 2) Want/Need something hot or cold. 3) Want/Need something caffeinated. This algorithm means we will drink any coffee, from any vendor, if the only conditions existing are 2 and 3.  This means that it's a coin-toss between Circle K and the store with the charred beans and that creepy damn mermaid.  If condition 1 is in play, neither one will prevail. This belief system led to our now roaster-in-chief drinking what we fondly refer to as "refry" during her college years.  Which is a significant improvement over the elementary school years when coffee had to be consumed on the sly, and "crunchy" was considered a positive attribute for instant coffee eaten straight from the jar.  Refry, however, is as bad as it sounds. Morning 1: Brew pot of coffee, drink ¾ pot. Morning 2: Reheat remaining ¼ pot (If this is going to be a confession, may as well admit that the reheating was in the microwave) while brewing fresh pot.  Drink ¾ of fresh pot. Morning 3: Lather, rinse, repeat.  This led to the Shameful Refry Incident of 1993, when the refry was so bad that we failed to notice that the milk was, uh… chunky.  Severe sleep deprivation and poor planning for an anatomy final were determined to be the cause of the Shameful Refry Incident.  The receipt of a terminal degree, and the successful completion of required state licensure examinations resulted in the unmarked and unmourned end of refry consumption. But, loving our coffee and appreciating the nuance of flavor and fragrance (and being able to bore a chemistry professor into slack-jawed boredom with an over- developed appreciation for the Maillard reactions) doesn't mean we won't use hot brown water or the contents of the La Brea Tarpits as a caffeine carrier if the situation requires.  Should you ever run into us at the local convenience store, we will hold our heads high and lift our paper cups of slightly-burnt-sludge in salute.  We know it will taste vile.  We're okay with that--clearly we're in a Condition 2-3 crisis that needs instant remediation.  Well, maybe not instant.  That's another story for another day… See above re: vile elementary school coffee habits.  Maybe after another glass of wine we'll give you the gory details. *No offense intended to the hipster baristas we know and love.  You're not really hipsters in our eyes.  You're legitimate coffee-artists.  But, since we're old enough to be your parents, we'd like to encourage you to finish that degree you started, and maybe consider switching your major to chemistry, or engineering, or IT, and making anthropology, creative writing, or political science your passionately- pursued minor.  No?  Okay.  We love you anyway.  But we're not co-signing for any loans.

May 28, 2013

We've pretty much confessed to every coffee sin known to man by this point. (There is that thing we don't discuss involving a certain person during her sophomore year of college and chocolate-covered espresso beans, but even we have limits.)  So, we may as well confess that we are terrible parents. Or so we've been told. Our kid started drinking coffee at 8. That is, he started drinking coffee with our blessing on his 8th birthday.  (We did clear it with his pediatrican--a calm, unruffleable gentleman who informed us that his children had started drinking coffee at 4.  He, personally, had started drinking coffee at 3.) We have a picture of him blissfully sucking down his first "legal" cup.  He really started drinking coffee at about 18 months old, when he would steal cold cups of McDonald's coffee (before McDonald's coffee was "improved," when it tasted like stale cigarettes and regret.)  He actually started earlier if you consider that the female half of Three Canyons Roasters stopped for coffee on her way to the hospital to give birth to him.  If the prenatal class said that fries-and-ketchup counted as a serving of vegetables, she was pretty damn sure a nice cup of salt-free bean broth was nourishing and wholesome.  We are the ones whose third-grader waited, bleary-eyed, for the school bus every morning with a travel mug of coffee.  The ones whose cranky kid apologized to his teacher, telling her he was "a real bear" if he didn't have his cup of coffee.  The kid who very earnestly told us that he'd do better on the Arizona standardized tests if he could just have an extra cup of coffee.  And, needless to say, the same kid who informed his mother that for his 21st birthday (many years away) he'd really like to go on a tasting tour of California wine country... Over the past 13 years, we've heard it all from other, disapproving, parents:  "We don't let OUR precious Muffy/Junior drink coffee!  It will make them hyperactive and stunt their growth!"  "Coffee is a carcinogen!  Do you let him smoke cigarettes too?"  And, our all- time favorite from an outraged soccer-mom:  "Don't you know that drinking coffee will delay his puberty?!"  These judgments-disguised-as-questions were not-infrequently delivered as the aforementioned Muffy/Junior was sucking down a neon-colored drink with enough sugar to make their grandchildren hyper and/or snarfing down fries and a multi- species patty on a GMO-styro-bun as they gleefully hurled their bodies into traffic.  (We like the occasional burger-n-fries at least as much as the next red-blooded 'Murkan, but it's hard to see how they're morally superior to a basic cup of coffee.  And, our kid has all the hyperactive tendencies of a yam.)  As far as the predictions of stunted-growth go, at not-quite 14 he’s passed his mother by about 6 inches already, and happily helps us sling 150 pound bags of green coffee. As far as the puberty thing goes... Let’s just say we keep offering him cups of coffee and hoping that soccer-mom was onto something, but the beard growth doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

May 12, 2013

We received a new Guatemalan decaffeinated coffee the other evening.  It's actually pretty tasty-and we say that without the standard snub: "for a decaf."  Seriously, it's good. That said, what caused several minutes of amusement, and dubbing of this particular coffee "Everyman's Bean" was a long, narrow, cloth label sewn onto the bottom of the bag printed with all the coffee's certifications: 1) Organic (Well, duh. Part of why we bought it.) 2) Fair-Trade (Major reason we bought it.) 3) Rain-Forest Alliance Certified (Bonus!) 4) Kosher (Ohhhh-kay...) 5) Halal (Seriously?) 6) Decaffeinated-Swiss Water Process 7) Chemical-free (insert hysterical giggling--it’s a geek thing.) We know what the processor meant by "chemical-free."  However, the term "chemical-free" for coffee, which gets its flavor from more than 800 chemical components?  Maybe it was just late.  Maybe you had to be there.  But, we challenge you to find someone who *couldn't* drink this coffee.  (No, you don’t get a prize if you find someone. We’ll listen politely, say “Wow!” and wonder how many hours you wasted interviewing people about their weird dietary issues.)