Coffee-ism – Page 3 – Home's Cool!

Blessings of Habit, Coffee-ism, Homemaking, Inspiring, Recipes, Wisdom, Womanhood

The A-OK Breakfast – Veggie Frittata!

Posted on March 30, 2011April 17, 2011 by Katharine

Good morning!

The hardest thing about dieting, for me, is that the only way I can really lose weight and stay healthy is to cut carbohydrates. I dread that. I love chocolate-coated sugar bombs with milk and cream on them. I love pancakes with too much syrup. I love granola bars, instant milk stir ins, and smoothies.

The only way I can make myself follow a low-carb diet is to keep telling myself that sweet = poison. In a way, it is true, for me. Sugar sure is sweet and sure is poison. Most sugar substitutes are, also. Since I stopped allowing sugar past my lips, I have been tons healthier. I try hard to stick to only 10 grams of sugar per day, although I often go up to 15 or 20. Still, I try.

Now, lest we be confused, in my book, starch = sugar. If you paid attention in school, you learned that starch changes to sugar in the body, often as soon as while it is in the mouth. So–no sugar = no starch.

Exit: breakfast as we know it. Enter: eggs, the wonder-food.

Long ago when scientific empiricism ruled, children learned in school that eggs are nearly a perfect food. Soon after that, media sensationalism took over and we all became scared of the egg. Impossible! Now, surprise, surprise! the egg is coming back into vogue, probably because if we want, we can circumvent media tripe by watching the computer, instead, choosing to read the research for ourselves, instead of trusting the interpretation of those who have agendas.

Slowly it trickles down and grows to a deep sea of truth. The truth is, I cannot eat the average donut or cereal breakfast and lose. I ate that way for most of my life, and now, the part of me that processes sugar is worn out. It’s gotta be protein and greens for me.

I have learned, from long years of perfecting my breakfast menus, that I cannot tolerate egg after egg after egg, unless I do something drastic about the boredom. So I collect amazing egg recipes. Thinking others may be in the same boat, I have decided to share, every Monday, how I have beat egg boredom. (Yes, I know today is Wednesday. Minor glitch. Just think–you only have to wait five more days for the next installment.)

Today will be the Vegetable Frittata. It is so NOT breakfast-y, that it shocks the taste buds into sobriety while delivering tons of great nutrients to the fasting body, including one of the most easily digested protein sources, the lowly egg.

Here it is, in all its glory. Adjust it to meet your taste buds and your veggies on hand. Enjoy!

Vegetable Frittata

2 T. olive oil or butter
4″ sprig rosemary
1 or 2 green onions, chopped
1 clove garlic, pressed
1 or 2 mushrooms, sliced
1 small tomato, chunked
2 eggs
grated parmesan cheese (opt.)

Warm oil with rosemary in covered saute pan for a minute. Add onion and garlic and saute briefly, stirring, until clear. Add mushrooms and increase heat slightly. Saute, stirring, until mushroom begins to shrink and brown. Onion should brown, also, and garlic should be nearly overdone. Increase heat slightly and add tomato. Stir and fry until tomato just begins to peel.

vegetable frittata-1 — Just After Adding Tomato

Beat eggs with 1 teaspoon water and add to pan, stirring constantly until done. If desired, contents of pan may be pushed into interesting shapes before egg sets.

vegetable frittata-2 — Prepared with Love

Sprinkle lightly with parmesan cheese, salt, and pepper, if desired, and serve with 2 ounces of pomegranate juice and/or 1 cup coffee or tea. Serves one.

Enjoy!

Okay, I know it’s a shock. Move to a sunny window, close your eyes, pretend you’re in Italy, and learn a new thing.

See ya’ tomorrow!

Blessings of Habit, Coffee-ism, Homemaking

Here Comes Spring (Hay) Fever!

Posted on February 25, 2011March 16, 2018 by Katharine

Well after all the fun posting photos of snow, Spring has sprung, hasn’t it!

With Spring comes Spring fever. This is a malady that makes you feel like doing nothing. It attacks us, hand-in-hand with its old ally: hay fever. Hay fever makes us feel like yuck.

Itchy eyes, ears, nose, throat; runny eyes, nose; stuffy nose; and cough are just a few of the delights that visit us each year, if we are among the pollen afflicted.

