Mother's Day Brunch Cocktail

    Momma Metrosips' birthday is always two weeks before Mother's Day. I rarely seem to ever hit the mark for both...getting a card for her birthday, a gift for the holiday or vice versa. This year she's coming cross-country to visit me on her birthday, (!!!) and I think I have the perfect brunch cocktail to celebrate with.

     Inspired by a lovely creme de cassis (black currant) and prosecco drink I had at Table, a new DC restaurant in the Shaw/Cardozo area, I experimented a little with some things I had on the shelf and came up with the following:

Makes 1 cocktail

1 T. creme de violette
2 dashes orange bitters
4 oz. prosecco

     Turns out to have a lovely steel grey color! Very refreshing take on a bubbly drink, and good taste of spring. Enjoy!

A 12oz. Rant

     Running some errands this week I stopped in The Bean Hollow over in Ellicott City for a pound of one of my favorite coffee blends, Gretchen's Grind. Threw an el-cheapo chocolate bar on the counter to go with it and hot damn the bill came to $23.65. <choke> What the hell? Tax is only about $1.60 and the choc bar had to be under $3.00. So doing the math that is...

     ...line up the decimals...

     $18.94 for a POUND of coffee? (Not a math major. And no, they did not display the price of it anywhere.)

   It's certainly not the rumored-to-be-orgasmic $40/Lb. Geisha Blend coffee, so why so pricey? Wait. Observation:  I'm used to paying $12.99 at most for a "pound' ...maybe $13.50 with tax or whatever. This bag 'o' beans is a refreshingly full 16 oz. Still pricey even at that weight but it reminds me - in other stores, the average "pound" has magically lost 4 ounces. I wish my weight had pounds that were 4 oz short..I'd be 52 Lbs lighter!

    Doing some more math: Say you buy a real 16 oz. pound at $10 each per month. That's $120/yr for 192 oz. total with a price per ounce (PPO) equaling $0.63. Taking out the 4 oz. but keeping the $10 price tag, you get a PPO of $0.83, up $0.20 per ounce...and you only get 144 oz. Which, assuming you didn't change your consumption levels any, means you would have to purchase 3 extra (16 oz.) bags ...for a total of $30 more of coffee just to get through the year! Irritating! It's taken me some time to notice, but everywhere I go (except Starbucks, which is really only a last resort for me) it seems the pre-packaged bags of coffee beans - ground or whole - are latching on to the 12 oz. trend.

     Can we live without coffee? No of course not. The sellers (distributors?) have us hostage of sorts. This whole scenario is reminiscent of that marketing case-study where Tampax started selling 32 ct. tampons in a box for the same price as they originally offered 40 ct back in 1991. The backlash and boycotting was so vicious/effective, the 40 ct. boxes were back on the shelves in months. Okay, perhaps not the best analogy, but it feels about the same, where the customer winds up getting the short end of the...deal.

    Where is the rebellion though? Clearly I'm not the only one noticing this trend, but why are more people not complaining about this?

     Probably for the same reason the craft ale/cocktail industry can charge so much, and why wineries with grape-juice crap wine can charge ridiculous fees for tastings. Why everything is free-range and house-made:  hipsters and soccer moms. Maybe not. Maybe it's more complex than that but it's downright irksome and it's a little surprising we don't have a little more Boston Tea Coffee Party action going on.

     This is perhaps yet another reason for me to make the switch to tea.

</rant>

Honey Laundering

     It's been about 3 months now that I've been drinking tea instead of my usual stiff black coffee in the morning and while it's not an every day occurrence, I think I've had more honey in these three months than in my entire life. Not too bad with a twist of lemon. Seems natural, and a part of the whole-foods way of living. Imagine my surprise when I found this article about HONEY LAUNDERING on the Mother Nature Network (MNN). WHO FAKES HONEY? Corn syrup mixture? "Jaggery?" WTF is that? The food safety inspectors are even saying it contains (cue horror movie music) illegal antibiotics and metal contaminants. Where did this idea come from? I seriously want to know. Who had that notion that "hey, we could make big bucks duping those silly Americans by messing with their bee pollen byproduct. Their Starbucks will never taste the same! Muahahah!"

     Sorry. Carried away there. Really though, this seems like a ridiculous plot from a bad movie, where the drug bust went bad and now the complacent corporations are getting sued for negligence. Not surprisingly, the NPR take on the US-side of the scandal says certain American honey vendors are now being prosecuted under criminal charges. Read more in the Wired article on the whiz-bang-wow astrolomy equipment being used to detect the fake honey.

     It's bad enough the bees are endangered, but now this? The industry can't seem to catch a break. Nothing like a little market dumping and price manipulation to sour the sweetener. Which makes me wonder...if the money/price issue wasn't really of concern, would we have even caught this counterfeit activity at all? Awesome. One more thing to worry about when you see the "Made in China" label. Or will it be "Made in China Thailand?"

</rant>