What a busy day

Firstly, my cafe au lait experiments are going well. I brew a very dark roast at extra strength in a press pot (30g in a 3-cup I’d normally use 20g in) and then froth milk with my espresso machine steam wand. I have been bringing it to the 180-degree low end of scalded. I have also been intentionally steaming it to produce some “soap bubbles” foam, something I never do with, say, cappuccinos as I prefer the traditional smooth, creamy foam for that.
The coffee ends up about 4oz each into two 7oz cappuccino bowls, then I fill with the milk.

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We’ve been adding a bit of sugar (we pretty much never do this with any other coffee drink) and she tried hers today with a sprinkle of bitter chocolate.

Anyway, we went out today. We needed a fun day out. Went to a thrift shop in the village of Corrales, where I found a couple nice acrylic containers I am now using for coffee beans on the bar. Nothing special but cheaper than I usually see them.
Then another couple thrift stores and another couple nice finds.
We stopped in World Market, got some munchies for tonight and I was delighted to find Torani now has pumps for their syrup bottles for a mere $2.50 each! I don’t use syrups much but am wanting to try new things lately so I got two syrups (vanilla, caramel) and pumps for them. We also got some of their cocoa mix.

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Our last stop was one we’ve been waiting for awhile. A place called “Total Wine & More”. We’ve been awaiting their grand opening and we noticed today that they’re finally open. Absolutely EPIC. I haven’t seen a place like this since I loved in Vegas. The size of a grocery store, over half of it wine, but also the most impressive selection of spirits I’ve maybe ever seen. Irish Whiskeys even I’ve never heard of and a couple Irish creams I didn’t know existed. I didn’t even look at other stuff.
We had a nice chat with Wendell who was very knowledgeable and we walked out with a bottle of Fennellys Irish Cream. And will return soon for a single malt Irish he recommended.
More on the Irish cream in a second…

I made quesadillas for dinner – lots of chicken and bell peppers – a family favorite dinner.

Afterward, Terra and I finished the BBC’s recent production of Mrs Tolstoy and then listened to Cape Cod Radio Mystery Theater’s Some People Are Missing on Canal Street, which was as good as I remembered but no more :P We enjoyed it but it isn’t a keeper and she’d never heard it and agreed it was worth a listen.

Then it was time for a new ritual we’ve recently begun… Thursday nights we stay up a bit late and watch TV in our room. Netflix streaming, actually. The first two times, we tried episodes of Star Trek Voyager but, meh. Tonight, we decided to switch to Star Trek Deep Space 9. Meh again. We barely made it through the pilot.
So, we have decided that Thursday nights will be Twilight Zone nights. When we used to do our weekly slumber party nights, we’d always turn it on when we were ready to drift off to sleep. I stayed awake through many episodes and was at the 25th episode of the second season when we stopped having SPN and was consistently impressed. We watched the next episode in my previous viewing order (“The Silence”) and enjoyed it more than any of the Trek we’d been watching.
I made cafe au laits but added the cocoa we got from World Market to the milk and the resulting drink was great :)

Which brings us to the Fennellys Irish cream after the coffee. We really don’t much care for it. It has a weird flavor. I swore I tasted something like orange Life Savers. And a very sweet caramel, maybe? And it wasn’t as creamy as I expect Irish cream to be. Our favorite is Emmet’s. Second probably is St. Brendan’s. Carolan’s third and we don’t much care for Bailey’s. I’d put Fennellys about the same level as Bailey’s – not that they taste anything alike.
Were we had by a salesman pushing a product he’d been told to push? Or is this just our taste not matching what he thought we’d like? Well, we’ll find out more when we buy the single malt he recommended. I specifically asked him what he had that he was excited about.
See, he explained that the stuff I’d never heard of was acquired by special arrangement. This company finds spirits not produced in large enough quantities to interest international distributors and purchase quantities that they then import and distribute themselves. Micro-lot liquors, I guess. I am excited by this idea and hope to try some of the stuff he recommends.

But, again, this first try didn’t go so well.

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