Black Blood of the Earth

I've been looking for a suitable replacement for coffee at the office. The coffee's fine, but it isn't outstanding and lately I've been wanting a little extra kick in terms of caffeine (lots of travel and late nights lately). Poking around the internet, I ran across a web site that offered a promising product, called "Black Blood of the Earth", or BBotE. BBotE is produced by a company called Funranium Labs. All the details are on the web site. In the description, the proprietor indicates that competing labels for the liquid were "weapons grade coffee" or "scientific coffee".

I ordered a bunch to give it a try and I think it is excellent. Very tasty stuff, very smooth and it does provide the advertised extra kick. The coffee is brewed using cold water steeping, followed by vacuum extraction. The process avoids most the acid present in regular coffee and it extracts much more of the oil from the beans, rendering an excellent flavor (some of the best coffee I've ever had). You can also really taste the differences between different varieties of coffee using this brewing method. It ships in 100ml plastic containers or in bottles and they don't recommend consuming more than 200ml in a day. I've found that 100ml in a cup makes me too jittery, but 50ml is excellent all around. Great taste and a good pick-me-up after a very late night or at the start of an early morning. The shelf life of the coffee (in the refrigerator) is about 3 months. 50ml along with 150ml of water makes a great cafe americano. 50ml along with 200ml of milk makes a great latte. And the stuff makes good iced coffee too. 

BBotE is good stuff. You can buy it here.

Sous Vide Cooking

I recently read about the sous vide techniques that they use in some high end restaurants for cooking and I've been wanting to try it for myself. Sous vide is basically slow cooking using water and vacuum packed food. I did a bit of shopping and ran across a home use sous vide oven (the Sous Vide Supreme). I picked one up a few months ago and I'm never going back (especially where meat is concerned). My unit cooks up the best steak I've ever tasted and, best of all, it is always perfectly done. I can drop it in the oven and come back 4 or 5 hours later and it's ready (no standing around waiting for the food to cook). I've also tried the oven for other kinds of cooking using the sous vide recipes that you can find on the web (including the Sous Vide Supreme website) with good to excellent results.

Progress

I have been making some reasonable progress on my new years resolutions, despite the busiest spring term I have ever had. Hopefully I find some time to post more on my progress over the next few months (and catch up on my posting goal for this blog at the same time). As a start, I want to point out a pretty neat discovery that I recently made about guitar lessons.

One thing I've always disliked is lugging my guitar back and forth to lessons. I've also always found guitar teachers to be very uneven in terms of quality over the years. So whenever I start playing again, I always wonder if I am going to be able to find a decent teacher. If I don't after one or two attempts, I usually call it quits. This time around I spent a bit of time looking in to what the Internet might be able to offer. I ran across two pretty good resources that are (1) more affordable than personal lessons and (2) really good. The first one is GuitarTricks.com and the second is JamPlay.com. I checked out some online reviews of these services and opinions seems split. Several folks seem to like the instruction on GuitarTricks slightly better (they've been doing online instruction for a decade longer than JamPlay). But there are some pretty cool things about JamPlay as well (including evaluation of your playing via webcam). I kinda liked the layout on GuitarTricks slightly better so I went with them for a first shot.

So far, I have mainly good things to say. I am finding the lessons to be excellent and very well organized and I actually like them better than one-on-one personal instruction (being able to watch them over and over is very helpful). The only beef I have about GuitarTricks so far is that their videos are all flash (no HTML5), so I can't watch them on my ipad. I'm not finding that to be too much of a problem, however.... Just a tad inconvenient.

A few beers...

I've recently tried three beers that I have really enjoyed. The first is St. Bernardus ABT, served on tap in Madison at Brasserie V on Monroe Street. If you find yourself in Madison, be sure and try the french fries aioli served there. Awesome... Anyway, the St. Bernardus is really fruity and full bodied (classic belgian fare).

The second is Hoppalicious, brewed locally in Madison by Ale Asylum. It is available in grocery stores in Madison and also at some lakefront establishments (most notably the UW Student Union terrace and the restaurant overlooking Lake Monona at Monona Terrace). This is a very tasty pale ale.

Finally, I tried a beer called Totally Naked at The Old Fashioned (a restaurant on Madison's Capitol Square specializing in typical Wisconsin foods). It is also brewed locally at New Glarus Brewing. A nice crisp clean beer for a warm summer day... 

Give these a try if you have the chance.