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Coffee wars!
May. 30th, 2008 12:03 amBecause coffee comforts me in the face of Latvia's unjust defeat.
There has been a battle waged in our kitchen, one that has taxed Beloved sorely, for his very nature is pulling itself apart. See, Beloved, is a neat freak. Let's be clear on the NEAT here. I am a self-admitted CLEAN freak. I hate feeling dirty. In sweaty summers I will live in the shower if I have to. I clean vigorously and quite quite obsessively (though not to the extent of mother mine) and the idea of dirt around me fills me with irrational loathing. I am not, however, neat. I will happily leave piles of books, files, phones, keys, little notes, whatever around wherever I happen to leave them (my memory is superb, if I do say so myself. I CAN find things I have put down IF no-one moves them). Beloved, who thinks a brief rinse with cold water makes a tea cup clean, finds this aggravating apparently (yes, I AM readingv all 6 of those books. Yes I CAN read them all at the same time. No you CAN'T put them back. They're on my desk and on my bedside table, how can they possibly be bothering him?!). So yes, neat freak.
He is also, as I've said before, something of a gadget freak (though not as bad as my brother - poor luddite me has not been finding this a comfortable combination. I mean, do we NEED an electric can opener? We all have fully functioning hands - why take up space, waste electricity, make a vast amount of noise and generally faff around with some buzzing thing that opens tins automatically?) But he normally loses interest in his gadget (unlike brother mine) because he tidies them away obsessively and then can't be bothered to cart them out from the back of the cupboard turfing out the 8 other gadgets that are also stored neatly in there (unless I put them away, in which case the sticky hinge on the cupboard door may be the only thing preventing them spilling out onto the floor in one wire tangled mess)
So, that is the background. Now, onto the coffee wars.
As has been said previously, we have a Tassimo http://www.tassimo.co.uk/tassimo/page?PagecRef=1 a nice convenient coffee maker that produces quick, unusual coffee for minimal effort.
It was, therefore, with some irritation that I found out Beloved had purchased a Senseo http://www.senseo.com/en-uk/Senseous (I do NOT understand him. He will pinch every damn penny in a household budget then go out and buy something so patently absurd that I am left literally stunned) which is, well, a nice convenient coffee makers that produces quick coffee.
So for weeks Beloved's love of gadgets has had him keep both of them cluttering up our kitchen surfaces (I am in the background making helpful comments like "why, what's this? It's a KETTLE! And look, it does everything they can do for a 10th of the price and half the unit space!" Because I'm wonderful like that.) while his neatfreakness has demanded he store one or both of them in some storage unit in Azerbaijan where we will never ever see it again and return to drinking instant coffee (bleck. Even when it is Kenco, it's still bleck). This has been most amusing to watch. Especially when you get to poke as well.
But he has now accepted that one has to go - in fact I pulled a fast one and offered to give one to Brother mine since he's returning to his house next week (at LAST after SEVEN months. We could have had a house BUILT in the time it took them to fix his! But that's another story) so he cna have nice coffee too and we don't have another piece of junk stuck in a cupbard.
So the "dilemma" is which one to choose. The Tassimo's main strength is it's variety.There are OODLES of those little pods out there, you can get about a squillion kinds of coffee and then there's tea and hot chocolate and loads of stuff. This? Does not impress me that much because the coffee is only DECENT and has a tendency to be so bitter that variety no. 688 tastes much the same as variety no. 875. Belovede wants to keep the Tassimo - having 10 squillion varieties of coffee pods (all tasting the same) appeals to his gadgetyness *eye roll*
The Senseo has about 5 varieties. And they're all coffee. Not machiato or latte or whatever other starbucks pretentious name which are largely just collections of random Italian syllables pasted together we have for basically bitter coffee with pudding syurp slurped in. No, these are just coffee - coffee beans from different places with all the full flavour that each brings all on its own WITHOUT you having to stick lots of sugary artificial flavourings in them so you can tell the difference. But wait, not only are they just coffee, they are SUPREMELY good coffee. I mean, several orders of magnitude better than the Tassimo coffee. It also lets you make a MUG of coffee, not these tiny little tea cups of coffee thatg are woefully inadequate to a caffein addict of my calibre (I'm a LAWYER for crying out loud! You do NOT serve me a tiny little thimble full of coffee! You plug it into my veins by IV drip!). Oh, and the coffee pods look like tea bags. We have coffee bags, how cool is that?
As may be guessed, I'm in favour of the Senseo. I fail to see how 10,000 varities of crap can compare to 5 varieties of heaven (he even concedes the quality difference! And yet... roots for the Tassimo. The silly it is strong with him)
So, there is a war in my kitchen. Their will be a wailing and a shaking of caffein jitters.
