Daily Dec #3: coffee & me

[topaz119]

wendy asked me how I take my coffee, and the short answer is: tea. :D.

I really don’t drink coffee at all—I occasionally go for a good coffee-flavored ice cream to counter-balance some serious chocolate (and I have a recipe for a Baked Alaska using coffee ice cream for which I’m trying to find a suitable occasion) but I usually don't even like mocha candy.

Tea, on the other hand, is a big thing around my house. I have one of those over-the-door shoe organizers (with the clear plastic pockets, right?) on my pantry door and that’s where all my little boxes of tea live in the kitchen. I usually do Earl Grey in the morning (no milk, just a bit of lemon, which is all kinds of wrong, I know, but I like what I like) and I’ll end the day with something herbal (and decaf!), usually a Lemon/Red Zinger or a Peppermint (chamomile makes me feel like I’m drinking the proverbial ‘hot leaf juice’ and let’s just not talk about green tea at all.) If I’m feeling bored (or if the boys have used up the last of my EG), I have some jasmine tea to mix things up a bit. I used to do the fancy blends from Teavana, etc, but in one of our ever-present reorganizations at the office, I ended up on the same team as two fabulous Indian women who have shared with me with their own custom chai blends (I think their mothers make them up in bulk) and so I will do at least one chai latte every afternoon. My go-to Starbucks order is an iced passion tea if the weather is hot, or I’ll do the seasonal syrup in a hot chai (er, not the peppermint stuff—that goes in hot chocolate, but the gingerbread syrup is pretty tasty in their chai.)

So, yeah, tl;dr: How I take my coffee is TEA. ♥

Comments

[endeni]

/How I take my coffee is TEA. ♥/ - Eheh, me too. Tea, no sugar, lemon. I don't care if it's not how you're supposed to take it, it's how I like it. ;)
/(chamomile makes me feel like I’m drinking the proverbial ‘hot leaf juice’ and let’s just not talk about green tea at all/ - Totally, someone after my own heart. :D

[topaz119]

I am amazed at how many people are right there with me--I always feel like the odd one out (when they built our new office, they put a custom Starbucks in the lobby even though there's a proper retail location less than a block away, that's how much coffee gets drunk at our offices.) Yay tea!

[endeni]

Eheh, trying living in Italy where espresso is more of a ritual than a simple drink. Every-time I accompany someone to take a coffe in bar and don't order one for myself I can almost feel the eyes of the barman silently judging me... :D

[topaz119]

Oh, yes, I can only imagine! My mother's family is from southern Italy so "coffee" in my childhood == espresso (and a little grappa) which might have had something to do with my not liking it now...

[endeni]

Eheh, really? My relatives often drink espesso with some homemade anise liquor my granpa makes... *shakes head*

[topaz119]

Oh, anise -- I can't take that flavor either. I'm such a failure as an Italian--I even got my grandmother to make non-anise flavored pizzelle for her holiday baking.

[endeni]

Eheh, I'm not crazy about it either.
Anyway, I didn't know about your Italian roots. Did your relatives pass along any of the language? :)

[topaz119]

No, not really much language. When I was a little girl (very little, maybe 4 or 5), my great-grandfather (whom I called Nonno) was still alive and there are lots of pictures of me sitting with him. Everyone tells me that he had lost all his English by then (he was very old, close to 100) but I remember talking to him. Possibly I talked in English and he answered in Italian, but every Sunday that my grandmother (his daughter) took me to her sister's house (where he lived) for dinner, we spent the whole afternoon together, either in his little garden or with my dolls if it was raining.

Have you ever seen the movie Moonstruck? The house that Loretta's family lives in is like straight out of my memories of Tia Angeline's house (though it's set in Brooklyn and we lived in small coal mining towns in the West Virginia mountains.)

[endeni]

Aw, thank you for sharing you're memories with me, dear. I used to call my great-grandmother "nonna" too, "bisnonna" (AKA great-grandmother, literally twice a grandmother) is too much of a mouthful for a small child.
And, yes yes, I remember Moonstruck, that's a nice frame of reference, thank you. :)