The Saturday routine: Sleep in, walk up to a local cafe for coffee and scones, check in on the chicken coop in the garden at the local middle school, sit for a while in a sunny spot and maybe read a little bit of the paper, throw and/or kick the ball for The Dog, then go home.
Once we’re back in the door, it’s time for more coffee. Fill the kettle, heat the water, grind the beans, rinse out and warm up the carafe, put a filter into the filter cone, dump the ground coffee into the cone. If I’m on top of things, I’ll turn off the heat under the kettle before it quite gets to a boil. I excavate a little pit in the center of the dry grounds before pouring the first hot water in–just enough to wet the grounds. After things have steamed off for maybe 15 seconds or so–I won’t go into the “why” of all this, because I’m not sure whether I’m dealing with culinary science of kitchen superstition–then I thoroughly wet the grounds. Between five and ten minutes later, depending on how much I’m making, I’ll have a pot of coffee to dispense.
I had taken the camera out this morning to shoot with the new macro lens. I noticed the bubbles both in the filter as a I started to brew the coffee and in the cups when I poured the first of the finished brew. What got my attention in the images was the reflection of the kitchen skylight on the surface of the bubbles. In the filter, the bubbles show an iridescent sheen–I’m guessing from the oil in the coffee; that iridescence is mostly absent from the filtered brew, but you notice that many of the bubbles seem to have a second, mirror image of the skylight reflection.
