No Joe

This morning I walked into my kitchen to find there was no more coffee.  This may seem trivial, but at this time in my life there are two rituals I perform every morning which allow me to project sanity for the rest of the day:  I take a really hot shower, and I drink a cup of coffee...sometimes simultaneously.  I know, I know...I am breastfeeding.  But I just drink one small cup after I nurse to clear the cobwebs, as Chef would say.


I have grown utterly dependent on these two daily rituals.  The shower because I spend my nights awash in bodily fluids...spit up, urine, cappuccino diapers, and terrible postpartum night sweats.  Let me tell you, the combination makes for a wonderful musk in the morning.  The coffee because The Sprout sucks me dry every two hours starting at 1 am onwards...and lately she has been thinking 4:30 am is time for breakfast and then she stares at me grunting and flailing until 6:30 am.  Lil' Bit wakes up soon thereafter.  Needless to say, coffee is imperative.


So, this morn before Lil' Bit woke up, I strapped The Sprout into her swing, told Chef to keep his ears open for the girls (his eyes were not even open at this point), and I took off to the local coffee shop to buy an Americano and a pound of fresh roasted beans.  There I learned that the lighter the roast of coffee the more caffeine.  You would think it the other way around for some reason...but no.  So, I ordered a medium roast of Brazilian beans with the hope to get more bang for my one little cup of Joe.

At the coffee shop I saw my new neighbor from Wisconsin.  We exchanged pleasantries and then he told me that in the future he wanted to build a privacy wall between our houses. "Something vines could grow on, and something to keep our dogs in."  He said it as nice as can be, he is from the Midwest mind you.  I left wondering if perhaps he had seen me wandering the house with my breast hanging out of my shirt, or maybe he just wants to do a little nude sunbathing.  Who knows?  I told him it was a fantastic idea and that he should go for it.


On the way home, it felt good listening to NPR in the car, instead of Jimmy Crack Corn on repeat.  It felt good stuffing my face with a blueberry muffin while slugging my Americano with the windows down.  It felt good to get out of the house first thing in the morning without any little tidbits in tow. It was a small moment, that at any other time in my life I would have taken for granted.  Kids seem to have that effect on time.


Last night Chef and I made Jamie Oliver's Zucchini Carbonara out of this cookbook. 

It is an incredible cookbook...I totally recommend it to anyone who loves rustic seasonal food.  I love its folk design, and he even goes into some detail about how to grow and store many of the ingredients.


Once finished, the pasta was amazing, but there was a problem with the recipe that could have been catastrophic. There was a typo in the recipe that totally screws the whole dish.  Adding the eggs to a carbonara sauce is tricky business because you don't want them to scramble, and after warning you of this in the recipe Mr. Oliver forgot to tell you when and how to add the eggs to the sauce!  It is rare Chef is home on week days to help me cook...but Thank God he was there to save the day...once again, my knight in shining armor.