Spring is back (again), and a Starbucks experiment

What a day! After the grim last week (the cold and snow didn’t let up for a full seven days), we had some decent if a bit cool weather yesterday, and today is just- wow. Weather amnesia kicks in and I’m happy to be where I am, geographically and meteorologically speaking.

Tulips, daffodils and assorted cognate greenery is looking battered but very much alive:

Chives are doing extremely well- not sure how they taste but they look like happy chives:

And yours truly took the decadent step of standing on the cold muddy lawn in shorts and bare feet to gloat at and tease the melting snow behind (sorry about the quality but shooting myself has always been a challenge):

And so as is so often these days my thoughts turned to coffee. I’ve been seeing lately what I can get out of beans that aren’t necessarily renowned for their artisanal quality; we’re awash in good beans these days in Calgary but I’m still curious about what the lesser-knowns can give me. There’s a credo among baristas: “any bean, any machine,” or something like that, meaning that a good barista can get the best out of unexceptional beans and lesser quality machines. I have a very decent if quirky home espresso machine but am still curious about what will happen if I start to, or have to, buy the beans that I used to before the “third wave” crashed into town- for example, once upon a time I used to get beans from either Second Cup or from the Faema outlet in Toronto. What if I did that now, given what I know and being blessed with better equipment, machine and grinder-wise?

I decided to try this with beans from the silver bags (the beans behind the bar, not the stuff on the shelves) at my local Starbucks (15th Ave and 14 St SW). Now, I have no idea how fresh these beans are but am optimistic that they are a lot fresher than the prepackaged ones. I bought a half pound for $8.95, which is about par for the course for “better” espresso blends. Here’s the bag:

And they are, as expected, dark and oily as hell, which is not considered ideal (at all!) by espresso aficionados these days:

I ground at “6″ on my Rancilio Rocky, which is pretty fine and what I’ve found to be necessary for dark beans (likely because they’re more brittle and less dense, having been carbonised and all).

I pulled a shot with my naked portafilter to witness the extraction, and here is a film of the result:

Well. Hmmm. It looks really good. Beautiful mousetail extraction, nice striping, and it looks nice in the cup with variegated crema, and thick crema to boot. I tasted it with a patina of sugar to see how durable the crema is (to see if the sugar floats on the crema, in other words) and it tasted… not bad. Not not bad- it was good! Not the best shot I’ve ever had but better than many, with some expected chocolate notes but not that much charcoal and just a smidgen of brightness too; I’d have been happy to get this shot in any caffe.

So am I going to start getting coffee at Starbucks? Coffee beans, maybe, sometimes, sure. Espresso from their bar? Never. This was INCREDIBLY better, just ASTONISHINGLY better than the espresso I’ve actually purchased at Starbucks outlets themselves. This makes me happy because I like to see that I can do this, get a nice shot–a really nice shot–from beans that coffeegeeks deride as mediocre or worse. But it also pisses me off: If I can do this, why can’t Starbucks?

Gyoza King: How life should be

I’ve been in Vancouver since Friday, so am three days into this Reading Week excursion, and in the midst of some fine (dry, if a bit cold) weather, I have to report that I just had one of the best meals of my life. It was at Gyoza King, 1508 Robson and just a few steps west of my hotel (the Empire Landmark, 1400 Robson). I had an order of “seasonal pickles,” a small order (six) of shrimp, pork and chive gyoza (pan-fried Japanese dumplings), and an order of pork and kimchi fried rice.  To drink, I eschewed the interesting list of Japanese-y cocktails and had plain iced oolong tea.

It was magnificent, every bite, every morsel. The pickles were a sort of mild kimchi (I say this as it was pickled Chinese cabbage), but with a sprinking of what I think was shiso. It was delicious and mysterious. Next came the fried rice, served on a plate with a spoon as I’ve become accustomed to with fried rice Japonais. Addictive from the first spoonful; the pork was tender and the kimchi was a perfect spicy accent, rice perfectly crisp-chewy, superb!

About half way into my rice came the gyoza, gossamer things with … ohhhhhhh, just… God. Words fail me. The whole meal was a revelation.

I’ve had many, many good to great meals in Vancouver, including a $150/person feed at Diva at the Met a few years back, and this was the best one I’ve had in this city and one of the best I’ve ever had, period.

The bill? $20 and change, $25 with tip.

