Coffee Talk with a Guest Blogger (My Husband)

Many of you know Luke, but those who don’t, he is my handy dandy and tech savvy husband.  Oh, and he also has that lovely English accent (too bad you can’t hear him through the blog).  Anyway, he’s visiting Silver Pennies today from ps-u dad (where he blogs about computers, being a dad working from home and other musings of daily life).

Anyway, you all know how much I love coffee and it seems I need more each day.  If you also love coffee this post is for you.  My husband is able to recreate the cappuccinos we had while visiting Tuscany last year.

sipping cappuccinos in Italy

Now over to Luke:

It was not until I was 21 that I first consumed a… coffee.  Until then I had felt that coffee was pretty foul, and only drank tea.

I would never consider myself a tea snob, I’ve never used leaf tea in a pot; I brew my tea with a bag and a mug.  However, that tea must only have a small amount of milk, and be red!

Although I still drink tea, after my first, properly brewed, coffee, I’ve been hooked.  What once was foul to me, now smells and tastes like morning sunshine!

The ways I’ve drunk coffee have changed over the relatively few years that I’ve been drinking it.  When I started it was just instant, because I was a student and didn’t have any machinery!  We got an espresso maker for our wedding, a Gran Gaggia, all very fancy, but I never really got on with it.

Once we moved to the States we bought a filter coffee maker, and have been pretty happy with them since, until now. Now I’ve made, what I believe to be, the perfect cup of coffee.  I believe that the final product is a cappuccino, but others may disagree.  I shall enlighten you as to the process:

First you don’t need to spend a crap load of money on a machine, we came by a 6 cup stove top Italexpress by Pezzetti. You also need a jam jar, or any that can take a bit of heat, and is at least 3 times the volume as the milk you use.  The most important thing is what you put in it, this is where the expense should be made, it has to be Illy Medium Roast espresso coffee…

I fill the water well of our espresso maker, and then add 3 spoons of Illy.

Then put the beast together and pop it on the stove.

As the coffee begins to flow, I basically follow these directions to get a good foam on the milk:  Pour about 125ml of milk into the jar, making sure it doesn’t come up any higher than a third of the way.

Shake like hell for about 30 seconds, this should give you a foam like this:

Now put it in the microwave for 30 seconds, to make the foam take hold, and to warm the milk.

Pour out your black goodness into a couple of cups; I just have mugs:

Now pour in some milk, not too much, but don’t be too shy

Spoon the foam onto the coffee, and voilà, a perfect cuppa!

Enjoy, it might just be your cup of tea!

dad@home ~ $ ps -u dad
  PID TTY        TIME CMD
21708 pts/0  00:12:08 brew install coffee