First off, two quick personal notes:
— My special thanks to D.M. for the nice contribution he made this morning to my Help Keep Doc From Gnawing Off His Right Foot fund. While the hospital has been real easygoing about the debt, the independent lab that did the in-depth blood work is already talking 'collection agency' for my being a whole month behind. On that note, it does seem in recent years that companies have become a lot more short-fused than in the past. My electric company gives you a whole 20 days before they cut your power, and without any further warning.
— I won't be posting much over the next week as I'll be saving up the goodies for when Bird Dog goes on vacation on the 1st. Who leaves for vacation on a Thursday is anybody's guess, but I figure he and the missus are headed for the Two-Seed-In-The-Spirit Predestinarian Baptist All Revival Revue & Clam Bake in Wopaskisquipsiecola, Mass, which starts on the 2nd.
As for the following, I turned yet another person on to this great drink the other day, so figured it deserved a repost.
Personally, I think coffee is one of the most putrid things I've ever tasted. I simply can't understand how it ever became popular in the first place. You'd think someone would have taken the first sip and gone, "Yuck! Ptooie!", and that would have been that.
On the other hand, I adore its effects.
If you feel the same way, try mixing it with chocolate milk. And I don't mean just adding a dab of chocolate, I mean making it half-and-half. It's called a 'mocha' ("mo'-kah") in the bar world and, while I wouldn't call it "great" tasting, it sure beats the hell out of straight coffee.
I boil half a cup of water in the microwave, then drop in a heaping teaspoon of Taster's Choice, some sugar cubes, then fill up the second half with chocolate milk. I have no idea if chocolate milk mixes tastefully with other brands of coffee or not as I've drunk Taster's Choice from the beginning. So, if you try this and it tastes terrible with your own brand of coffee, at least pick up a tiny jar of Taster's Choice and give it a try.
The chocolate milk should be the type you prefer, but you should test all available brands. Like there are different types of chocolate in the world of candy (Hershey bars vs Mars bars, e.g.), there are also different flavors of chocolate milk.
Remember, we're not looking for a big "Mmm, delicious!" moment when you take your first sip. Simply not gagging and retching is a good start. What you're basically shooting for is whichever milk makes the putrid coffee taste the most palatable.
On the subject, one of my favorite things in the world is my coffee mug warmer. Your local hardware store or K-Mart/Wal-Mart might carry them. What's fun is that the chocolate milk in the mocha settles slightly over time, so if you baby the mug along for an hour or two, it slowly goes from being a coffee-with-chocolate drink to a hot-chocolate-with-coffee drink, getting slightly sweeter all the while. In that way, the mocha is kind of unique, as it's actually a 'dynamic' drink in that the taste changes slowly over time.
As a small side note, I noticed while digging up the accompanying pic that there appears to be a number of USB-powered warmers on the market, although I'd have serious doubts they're very effective. A USB line carries an extremely low voltage and I'd guess that it'd take forever to warm up (by which time your coffee has gotten stone cold) and it wouldn't get very warm when it finally did. The regular wall-current models keep it piping hot.
And, ironically, the one place where you might use a portable, USB-powered coffee mug warmer would be, say, on vacation using your laptop — and the last thing you'd want to do at that point is purposefully drain the laptop's battery!