Pollen is so tiny, yet can cause such misery!

Outside of chemicalizing oneself half to death, what can a person do?

Spring pollens do not bother me, but I have found several ways to beat ragweed, which possibly would help with any other pollen problem. I’d love to share them with you!

The first thing I always do is eat honey all year long. Not just any honey will do. It must be raw, as in uncooked. If the label isn’t boasting, it probably isn’t. It also must be native, as in from near where I live. Honey contains miniscule flower parts in various forms, and eating about a teaspoon of it daily helps me beat my pollen allergies, like an immunization.
Outside of that tiny dose of honey, I avoid all sugars. Sugar kills immunities, especially the super-processed sugars.
I take vitamin C. A lot. Vitamin C is supposed to help with the body’s immunities, so it is what I need. I also find that for me, the things I’ve read about C acting as a mild antihistamine are true. They say you can tell if you’ve had too much when you develop diarrhea. They say to cut back a bit if that happens. I usually get by with taking 2000 milligrams per day.
I wash my face a lot. Every time I think the pollen is getting to me, I wash it off. Have you ever seen a magnified photo of pollen? It looks prickly like a cactus. No wonder it bothers the sensitive tissues of face, eyes, and nose. After washing, I apply a coating of some light hand lotion to my face. As it dries, it seems to make a barrier between my skin and the pollen prickles.
I stay indoors and keep windows shut. I know, some of you cannot do this, but those who can may find it helps. After all, the pollen is out there, not in here.
If I find that I am just simply miserable, I use heat on my face. I run a bowl of hot water, as hot as I’d ever want a bath, and dip water from it with a washcloth and hold this over my face, renewing as it cools. Or I stand in the shower with the water hot, spraying on my face. It takes about 10 or 15 minutes, but this wet heat draws out the histamines in my body. Histamines are what cause allergic reactions, and are what anti-histamines are supposed to circumvent.
Anyway, as the heat applied to my face draws out the histamines, my face is itchy and my nose grows stuffy. Oh, but—when that itching stops, it means all the histamines my body could produce are out. Most bodies cannot produce any more for several hours, like four to eight. Hours. Of no itching, sneezing, stuffy nose, runny eyes, etc. It’s plenty of time to take a nap or go to a restaurant or visit a friend like a normal person.
If I go so far as to become wheezy, I drink hot coffee. Coffee is supposed to be a good emergency substitute for asthma drugs. I don’t have asthma, but hot coffee helps me breathe when the pollen count is high.

There you have it, what I do instead of taking pills. Sometimes, when it really is tough outside, I have to add pills to my regime, but not often. I love not being tied to chemicals and I think you will, too.

Coffee-ism

Ike Stole My Coffee!

Posted on January 4, 2011November 13, 2013 by Katharine

We don’t live south enough to suffer much from hurricanes. The night Ike passed left us a surprise, though, the common calling card of storms.

The most surprising thing about it was that somehow, a tree could fall on the door to my coffee without me knowing it.

Since our stove is electric, the electricity was out, and it was coffee-time, I calmly felt my way through the dark to our guest house, where the stove is propane, where we always solve the electric problems. Lugging an old-time drip-through which I’d loaded with grounds in my dark kitchen, slipping down the hill on flip-flops through the wet world, hardly able to see yet always knowing the way, I bumped smack into bunches of limbs. Heh.

Could the woods that always so lovingly envelope us actually have thrown branches at us in the night? Perhaps.

Back up to the house for a flashlight. Back down to the guesthouse where the door should be. Zowie!

An entire tree.

In the way.

Of the coffee business. Heh.

Back up to the house for my trusty loppers and a discussion with Husband. Back down to the guesthouse for some pruning.

In the dark.

Before coffee.

Sure.

Finally I found space to get the door open just enough for me and the pot.

Candles lit.

Stove lit.

Tea kettle filled.

Burner on.

Promising sizzles from the wet bottom of the kettle.

Husband descends. “How do I get in?!”

I pass the loppers through to his bulkier self. It doesn’t take him long.

Shivering in the morning cool in this secret hideaway, we mumble through our personal morning fogs the slight chat of people who are comfortable with saying nothing. In their jammies. By candlelight.

Whistling. Pouring. Bubbling. Dripping.

