little feet, big sky http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com Most recent posts at little feet, big sky posterous.com Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:38:01 -0800 i've never had coffee this good before http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/ive-never-had-coffee-this-good-before http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/ive-never-had-coffee-this-good-before
Swissgold

As part of my ongoing coffee snobbery, I recently purchased a swissgold® KF 300 One-Cup Coffee Filter, a gold-plated manual drip filter. I've been on a quest to use my own beans via the Keurig and just haven't been getting the best results with the reusable My K-Cup filter. Since discovering that you could get simple hot water from a Keurig, I wanted to try using a simple manual drip filter with some quality beans and see what would happen.

The end result was pure heaven. Place over your cup, add the grounds on top of the filter, place the water filter on top and pour your hot water over, covering with the lid to keep things warm. Incredibly simple, and very easy to clean: just tap the grounds into your compost and rinse/wash with soapy hot water. I didn't realize how much oils and flavor I've been losing to paper filters, or how much I could control the brew compared to our old french press. I'm brewing Intelligentsia's House Blend and the taste was leaps and bounds better than the same grind put through the Keurig directly.

I'm already on my second cup within the hour; this filter is going to be dangerous to my health at this rate. :-)

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:07:08 -0800 finger-licking chinese-style bourbon crab http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/finger-licking-chinese-style-bourbon-crab http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/finger-licking-chinese-style-bourbon-crab I whipped up this dish based on this recipe, substituting the sherry-I-did-not-have for bourbon and adding some peas to make it a bit more of a one-pot dish. We served it over calrose rice cooked with soy sauce, sesame oil and lemongrass. Something about the bourbon in the sauce was absolutely delish and being stir-fry, it was super-fast to make. ;-)
  • 1 large live crab (Dungeness is good)
  • 3 tbsp oil
  • 1 tsp minced garlic
  • 1 tsp minced ginger
  • 1/2 cup sliced green onions
  • 3/4 cup vegetable broth
  • 1 tbsp soy sauce
  • 1 shot of bourbon
  • 1 cup frozen peas, rinsed and drained
  • 1/4 tsp sugar
  • 1 tsp sesame oil
  • 2 tsp cornstarch blended with 3 tbsp water
  1. Clean the crab thoroughly, discarding the top shell. Separate the legs from the body and cut the body in half. In a bowl, mix broth, soy sauce, bourbon, sugar and sesame oil and set aside. In another bowl, mix cornstarch and water and set aside.
  2. Heat oil in a  large wok. Add the garlic, ginger and green onions, and then add the crab and stir-fry to coat with oil.  Pour in broth mixture, add peas and bring to a boil.
  3. Cook covered until crab shells turn pink. Stir the blended cornstarch if it's settled and then stir it into the dish, bring to a boil again and serve.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Sat, 16 Jan 2010 07:55:59 -0800 steam veggies in rice cooker http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/steam-veggies-in-rice-cooker http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/steam-veggies-in-rice-cooker
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I don't remember where I learned this, but it's a neat trick for fast weeknight dinners. If you have a rice cooker, you can steam veggies in it while the rice is cooking. Cook the rice as usual and wash/cut your veggies while it gets started. When the rice is cooked enough to just have a solid layer on top, add the veggies and close again. Play with it a little; the veggies can cook more or less depending on how you chop them and when you add them. To take it up a notch, sometimes I toss the veggies with a light marinade or sauce before adding to the rice cooker. Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:18:00 -0800 'cause waking up is hard to do http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/cause-waking-up-is-hard-to-do http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/cause-waking-up-is-hard-to-do

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The past week has been absolutely insane. We had a huge project due on Monday. One so massively critical that the babysitter logged forty hours last week, and Spice spent the weekend with my mother. On the bright side, it's over now, and we're all recovering well, and we might have scored a huge boost thanks to all the sacrifice. In other news, the cats have recently been brushed and the orchids watered. Stay tuned for more upcoming excitement; same parent time, same parent channel. :-)

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:39:00 -0800 why Intelligentsia doesn't carry fair trade coffee http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/why-intelligentsia-doesnt-carry-fair-trade-co http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/why-intelligentsia-doesnt-carry-fair-trade-co

You used to carry Fair Trade coffee, why don't you anymore?

We believe that the Fair Trade model is not really designed for a company like ours.  It was created to try to balance trade inequities in the commodity business and to discourage traders of commercial or entry-level Specialty Coffee from under-paying and exploiting cooperatives. This was specifically designed to monitor the international financial transactions between the exporting cooperative and the importer. In recent years it has also been used to enforce labeling practices of roasters.  Generally speaking, these coffees have historically been purchased under conditions of extreme anonymity—no traceability, no accountability. We support the existence of Fair Trade and believe that it has had a net-positive effect on coffee trade.

