A Nor’easter just rolled up the Atlantic coast and clashed with some cold air aloft, giving northern Jersey another brief taste of winter snow. But it’s early March and nature is making its preparations for a change in season. Daffodils, those shock troops of spring, have already poked thru the soil and are not going to let a few inches of snow stop them. The grays and whites of January and February will soon give way to the greens and yellows of April and May. It’s time to watch and enjoy nature in motion, once again.

A little portrait of a wet, rainy day in February.

I haven’t quite yet taken the plunge into buying green coffee beans to roast at home. But I have experimented a bit by pouring regular brown coffee beans bought at the local supermarket onto a pan and popping them into a 400 degree oven. I felt that the results were rather good. After grounding up some of the darkened beans and brewing up a cup, the end-product was generally quite satisfying. Once or twice I had over-darkened the beans such that the liquid end-product tasted mostly like tar. But there is a middle zone where the brew becomes more chary and robust but is still full of coffee flavor. Any sour notes are drowned out.

As a rough guildline, it would be good to get the beans that are being re-roasted out of the oven once you can hear them popping. Yes, you literally hear them popping. Pretty neat.

I haven’t had any great, deep or worldly thoughts to discuss (or attempt to discuss) lately; roasting coffee beans is about the best I can do right now. Perhaps I’m in an early-winter / post-holiday funk. Perhaps I need a good pick-me-up. Like a good cup of double-roasted coffee!!

(But wait — the more roasting, the less caffeine in coffee. So, my brain certainly won’t be kicked back into high gear by these wintertime coffee roasting experiments!)

Another early winter sunrise over Newark, NJ. “The dawn opened the play, waking the day, causing a silent hooray” (from Emerson, Lake and Palmer, “The Endless Enigma, Part 2”).

I posted picture last week of a church cross that was tilted by the roaring winds of Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy. I soon found another one, just a few miles away in Newark, NJ. This is at the Goodwill Rescue Mission. The Goodwill center is said to do much good for the needy, but the raging winds and driving rain blow against both the good and the bad.

We all have our various Thanksgiving traditions. One of my traditions is to get together with my brother later in the morning on Thanksgiving as to visit some local taverns and have a few beers. It’s not good to do that on an empty stomach, so I make sure to get a good, hearty breakfast on Thanksgiving. (Since I’m a vegetarian and a semi-hermit, I do not partake of the usual big Thanksgiving day dinner; but at least my breakfast is special.)

Thus, I have a second Thanksgiving tradition: making pancakes for myself in the morning. While making my pancakes yesterday, I started thinking about the various stories of people seeing the face of Jesus on a tortilla they were baking, e.g. a recent sighting in New Mexico, and another down there back in 1977. So I took a look at the pancake in my frying pan and wondered what I might see.

It was not Jesus. But I DID see something  »  continue reading …