The 11 Minute/99 Second Cup!

I live in New York, suburban Long Island, where 'Take Out' is let's say, next to G-d... usually dinner, but where standing in line for a 'Vente', (in some parts of 'New Yawk' they say, "Yo, just gimme a big cuppa Jo') is a morning ritual.  My morning ritual starts at 6:20, wake up kids for school 6:30 (and 3 more tries after that), turn off the house alarm, pet my pooch, and start the blessed coffeemaking ritual...


19 seconds... fill carafe w/water
17 seconds... pour water into electric coffeemaker
8 seconds... put paper filter in cone
49 seconds... grind beans
6 seconds... pour grinds, close cover, flick 'On' switch


Total 99 second... Coffeemaking Workout

Brewing... 11 minutes

Not pretty, but does the job

My favorite, rich, bold, and bright

Beautiful glistening beans

Ready to grind

Ground fine

My cup and my husbands 'bowl'

Rich brown color, if grayish brown then it's overcooked

Can't wait, sometimes I add 'Cool Whip Lite', shhh, don't tell the purists!

When I'm making the coffee, I'm in that fuzzy state between sleep and wake, so I hardly remember making it, but then when the kids leave at 7:15, the sun is visibly up, I've had those first blissful sips, I'm sitting at my Mac writing my blog, consuming my homemade heavenly tepid 'cuppa Jo'.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with buying 'Starbucks' or 'Dunkin' or whatever, but there's something so satisfying going from bean to brew.  In fact, I have this romantic notion of sitting on the hillside of a coffee plantation in East Africa, just as Isak Dinesen describes in her beautiful memoir, 

"Out of Africa".

"There are times of great beauty on a coffee-farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist and the drizzling rain, over six hundred acres of land. The coffee-blossom has a delicate slightly bitter scent..."