Coffee.
The Spouse and I recently went through a couple of weeks where we eschewed coffee and alcohol and sugar and bread and nuts and milk and eggs and cheese and butter and yogurt and red meat, that last not proving too difficult, as I’m nominally vegetarian (though I’m eating more fish, which is completely the fault of the decent sushi joint that’s walking distance from our house), and as I’m nominally vegetarian and do most of the cooking, the Spouse finds herself vegetarian de facto. Even the lack of coffee wasn’t too bad after the first few days with the headaches and the grumpiness. I drank a lot of green tea.
And it wasn’t as bad as you’d think. Anytime you force your diet out of its usual rut you get creative, or so I’ve found. Menus spark up. I found whole chunks of cookbooks I hadn’t seen yet. That lovely gratin with the red onions and the olives and the tomato and the thyme. That “Mexican” stir fry, with the black beans and the corn. The Tuscan white bean and tomato soup with the kale roughly chopped and tossed in to wilt. —Though the tofu with the tasty spicy sauce didn’t turn out exactly as Madhur Jeffries advertised. (Really, the worst of it—aside from the daily infusions of foul herbal nostrums which, we do this again, I’ll just skip, thanks—was the lack of cheese. And eggs. I do like the dairy.)
But the point is not to trade recipes whose names and particulars I can’t bring to mind here at work, away from my cookbooks. The point, despite the relative ease with which I did without it over the course of the two weeks, is the coffee.
Before we did this two-week purge, I used to drink my coffee out of a mug like this:
With milk enough and two spoons of sugar. (It’s a big mug; a bowl of coffee, as the Spouse would put it.) I’d have two of those as I read my blogs and newsfeeds before I considered myself human enough to face the rest of the day.
Now, though? I drink one, maybe two, of these:
And I drink it dead black. No sugar at all. The very idea of doctoring the stuff is on the edge of ick to me, now; has become, oddly, alien.
Weird.
You’ve gone all George Orwell on us, eh?
Press pot?