Searching for that Perfect Cup...Without So Much Garbage

I "won" this Keurig Elite from the HSC Charity Auction last fall. 

Like millions of other Americans, we have become Keurig customers.  It's like a revolution in coffee...Keurigs give you a "perfect" cup of coffee with very little work.  The American dream, right?

We got our first Keurig, a "Mini", just before we moved from Nebraska to Florida in fall 2010.  After the movers took our regular coffee pot, it was a nice way to keep having our coffee in the morning.  It's small and we didn't have to keep coffee grounds on hand, just a box (or two) of K-Cups and some disposable coffee cups. That one ended up in Dave's office.  We like how it turns itself off after the cup of coffee brews.  We get a bit paranoid about coffee pots being left on.

This past fall we got one for the home.  It's been great.  When you register your machine with Keurig, you get coupons for free K-Cups.  BOGO for 2 boxes of 48 K-Cups.  This was a great deal after Christmas when the Starbucks K-Cups became available online.

K-Cup-brewed coffee is delicious and perfect every time.  No doubt there.

My conundrum: K-Cups are very wasteful and are expensive.  After all, traditional coffee pots brew through compostable coffee filters and then you can go on to compost the spent coffee grounds.

You can compost coffee grounds -- and as a bonus, they also offset the odors in your compost pail.

But with K-Cups, you're dealing with a plastic cup that has a paper filter glued to the inside...all topped with a foil lid.  The very ambitious can peel off the foil lid and compost the meager amount of grounds inside.

Not only do K-Cups generate a lot of waste, but they're also expensive.  

Let's talk about the cost.  Your typical box of 12 K-Cups will run $6-10.  Starbucks will cost more (because they can, people are buying them anyway).  The prices vary considerably, based on the brand of coffee and the number of K-Cups in the box.  It goes without saying that the large multi-packs will sell for less-per-cup.

I often seek out the big deals for the cups: Keurig's own website has good deals, military commissaries have the best non-sale prices around, and you can use the Bed, Bath and Beyond and Kohl's coupons for some good deals also.

My goal is to keep the costs under 50 cents per cup.  I'm usually pretty good about that, even with the Starbucks cups, which tend to run closer to 80 cents per cup.

So I decided to try the "My K-Cup" contraption, which is found where Keurig machines are sold.  You remove the K-Cup holder from your machine and replace it with this grey cone, inside which you put a fine mesh filter with 1-2 Tbsp. of coffee grounds.

My first attempt at using this was a gi-nor-mous FAIL.  My first cup of coffee was super-weak, but when I added more grounds, the system overflowed and I got a countertop covered in hot water and loose coffee grounds.  I attempted to adjust the size of the grounds to make the coffee stronger...unfortunately, if the water flows too slowly through the filter, the machine will stop flowing water...and you end up with a smaller-than-planned cup of coffee.

I asked friends on Facebook for advice -- and received all sorts of ideas, which I've tried.  My Mom clued me into some replacement filter baskets that are bigger than Keurig's.

The BB&B filter is on the right.

This helped somewhat.  But the coffee was still weak.

One of my Facebook friends told me about Keurig addressing the waste problem by launching a brand-spanking new coffee brewing system: The Vue Brewer.  Sounds promising...but....

...what about the millions of us who have already invested in a coffee maker that only uses K-Cups?  I'm hoping for some backwards-compatibility here...Amazon has so many options out there to make your Keurig machine more efficient...let's see what we have, shall we?

I also tried a friend's idea to simply stuff a standard paper filter into the "My K-Cup" grey cone.  It was on its way to brewing a nice strong cup of coffee but then the water began to overflow around the filter.  Oops...another mess on my hands.

How about a standard paper filter in My K-Cup?  That didn't work so well either.

What am I doing?  I'm back to the standard, expensive, wasteful K-Cups.  For now.  I've been trying to get my coffee right for two weeks with the more resource-friendly options and so far haven't been successful.  On weekends we revert to our classic French press coffee maker, no filters, and the grounds go straight into my compost pail!

Checking Out a New Food Fad: McCormick's "Recipe Inspirations"

Tonight I'm making chicken tikka masala for dinner.  I never thought in a million years I'd be cooking homemade Indian food, but here I am!

I don't keep a ton of fancy spices on hand, they tend to expire before I use it all up.  But for the past few months I'd been seeing these McCormick's Recipe Inspirations at our local grocery stores and I got to thinking....