We do not, however, buy commodity coffee; we buy boutique coffees of the very highest quality, and we travel and work very closely with the growers themselves.  We spend days at a time with them, we sleep in their houses, and we are engaged in a continuous dialogue with them about how to grow together and benefit.  Experience has shown us that we can achieve better results through our own efforts and attain a higher level of transparency than we could by simply purchasing Fair Trade coffees.  Lastly, it is important to us that the producer gets maximum return for their work. Many of our coffees come from cooperatives that are Fair Trade certified, and we could easily make them Fair Trade coffees.  If we did so, Intelligentsia would pay a commission to Fair Trade for the use of the Fair Trade logo.  Our belief is that the money makes a bigger and more positive difference when it goes directly into the hand of the producer. Instead of buying the right to use a label we just give the money to the grower.

We will continue to buy coffee from Fair Trade certified cooperatives, but in these instances Intelligentsia is choosing not to pay for the marketing rights of Trans Fair and FLO.

via intelligentsiacoffee.com

UPDATE: Thanks to @kevindaum for reminding me to mention that they trade directly instead, which was the whole reason I found their "Not Fair Trade" fairer trade model interesting. :-)

 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:00:00 -0800 i <3 keurig http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/i-3-keurig http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/i-3-keurig


For Christmas, the spouse-unit finally caved and bought me a Keurig single serve coffee machine. I'd been dropping hints about one since the previous holiday or gift-giving occasion and over 2009, it had turned into a private joke where the spouse would roll his eyes and groan. We generally have a policy of getting rid of bulky, single-purpose appliances in our tiny house, so the whole idea of getting something like that instead of instant coffee, or a simple french press, was indulgent.

I sneaked a Keurig B70 into the house in late November under the guise of taking it to our geek office. Well, okay, I did take it into the office after a few days trial use at home. It was awesome, but huge on our small countertop, so I was content to downscale my wild dreams of a home one to the much smaller, but equally awesome Keurig B30. This was the one the spouse surprised with me on Christmas morning! Yay!

The B70 has a water reservoir, which is great for the office. In the morning, I turn it on and fill it with fresh water from our water cooler. A few of us there use it through the day for 1-3 cups of coffee each. It's pretty fast and the room under the spout accommodates standard-sized freebie mugs and my tall travel mug (if I scoot the bottom cup holder to one side).

The B30 is a little less convenient in that you pour a cup of water into it each time, but for our house that's good, that no water is sitting around in it all day long. The opening mechanism is a little strange in that every time you open it to put a k-cup in, closing it triggers opening the water reservoir area. After some extra fumbling with the opening/closing order, I've gotten it down to the following process: fill mug with fresh water, grab k-cup, press OPEN lever, drop in k-cup and close, pour in water and close, hit BREW. I know it sounds confusing, but if you use one, you'll get the habit of it easily.

For coffee selection, I started with a Gloria Jeans Variety Pack since I was a cream-and-sugar kinda girl and a unflavored box of Coffee People's Donut Shop for the office. I have this lovely OXO Travel Mug that I love to death, sans cleaning the cream-and-sugar gunk out of. The more I've been drinking my coffee black over the past few weeks from my travel mug, the more I've come to enjoy the Donut Shop blend and good regular coffee, in general. My coffee-drinking mother-in-law was staying with us over the holidays and so we quickly went through most of the home stash of Gloria Jeans, so I ordered a Timothy's World Coffee Variety Pack. Aside from a strange "italian lemon drink" one, it's been pretty good and now the GJ coffee tastes like flavored water in comparison. Bleah. While the Timothy's is good for now, I can imagine that my black-coffee-palate will outgrow the k-cup selection, but I loathe the waste of the k-cups anyway, and look forward to playing around with more of using our own coffees from places like Peet's. I also noticed there are strange/interesting things you can do to re-use k-cups, but might stay away from this for BPA-related concerns.


The k-cup tea selection on Amazon is a little weak, and the spouse-unit and I prefer Peet's anyway, so we did some tea-brewing experiments with the Keurig My K-Cup Reusable Coffee Filter. It turns out you can brew a pretty decent cuppa in a Keurig, but you have to do one of two things to keep it from being weak. Typically loose leaf tea sits around in boiling water for a few minutes to steep, but you don't have that time in the process with a Keurig so you have to help it along. One way is to wet the leaves first; fill the filter with tea, close the holder around it, cover the bottom hole with a finger and pour some water in, letting them soak a little. This was way too much work for me, for only a marginally stronger cup of tea and I like my chais and earl greys strong. I could get this with the second technique: grinding your tea leaves.

I used the small container on our hand blender, but if I was going to do this regularly, I'd get a cheap coffee grinder ($10) to only use for tea. I ground the leaves to a tea-bag leaf consistency and put 1-2 tsp in the filter and brewed a lovely cup of earl grey. I'm on the hunt for a small spice rack holder to store some pre-ground teas in and will be picking up a few more of the reusable filter baskets to use for home-ground tea or coffee. I plan to mark the ones for tea somehow to keep from cross-contaminating the milder teas. 