And the point of this post? Beloved tends to look like the sensible one in our relationship. I wish to make it very very clear that neither of us is even remotely sensible, we're just different flavours of crazy :)
There has been a battle waged in our kitchen, one that has taxed Beloved sorely, for his very nature is pulling itself apart. See, Beloved, is a neat freak. Let's be clear on the NEAT here. I am a self-admitted CLEAN freak. I hate feeling dirty. In sweaty summers I will live in the shower if I have to. I clean vigorously and quite quite obsessively (though not to the extent of mother mine) and the idea of dirt around me fills me with irrational loathing. I am not, however, neat. I will happily leave piles of books, files, phones, keys, little notes, whatever around wherever I happen to leave them (my memory is superb, if I do say so myself. I CAN find things I have put down IF no-one moves them). Beloved, who thinks a brief rinse with cold water makes a tea cup clean, finds this aggravating apparently (yes, I AM readingv all 6 of those books. Yes I CAN read them all at the same time. No you CAN'T put them back. They're on my desk and on my bedside table, how can they possibly be bothering him?!). So yes, neat freak.
He is also, as I've said before, something of a gadget freak (though not as bad as my brother - poor luddite me has not been finding this a comfortable combination. I mean, do we NEED an electric can opener? We all have fully functioning hands - why take up space, waste electricity, make a vast amount of noise and generally faff around with some buzzing thing that opens tins automatically?) But he normally loses interest in his gadget (unlike brother mine) because he tidies them away obsessively and then can't be bothered to cart them out from the back of the cupboard turfing out the 8 other gadgets that are also stored neatly in there (unless I put them away, in which case the sticky hinge on the cupboard door may be the only thing preventing them spilling out onto the floor in one wire tangled mess)
So, that is the background. Now, onto the coffee wars.
As has been said previously, we have a Tassimo http://www.tassimo.co.uk/tassimo/page?PagecRef=1 a nice convenient coffee maker that produces quick, unusual coffee for minimal effort.
It was, therefore, with some irritation that I found out Beloved had purchased a Senseo http://www.senseo.com/en-uk/Senseous (I do NOT understand him. He will pinch every damn penny in a household budget then go out and buy something so patently absurd that I am left literally stunned) which is, well, a nice convenient coffee makers that produces quick coffee.
So for weeks Beloved's love of gadgets has had him keep both of them cluttering up our kitchen surfaces (I am in the background making helpful comments like "why, what's this? It's a KETTLE! And look, it does everything they can do for a 10th of the price and half the unit space!" Because I'm wonderful like that.) while his neatfreakness has demanded he store one or both of them in some storage unit in Azerbaijan where we will never ever see it again and return to drinking instant coffee (bleck. Even when it is Kenco, it's still bleck). This has been most amusing to watch. Especially when you get to poke as well.
But he has now accepted that one has to go - in fact I pulled a fast one and offered to give one to Brother mine since he's returning to his house next week (at LAST after SEVEN months. We could have had a house BUILT in the time it took them to fix his! But that's another story) so he cna have nice coffee too and we don't have another piece of junk stuck in a cupbard.
So the "dilemma" is which one to choose. The Tassimo's main strength is it's variety.There are OODLES of those little pods out there, you can get about a squillion kinds of coffee and then there's tea and hot chocolate and loads of stuff. This? Does not impress me that much because the coffee is only DECENT and has a tendency to be so bitter that variety no. 688 tastes much the same as variety no. 875. Belovede wants to keep the Tassimo - having 10 squillion varieties of coffee pods (all tasting the same) appeals to his gadgetyness *eye roll*
The Senseo has about 5 varieties. And they're all coffee. Not machiato or latte or whatever other starbucks pretentious name which are largely just collections of random Italian syllables pasted together we have for basically bitter coffee with pudding syurp slurped in. No, these are just coffee - coffee beans from different places with all the full flavour that each brings all on its own WITHOUT you having to stick lots of sugary artificial flavourings in them so you can tell the difference. But wait, not only are they just coffee, they are SUPREMELY good coffee. I mean, several orders of magnitude better than the Tassimo coffee. It also lets you make a MUG of coffee, not these tiny little tea cups of coffee thatg are woefully inadequate to a caffein addict of my calibre (I'm a LAWYER for crying out loud! You do NOT serve me a tiny little thimble full of coffee! You plug it into my veins by IV drip!). Oh, and the coffee pods look like tea bags. We have coffee bags, how cool is that?
As may be guessed, I'm in favour of the Senseo. I fail to see how 10,000 varities of crap can compare to 5 varieties of heaven (he even concedes the quality difference! And yet... roots for the Tassimo. The silly it is strong with him)
So, there is a war in my kitchen. Their will be a wailing and a shaking of caffein jitters.
And the point of this post? Beloved tends to look like the sensible one in our relationship. I wish to make it very very clear that neither of us is even remotely sensible, we're just different flavours of crazy :)