"Yes, I can smell the smoke!"

GROAN.  Anyway, in my often-difficult attempt to cook as much as I can from scratch, I pondered this product and decided this can't be too bad.  I picked up a card this week at our local commissary.  Chicken Tikka Masala.  At only $1.08 (that's the commissary price, it's probably at least double that at your local grocery stores) it already presented more appeal than a jarred simmer sauce or one of those frozen all-in-one meal kits.**

So here's what we have...it's a card filled with little bubbles of spices.  Just enough for the recipe you're making, pre-measured for your convenience.

Flip the card over, and you have a listing of ingredients on the card, and the recipe.  So while you're on the same shopping trip you can pick up the rest of the ingredients you need.

Truth be told, I had everything in this card except for the "garam masala"...if we like this, I can pick up some garam masala at our local Asian grocery store, hold onto the card and make this in the future...

Here's my assembly of ingredients ready to go.  (Except for the salt and cornstarch, which I always have on hand).

Don't freak from the heavy cream -- you don't need a lot of it...

So when you peel the back of the card, I'm greeted with 6 individually wrapped packets of spice, marked with the type of spice and amount.  I ordinarily would whine about the amount of packaging here, but there's some utility to have the packaging this way just in case you choose not to use all the spices and you want to store it for later.

I prepared the dish exactly as the recipe recommended.  I didn't include the red pepper (which was optional anyway), but instead gave that particular packet to Jacob.  He loves red pepper flake!

The verdict?  This dish is very tasty, but didn't seem like the tikka masala I'd had in restaurants.  It was more like a chicken cacciatore with a hint of cumin.  The kids liked it, but probably didn't love it.

I probably will be trying the Asian Sesame Salmon next time.


**Please don't think I'm being all elitist or anything about processed foods.  I make meals like that once in a while.  Lately with some of our family's diet and stomach sensitivity issues, those easy-to-prepare meals are too high in sodium or other chemicals that make it tough to digest.

It's Pac Man!!!

Thankfully I saw replacements for this at Kohl's this past weekend!
(Yes, I have yellow plates. This is Fiestaware, and I have place settings in green, purple, yellow and burgundy.)
This is a by-product of the frequent moves. Things can break...and they do. Several of my kitchen tools have broken, and our scanner has a huge crack on the glass now. We're probably about halfway unpacked at this point. The government has a process of letting us file a claim, and but it's a lot of work. You have to go out and get replacement costs estimates, or repair costs if it's an expensive item that has broken (such as an antique piece of furniture). We'll see how much damage we end up with and decide which items are worth fightning for. The flatbed scanner, yes. A pizza dough roller, probably not.

Toaster Oven Update

Thanks everyone for your comments/advice. We are definitely a "toaster oven" family, I don't think we've owned a standard toaster in our 12 1/2 years of marriage. Don't know why -- I think it's because we received a great toaster oven from Dave's parents the first Christmas after we got married (1995) and it's just seemed crazy to me to have both a toaster oven and a standard toaster. That first toaster oven lasted until we sold out FL house in 2005 and the unit was hard mounted under a kitchen cabinet and figured the new owners might like it there.

Dave got a good deal on the same toaster oven at Linens 'n Things, so he bought it while I was in VA visiting my Mom with the boys.

At our yard sale on April 20th, some lucky soul will get to buy a very good condition toaster oven without a rack for $2 OBO.

Support Assistance Request

Hi!

Oops, I did it again. I committed a brain fart and now I'm in need of a replacement RACK for our toaster oven. I popped in these little dessert h'or deurves the other night and the directions said they could bake in these little plastic "oven proof" trays that came with the dessert. Well I put the oven on about 100 degrees too hot and the pan melted all over the rack. So the rack is in the trash and I'm in need of the new one.

We really like our toaster oven, but for now I have to tell the boys, "No frozen waffles, bagels, English muffins or toast for breakfast." I've been searching searching searching on the web for a replacement rack and so far, no luck.

Black and Decker makes a billion different kinds of toaster ovens and I can't seem to find a replacement for my particular model.

And before you ask, no, I'd rather not just run to the store and get a new toaster or toaster oven. The one we have is pretty new (less than 2 years old) and we're feverishly trying to get rid of stuff in advance of our move, so getting a new toaster would defeat the purpose...

So if anyone is more astute than me at finding a replacement oven rack for a B&D TRO390W, please let me know. Leave a comment!