Aromas of Colombian dark roast tantalizing.

The first sip. We smile.

Are we bizarre to grope and fight for such a small pleasure, while ignoring the storm damage all around us? I don’t think so. Pleasures worth having usually are worth working for. The adventure of wrestling them out of the wilderness is part of the pleasure, don’t you think?

Coffee-ism, Inspiring, Wisdom

Good Morning? Good Night!

Posted on January 3, 2011January 3, 2011 by Katharine

Maybe you just woke and had that first cup-o’. That’s where I am. Sorry I overslept.

I think of 2010 recently fallen asleep. Although the new year spreads out like an endless path before us, both inviting and scary, I’m looking back to that bumbling old thing I just put to bed. How was it with you?

My 2010 memories are amazing, filled with whole-house-cleaning for a friend, funerals, trying to hear God, birthday parties, gardening, trying to hear God, workshops, canning, trying to hear God, estate sales, college kids home, trying to hear God, a wedding, glorious concerts, trying to hear God, possums and snakes in the chickens, teaching ladies’ Bible study, trying to hear God, husband filling an interim over an hour away, 15 people staying several nights together, trying to hear God, losing opportunities, and trying to hear God.

Lots of it hurt. Much of it was so confusing. I’m glad it’s over.

At the end of the day, when it all shuts down, when the party’s over, when there’s no more silliness, when it gets quiet—when you cannot hear anything else but your own heartbeat, the next thing you hear will be…what?

Your dreams. What will they be? Where will they take you?

God only knows.

Antique mug from diner; antique drip coffee pot.

Blessings of Habit, Coffee-ism, Inspiring, Wisdom, Wives, Womanhood

Gramma’s Wisdom – Are We Disposable?

Posted on October 5, 2010February 23, 2025 by Katharine

Today while I was tidying the kitchen, I made fresh coffee in my favorite two-cup pot. It’s an old-time drip-through I found at a garage sale, stocky and leaky, but it makes the best couple o’ cups around.

It made me think of me. Not as shiny as I used to be, out of order, and never did produce a lot in the first place—did I disparage myself for a minute?

Yes, until I realized something: I love that old pot.

I’ve loved coffee since I was so young I had to beg for sips. I knew it was good for us then, before the scientists did. I’ve had every sort of coffee brewing experience on earth, I think. I’ve bought and pitched overpriced, electric, coffee-making gizmos until I was ashamed. I’ve brewed it through paper towels in emergencies and even had the old kind with raw egg and shell stirred in the bottom.

I collect coffeepots just because they once belonged to someone whom I know I would have loved: a coffee-ist. I own the carafe my mother first used in her married life. I own a two-gallon, granite-ware coffeepot for over the campfire. I own a cute percolator from my paternal grandparents’ estate. I’ve scouted out the glass parts from several identical glass percolators, a full set with parts to spare. My husband even brings them home from antique stores to surprise me. The day my sister-in-law introduced me to the two-cup, drip-through oldie in her kitchen, however, was the day I began the real search.

When I finally found it, my feelings were hurt—someone had used “my” darling pot for straining drippings from grease, and it wasn’t even for sale; he had planned to throw it out. I actually had to ask him to sell it to me and he valued it at only fifty cents. I lovingly sudsed and scrubbed it until it no longer stank like grease and then my kitchen filled with the wondrous aroma of pure Colombian dark roast.

Bliss.

Nowadays, after my husband and I share our morning pot and he leaves for the woods with his thermos full, I draw out the favored one. The ritual never changes: rinsed pot, filtered water, fresh grounds, a dish underneath for leaks, a comfortable mug, and me. My satisfaction level knows no limit during this hour.

And I think. While I spent my life as a grease catcher, about to be thrown away, my Lord searched until He found me. His love for His rummage-sale find has transformed me into the small one He most loves to spend time with, alone.

I leak but He loves me.

Nothing else in this world matters so to me, except that He is searching for you, too.

Don’t let them throw you away.

_______________

Katharine is a retired, home-educating wife and mom who writes about all things “woman”, from a Godly viewpoint, here on this site, and at The Conquering Mom. Her writing appeared in several magazines for 15 years, and she is currently working on several books. She loves to write, speak, teach, cook, garden, spoil her hennies, and watch old movies with popcorn.