The Basics: Making Coffee

Making coffee is an interesting thing in itself since we don't have a coffee maker. We could easily have the help (read: servants) bring some for us but we're a little gun shy about eating or drinking anything of questionable origin. Plus once the help gets their foot in the door they want to help the living daylights out of you and you can't get them to leave.

Luckily, Luanne had the foresight to pack our coffee press just in case we didn't have access to a coffee maker, so we're covered there. Heating up water, though, is another issue. We haven't picked through the mass of pots and pans that are sitting under the cupboards because we're not quite sure what to make of them. Some are filthy, some don't have handles, and some we're not sure are actually for cooking. So we defaulted to using the one pot that was out when we got here, affectionately referred to as "the little pot".

You can see the little pot in the picture, sitting on the cooktop that we have in our kitchen. For all you high-end appliance aficionados out there, it is in fact a genuine Gilma.

To ignite the Gilma we have to use the little sparker on the right hand side. It's a piezoelectric igniter just like you find on a lot of grills. Very handy. You just turn on one of the burners and light it up. Given that the thickness of the bottom of the little pot is about that of heavy-duty aluminum foil, you can boil water in about 60 seconds. Cooking Macaroni and Cheese is a different story, though, since you'll end up with charred noodles and cheese sauce in the blink of an eye if you're not careful.

Another interesting thing about the stove is the fuel supply. I assume it's propane, but I don't know for sure. Whatever it is they must add a good dose of mercaptan to it because if you don't get it lit right away it stinks to high heaven. The tank is a big ol' metal thing that sits under the counter and runs fuel to the burners through rubber hoses with no clamps. I'm sure it's all very safe.

The coffee that we have found here is ground very fine, which I think has something to do with the way that they make their coffee (really strong, mixed with a lot of milk). Infact Luanne would add so much milk to her coffee that she started heating it up in the little pot before adding to to make sure the resulting cup of coffee wasn't ice cold. And that lines up with what I've seen the servers at the office do when getting someone a cup of coffee. They have a small caraffe of really strong coffee, and a large pump-thermos of hot milk. They pour a little coffee in the bottom of the cup and then fill it the rest of the way up with hot milk (or hot water for black coffee).

We've noticed that the ground coffee we buy from the store is also mixed with ~15% Chickory, which is similar to Cornflower in the US. Whatever it is, it makes a good cup of coffee.

So we boil water on the Gilma in the little pot, and pour the hot water into our coffee press, heat up some milk in the little pot, and ix it all together for our morning coffee/chickory pick-me up. Great fun.