La Comida de Mi Vida (My Life in Food)

I love this time of year because of the many varieties of food available that we can’t normally find year round. Special cheeses, cakes, cookies, crackers and my absolute favorite – egg nog. For me nutmeg means memories of family and tastes like cake in a cup.

My first experience with eggnog was tasting my uncle’s Rompope (rom-po-peh) when I was visiting my family in Mexico. It was thick and creamy and made it feel like fire in my nose. I didn’t know that this was eggnog until I got back home.  So mom allowed me to buy a quart of eggnog the next time we went grocery shopping and I’ve been hooked to that flavor ever since.

C.F. Burger has a very good eggnog and a local dairy named Arps makes a tasty version as well.  Saturday I found one that tops them all. It’s a half gallon eggnog available at Sam’s Club from Byrne Dairy called Santa’s Pack Recipe Eggnog.  It is thick, but not too thick.  The flavor is rich, sweet and buttery.  It’s made with real egg yolks and rBST free milk and cream.  At only $3.06 a half gallon it is a deal compared to the quarts typically available in the local grocery stores.  I haven’t checked, but they may have this same brand available at Wal-Mart.  It would be worth a peek.

Being non-alcoholic it’s great for the kids.  Well, the rest of you can add a splash of spiced rum to the mix to warm things up a bit.

Ever since a friend of ours opened a coffee shop that we frequent my DH and I have become a bit snobbish when it comes to the quality of our coffee. We were no longer happy with the, mm mm, swill that results from instant coffee or even the pre-ground Folgers or Maxwell house brands that come in the plastic tubs. They never gave us the lift we were looking for in the mornings and I noticed that I felt even more tired after drinking a cup or two. Like a heard a comedian say once, “If the “best part of waking up is Folger’s in your cup” then why wake up.”  Though I’ve recently had a new experience with this brand that has changed my opinion a bit.

We try to avoid buying ground coffee because it loses it’s body and goes stale fairly quickly. A week ago we had run out of all our whole bean coffee and I had to go to the local grocery store to buy coffee because we can’t seem to go a morning without it. It so happened that they had the Folger’s Gourmet Selections ground coffee on sale. At less than $7 for the 11 oz. bag I figured it would be OK to give it a shot. At least it wasn’t much more than the $10 per pound of whole bean coffee we usually buy. I made sure to find a bag that still had the vacuum tightly sealed around the block of coffee and it turned out to be a bag of the Lively Colombian. I have been pleasantly surprised.

It’s been a week and the smell of the coffee is still very rich. I typically use 4 heaping tablespoonfuls of coffee for each 6 cups of water. The coffee resulted too strong for my taste. So the next day I used 4 level tablespoons of ground coffee and it was perfect. The coffee was robust, complex with just enough sour and slight – very slight- bitterness that I expect from a decent cup of coffee. Later in the day I didn’t feel groggy either. This is a coffee I would not hesitate to purchase again – as long as it’s on sale.