written and directed by Robert Vaughn

• 2 Ingredients, 2 Recipes, 4 Meals – Here’s a couple of recipes using pork and green beans.
• Curry pastes – A necessary ingredient in a Perfect Pantry.
• Honey Glazed Lemon Roast Chicken Recipe – A simple and delicious recipe for roast chicken.
• What Do 300 Calorie Meals Look Like? – Pictures to give a visual sense of what a 300 calorie meal looks like.
• The Top 5 Brain Health Foods – Good quality dark chocolate and coffee. How can you go wrong?
• Best of Panama 2007 – the best of the 2007 brain food (coffee) from Panama.
• Roasting coffee with a popcorn popper – How most of us get started roasting.
• Chicken with Apples and Raisin Couscous – a Moroccan style dish.

The boys at Transcend coffee have laid their hands on 20 pounds of Hacienda La Esmeralda, which will be arriving soon. Forbes magazine listed this as the second most expensive coffee in the world:

“Hacienda La Esmeralda’s Geisha coffee set an online auction record when it sold for over $50 dollars per pound, unroasted, on May 30, 2006. The coffee, which is grown in the shade of old guava trees, has been widely and enthusiastically praised for its flavour and aroma. In April, it placed first in the SCAA “Best of Panama” competition, with a score of 94.6 out of 100.”

If you want to try some of this coffee, Transcend is offering it in 1/2–pound quantities for $35 Canadian. It’s first-come, first served, so you better hurry. It will also be available by the cup at the shop. Check the Transcend blog for notice of when that will be available.

You can read more about the coffee at the Hacienda La Esmeralda website.

transcend coffee: Hacienda La Esmeralda

“If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.” —Abraham Lincoln

If you really want to taste a fresh brew, you’ll want to roast your own coffee beans at home, and then use them as soon as they have cooled.

Home Coffee Roasting Tips

I’ve been roasting my own coffee for seven or eight years and there is nothing beats the freshness —and price— of home roasted coffee. Wurdgurl has a Squidoo lens on roasting your own coffee. There’s plenty of information here to get anyone with a hot-air popcorn popper or a cast-iron skillet started as a home roaster.

The DIY Guide to Roasting Your Own Coffee! on Squidoo

…plus six more.

The blog, Anything but Coffee, anticipating search engine referrals looking for information about coffee, has posted a page with 20 facts about coffee.

• Number 11 makes me glad I don’t buy coffee at a drive-through.
• Number 12 is the reason why I brew instead of buy.
• Number 18 has me wondering who gets the other $12.91 I pay.

Link from Vancouver Coffee

The Green Beanery web site lists these coffee facts while you wait for your order to be processed.

1. A study at the Harvard School of Public Health of more than 126,000 people found that men who drank more than six eight-ounce cups of caffeinated coffee per day lowered their risk of type 2 diabetes by about half, and women by nearly 30%, relative to coffee abstainers.
2. People who don’t drink coffee have five times the risk of contracting Parkinson’s as those who drank four to five cups of coffee a day, according to a study of 8,000 Japanese men reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Eight other studies likewise found that coffee protected against Parkinson’s.
3. Studies in the United States, Japan and Italy showed that drinking three to four cups of coffee a day was associated with an 80% reduction in risk for cirrhosis of the liver, compared with drinking no coffee at all.
4. U.S. and Italian studies found that three or more cups of coffee a day led to
   
   decreased prevalence of asthma.
5. A 10-year study of 45,000 men found that two to three cups of coffee a day
   
   reduced the risk of developing gallstones by 40%. Psychological Science, the journal of the American Psychological Society, reported that caffeine boosted memory in elderly people who drank one or two cups of coffee in the morning by raising calcium levels in their braincells. Coffee has also been found to improve long-term memory as well as psychomotor skills.
6. A study by the Cancer Epidemiology Training Program at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Public Health indicated that coffee could lower the risk of prostate cancer.

coffee

In his workshop in Mekele, just 200km from Ethiopia’s border with Eritrea, Azmeraw Zekele is turning burnt-out shells into cylinders used in coffee machines.

Most of the shells are left over from the 1998-2000 war between the two countries.

BBC NEWS | Africa | From weapons of war to great coffee

I’m a coffee geek.

Okay, as far as my friends are concerned, I’m a coffee geek. As far as real coffee geeks are concerned, I’ve got a ways to go before I can claim the title.

What coffee knowlege I have has been developed through a hit-and-miss approach. I’ve read articles, books and brochures and talked to experts. Of course, the Internet has become a great source of information.

The Beginner’s Guide website provides “buckets of information” on dozens of topics, including coffee. Visit the Beginner’s Guide to Coffee and you’ll find loads of information to expand your knowledge.

The information is organized in categories:

• Blog
• Coffee Beans
• Coffee Makers
• Coffee Mugs
• Coffee Overview
• Espresso Machines
• Espresso Pods
• Newbie’s Picks
• Overview of Tea
• Types of Coffee
• Types of Teas

Technorati Tags: Coffee, HowTo, Beverages, Coffee Machines, Expresso, Coffee beans

The Gourmet Sleuth has done a little detecting and dug up clues to solving the mysteries of Starbucks recipes. (I’m sure there’s a couple of jokes embedded in that phrase.) Among the links are recipes for these standard beverages plus some that I’ve not seen in Starbucks around here.

There are also some pastry recipes. Again, Starbucks in this area have pastry supplied by a local bakery, so I’m not sure what constitutes a “Starbucks” pastry.

• Java Chip Frappucino
• Mocha Frappucino
• Double-Strength Coffee
• Frappuccino (Starbucks Clone)
• Recipe(tried): Starbuck’s Frappuccino
• Recipe: Starbucks Chai Tea
• Starbucks Caramel Macchiato
• Starbucks Frappuccino
• Starbucks Frappucino II

GourmetSleuth.com - Starbucks Copycat Recipes.