Cookbooks and Coffee-Offs

This year's Christmas had a definite scientific bent. Amy received The New Best Recipe: All-New Edition which is a great cookbook in that it not only gives recipes but it also includes explanations of the experiments they undertook to come up with the Best Recipe.We tried  the Northern Corn Bread, the spiral ham, mashed sweet potatoes and pancakes.  All things we've baked before but that came out much  better with the new book's recommendations.

Inspired perhaps by the cookbook, or just because someone here likes to conduct his own scientific experiments we also had a Christmas morning coffee-off. Using the same brand of  coffee, freshly ground, in the same amount and with the same amount of water we brewed coffee using:

1. Chemex

2. Mr. Coffee®

3. French Press


The coffee was then poured into secretly coded mugs and served (black) to 4 testers.

The results were surprising, but unanimous.  Mr. Coffee made the best brew, followed by the Chemex. The French Press came in at last place.

Adventures in apartment hunting

This weekend we looked at a lot of apartments.  Cute apartments, buggy apartments, sterile apartments and non-descript apartments. Some were in small cities, some in little towns, and one - was as close to nowhere as you can get on the North Shore.

Our specs are pretty narrow.  Has to be sunny,quiet,  2 bedroom (room for guests and toys), and walking distance to the commuter rail line, and an easy drive to Gloucester.  And I think we found one in Manchester-by-the-Sea.  A really, really cute town. The .2 mile walk to the T, takes me by a coffee shop and a bookstore. Also, it is next to a bike shop and behind it, there is a nature conservancy with hiking trails.

Which makes the move all that much more real. Hard to believe I'll be working in the big city. Ah...so many adventures, so little time to blog.

Making a list

Yeah, it's trite but I figure Santa is pretty busy this year and this will help him out.

Good beer

Those little ear bud / headphone things

Nice wine glasses

Least you prefer to eat Bon Bons

Books can be dangerous. Very very dangerous. I finished a century in September and decided that I'd had enough of that. I just finished reading Step by Step: A Pedestrian Memoir, by a guy who obsessively walked/ran multiple marathons, double marathons and 24 hour races, (including trying to run a marathon in every state, and in every month of the year) and half way through reading the book I took a break to find out if that was possible with Centuries (there is one for every month, and all states except Rhode Island have official Centuries), and of course for the really obsessive there are Double Centuries.

Spoiler alert! All in all a good book, one comforting fact however, is that, this guy, Lawrence Block, doesn't realize until he's in his sixties that "it's the walking that's important, not the time, not the distance. Not the medals, not the trophies, not the T-shirts." Hey, at least I got that in my 40s!