Troubles brewing!

The last few weeks of 2008 brought me some distress in the coffee department. And distress regarding coffee is, to paraphrase Martha, a bad thing.

The roasting chamber of my coffee roaster had developed a crack near its top. It had done this before. The crack slowly grew but it didn't break apart. I didn't want to put any stress on the crack so I didn't wash the pot for a long time. Finally I couldn't see into the pot so I broke down and washed it. The next time I roasted it broke.
I'm guessing a bit of water got into the crack and expanded while roasting and blew the crack apart. As I said, this had happened before. When it did I bought a second roasting chamber before the first one's crack finally gave way. The replacement gave me grief. The lid didn't fit well and took a lot of effort to get it to go on. That made roasting a chore. So I bought a yet another pot. So I had an emergency backup pot on hand. With a Phillips #1 screwdriver I was able to adjust the backup pot so the lid goes on easily. And life went back to normal.

(It turns out that I have yet another backup roasting chamber. My first coffee roaster died with a terrible screech last year so I bought a new roaster. It, of course, came with its own roasting chamber.)

The last week or two gave me something new to worry about. The handle of the portafilter, the thing that holds the coffee grounds for an espresso maker, developed a worrisome jiggle. When I'd put the portafilter into Silvia's group head the handle seemed to go a bit further than the filter. Yesterday I went to Whole Latte Love's web site to order a replacement but then got involved in other chores. (Hey, their 10% off sale goes through tomorrow!)

But that was too late anyway. Last night while making our New Year's Eve party's coffees the handle came off.
And life got complicated.

Fortunately, I'm a guy. Guys can fix things. Guys got duct tape. Well, duct tape wouldn't hold a portafilter's handle on. But guys also have Vise Grip locking pliers.

The pliers hold real good!
They'll work just fine till a replacement portafilter comes.

And life went back to normal.

By the way, while we're on the subject of coffee, here's a picture of what occasionally shows up in Silvia's drip tray. The iridescent film is so pretty.

Orange you glad you've got a BlendTec blender?

A couple of days ago I was gloating over my good fortune to have neighbors who have more oranges than they can use. In one of my comments I said that we'd probably try using the Whole Juice setting of the BlendTec Blender to see if juice made by the blender would be any good.

It wasn't.

We threw in the peeled oranges and blended away. What came out was a thick, frothy, slightly bitter juice. I'm sure it was more nutritious than juice that doesn't include all of the orange (minus the rind). But it was bitter from all the pith from the rind that stuck to the segments.

Anybody out there who is lucky enough to have a BlendTec Blender should not waste any oranges this way.

I'm one who tries not to waste good food so I put the leftover juice in the refrigerator to have with my breakfast this morning. I didn't have juice, I had a chilled orange souffle. All the pectin in the membranes did its job and turned the juice into a semisolid.



The rest of the oranges will be juiced in the traditional manner.

I Love Labor Day Weekend

2013 edition is here.

The best thing about Labor Day Weekend isn't that it's a day longer than most. No, it's because of the "Celebrations" section of the Sunday San Diego Union-Tribune. This is where people pay to announce engagements, weddings, anniversaries, new babies, graduations from kindergarten, and the likes.

If you can pay for it, you can celebrate it.

Every year we get to share in the celebration of Ms. Magic Meryle Cohen's birthday! She hasn't aged a day since I first noticed the celebration of her birthday many years ago. The picture and type have gotten smaller (the column is only 3 ½ inches wide this year) but the information is pretty much what I remember.

(click it to read it)

She sounds like a hoot.

(But for all her accomplishments mentioned in the piece the only thing I can find on the Internet about her is her hint for Heloise.)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MAGIC MERYLE!

Hey, man, ya got any acid?

Descaling an electric kettle
Some time ago I noticed that our ChefsChoice Hot Pot was taking much longer to boil water than it used to and boiled a long time before shutting off. And it was making a roaring noise as it was heating up. Finally, one day it made a "crack" noise and a chunk of the scale that was building up on the bottom of the pot had broken off. I thought that maybe all these things were related.

I put a cup of vinegar in the hot pot and turned it on, let it boil, and let it sit for a while. The scale dissolved. The funny noises while it was heating went away. The water boiled faster and the pot turned itself off soon after it got the water boiling. I had solved the problem.

If your hot pot exhibits any of these symptoms, perhaps it is time for a descaling. Vinegar, an acid, works wonders.

If it's yellow, let it mellow
Jerry and I are practitioners of the selective flush (is that a chorus of "ewwwwwww!!!" I hear?). Well, we live in a desert where water is imported from hundreds of miles away. (I never have understood the insistence on having a lush lawn where there isn't any local water to keep it lush.) And now we are in another year of below average precipitation in the areas we get our water from and we might be facing water use restrictions. Besides, our water goes into a septic tank and we might as well reserve its capacity for water we really need to use (especially in El Niño winters when the ground gets saturated).

Anyway, even though Jasmin is a low-flow toilet, it used to be that when we flushed, whatever was in the bowl was more than eager to leave. There was nothing that Jasmin couldn't handle. That gradually changed. Lately, we had to hold the flush handle down so that all of the water in the tank would be used to take care of business.

Something was wrong.

I thought that something might be clogging the pipe on the way to the septic tank but that really didn't seem likely since once things started moving, things left.

Over the years of mellowness, we would get a buildup of dark minerals on the bottom of the toilet bowl. I'd chip at it now an then and attack it with some vinegar. The minerals would loosen up and chip away more easily. What I didn't think of was parts of the toilet I couldn't see.

I finally thought that maybe there was mineral buildup somewhere I couldn't see and that was slowing down the operations. So I bailed most of the water out of the toilet and filled it with our Costco-sized jug of vinegar and let it sit.

I used an old toothbrush to probe in the toilet's trap and siphon jet. A lot of large chunks of minerals came out.

Jasmin now flushes like new! Vinegar rescues us again.

If you have minerals building up on the bottom of your biffy, you might be getting low performance. Vinegar, anyone?

Here's a diagram of a toilet I found on the Internet in case you want to see where my toothbrush went. (It's not going into my mouth!)