My new Kids in the Hall (Season 5) boxed set has taught me that wistfulness about a happy past is better than regret about an unhappy one.

The weather has been pretty damn good this month, which is a lucky thing as November here can be a real crap shoot. Last year around this time, we were suffering under highs in the -20s and snow and icy, icy roads; this year, nary a flake (maybe more than nary, but not much more) and I still have not unsheathed my “real” winter coat. So I took the opportunity to take the long walk home after Brian and I had a predictably great lunch at Lina’s Italian Market. That’s in the Tuxedo Park neighbourhood straddling NE and NW Calgary on Centre Street, and the walk home is, oh, 3.79 miles, according to this very cool pedometer that lets you map walking or running, or any, really, route and it calculates distance as you enter “legs.” Very, very cool.

On the walk home I bought season five, the final season, of Kids in the Hall. I already own seasons one, two, and three–somehow four has eluded me–as well as both their Same Guys, New Dresses and Tour of Duty  concert DVDs, their film, Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, have seen them twice in concert (January 2000 at Massey Hall in Toronto and May 2002 at Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton), saw Bruce McCulloch in Letters to Wendy’s (which as far as I can tell has never been performed outside of Calgary), and accosted Mark McKinney at the corner of Bloor and Bay in TO. So yes, I am a fan. KITH were part of what attracted me to Canada before I ever met Brian. I’d watch KITH marathons on Comedy Central and was over the moon when they used to show two- TWO!- episodes of KITH in CBS late night Fridays. When the show was cancelled (or when the troupe decided it was time to end it- it was never “cancelled” per se), I was mournful.

That was in 1995, and of course  they are still kicking and still performing. I never got to see a show taping (having met Brian and made most of my sojourns to Toronto after the end of the show), but I did, as you’ve seen, get to see them live twice. And thanks to the fact that every bit of broadcast for KITH and pretty much everything else is available on DVD or through the efforts of some intrepid archiver on YouTube, I can relive those happy moments over and over again.

Or can I?

The fact is, reliving the past can be damn depressing. I can never recover what it was like to see these shows for the first time. My epic voyage to Germany struck home the idea that one cannot, as Heraclitus pointed out way back when, stand in the same river twice. I’ve blogged before about how the home and the home town where I grew up no longer exist. Things change. Cities change. People change. The happy memories of yesterday become faded memories of a decade ago. And so we sometimes revisit the past with a sense of melancholy, because we can never fully recover the experiences that we’re trying to recover, or simply to remember.

So yesterday we were watching some travelogue pap on the Food Network, Rachel Ray telling us where to get the best cheap Mexican food in LA or something like that, and I lamented about how I just want to travel more after recovering from a trip, but I was depressed that my recent memories were already shuttling into the past, ever further. So maybe it would be better to not have any special experiences at all, and to never have that sense of melancholy that I get to a paralyzing degree sometimes. I must be the only person who cried when he found this video on YouTube:

Why? Well this was part of my childhood and now I’m 43 and am going to die Quisp- and Quake-less, I guess.

But this is the thing: would it be better to never travel, never take risks, never partake of the lotus when it’s offered? A life without pleasure would, it would seem, be a life without that ache for a happy past. Best never to be happy, right?

And then it hit me like a tonne of bricks. Hell, no. That would be a life full of regret. And I know that the regret that I do feel–regret, for example, that I might have chosen a career different from the one that I pretty much settled on when I was 18–is not bittersweet. It’s just bitter.

Wistfulness means that you were happy, maybe more than once. It’s a blessing.

The Seahorses and I

Here’s an experiment with posting a photo- me and the seacorns, I mean, seahorses (little inside joke for those of us who’ve seen Planet Unicorn 3):

This was at seahorse farm (well, actually, THE seahorse farm since I’m pretty sure it’s the only one in the world) in Kona, Hawaii. It’s near the K-K airport.

Blogging like it’s 1999.

I’ve dabbled in blogging over the years but I’ve decided at long last to take it more seriously. So here I am. I post all the time on sites like chowhound and coffeegeek, and the commentary and reviews I post at these sites is sorta akin to “blogging,” but I’ve come to realise that I need a dedicated place for myself, not in the (or a) “community” and unencumbered by debate. That doesn’t mean I don’t welcome comment, but this is my place. I hope it goes well.