To cap this all off, my mother picked us up this wonderful k-cup carousel. This one is great in that it takes up a LOT less room than the round one I'd seen on Amazon. No more digging through the box looking for a blend. :-) Thanks, Mom!

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:22:22 -0700 "Q-tips: the ultimate beauty tool" funny, I thought that was Spanx. #thingswenevertellmen http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/q-tips-the-ultimate-beauty-tool-funny-i-thoug http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/q-tips-the-ultimate-beauty-tool-funny-i-thoug

Image

via tweetie

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:51:06 -0700 Seaming Spice's pink sweater. #knit http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/seaming-spices-pink-sweater-knit http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/seaming-spices-pink-sweater-knit

Image

via tweetie

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Sun, 11 Oct 2009 01:03:01 -0700 weekend http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/weekend-820 http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/weekend-820

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Random homelife

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:16:47 -0700 sidecar http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/sidecar-6 http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/sidecar-6 And the finished product... :-)

Photo

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Sat, 26 Sep 2009 17:07:32 -0700 crib flub http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/crib-flub http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/crib-flub Grr.. I'm taking the crib apart to chage it to the toddler bed configuration (go, go, gadget IKEA bed!) and I took the wrong side down first. *sigh* Now another ten minutes to put it back and another ten minutes to take the right side down and continue. Bleah. Time for a rum & coke break!

Photo

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:02:08 -0700 floating http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/floating-93 http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/floating-93 I went surfing again earlier this week. It was amazing. *dreamy sigh* I managed to stand up pretty regularly, so I'm over the hurdle of "what if I never get the hang of this". I have the hang of it, from here it's all practice and getting in the water every chance I get. Oh, and learning how to spot & catch the wave itself. :-)

Our instructor, Taylor, would point one out and tell us to start paddling and at the last minute, would give an extra shove for some speed. I tried a couple of times on my own to catch one, but now I know why they call it "catching" a wave! It's kinda confusing because you sit in the line up (the calmer spot of water out past the breaking waves) and wait until you see the right kind of wave approaching. The next bits are still a bit hazy for me. As far as I understand, you turn around, lie down and paddle like the bejeezus until you feel the wave start to lift the back of your board. Then it's a mix of timing, skill, grace and luck as you pop up to a crouch and ride it out. SO far, I can catch it with a push and can stand for at least a few seconds. I still need to figure out how to catch it on my own, and how to turn. Yeah. Turning is kinda important.

Already clearing my schedule to get in some time next week!! *jumps up and down in excitement* Better than Disneyland, cheaper than therapy. ;-P


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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:43:13 -0700 omg, I'm going surfing today!!! :-D http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/omg-im-going-surfing-today-d http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/omg-im-going-surfing-today-d

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:17:46 -0700 "You've Got to Hide Your Breast Away:" The Nursing Debate - DktrShe - Open Salon http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/youve-got-to-hide-your-breast-away-the-nursin http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/youve-got-to-hide-your-breast-away-the-nursin http://open.salon.com/blog/dktrshe/2009/09/18/youve_got_to_hide_your_breast_a...

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:06:34 -0700 Don't eat canned food if you are pregnant. http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/dont-eat-canned-food-if-you-are-pregnant http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/dont-eat-canned-food-if-you-are-pregnant
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) says "We don't want to tell people not to eat canned beans or tomatoes," said CSPI nutritionist David Schardt. "But at the same time, it makes sense for all parents, and especially pregnant and nursing women, to minimize the exposure of their kids' developing bodies and brains to BPA."
via treehugger.com

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:47:30 -0700 motherhood moment: wondering how 3 loads of clean laundry ended up in the baby's crib. http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/motherhood-moment-wondering-how-3-loads-of-cl http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/motherhood-moment-wondering-how-3-loads-of-cl

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:31:57 -0700 am sick today, like cough-cough, *back to bed* sick. bleah. http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/am-sick-today-like-cough-cough-back-to-bed-si http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/am-sick-today-like-cough-cough-back-to-bed-si

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:11:52 -0700 ravelry: vahnee's magma baby blanket http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/ravelry-vahnees-magma-baby-blanket http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/ravelry-vahnees-magma-baby-blanket
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via ravelry.com

Making a version of this for the spouse-unit's cousin's new baby, this time in Muench Big Baby in Blue Jeans. It's been so long that I actually had to look up my own pattern on Ravelry. Doh.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:02:48 -0700 When Do You Know When to Wean? | Momversation http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/when-do-you-know-when-to-wean-momversation http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/when-do-you-know-when-to-wean-momversation
via momversation.com

Awesome vid on weaning your breastfed baby - er, toddler. :-)

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:05:05 -0700 Evening walk http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/evening-walk-15 http://posterous.littlefeetbigsky.com/evening-walk-15

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/75319/me_icon.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10CZ1DfCeMp vahnee vahnee vahnee