Adventure #17-- Cold Brewing Coffee

I don't know if you've heard about cold brewing coffee. I heard about it first when I was working at Stirlings, but we didn't have room to do anything but what we already did. I assumed cold brewing was complicated and took a lot of equipment. I also didn't drink coffee, so the matter of cold brewing completely left my mind until recently.

I started drinking coffee during tax season. Hot coffee still has not won me over, but "addiction" may perhaps not be too strong a word for what I felt towards these beauties:

Get in my belleh

Ingredients? Coffee, milk, and sugar. Actual sugar, not corn syrup. Something in the neighborhood of $2 a bottle. One or two of those a day? It starts to add up. Not going to happen on a continual basis. So I started looking for iced coffee recipes, presuming I'd have to get a coffee pot, brew hot coffee, wait 'til it cooled, etc. 

But no. I found the Pioneer Woman recipe for iced coffee. It turns out that cold brewing means you put coffee grounds in a container, add water, and let it sit for at least 8 hours. I put half a pound of coffee in a plastic 1 gallon pitcher and filled it with water and let it sit overnight and partly into the next day. 

I used Cafe du Monde coffee for no reason other than
some girl from work cold brews too, and she's from Lousiana
and orders this coffee by the case, so she gave me
a brick of it for free. Thanks, Caroline!

After letting the coffee sit, you strain out the grounds (I used a coffee filter inside a wire mesh strainer), and you are left with... a sort of iced coffee concentrate. You probably would not want to drink the concentrate on its own unless you are brass of stomach or ball. So I added milk and some simple syrup to mine, and kablam! Sweet creamy victory way more delicious than the starbucks in a jar. The Pioneer Woman says that a batch of iced coffee concentrate made with a pound of coffee and two gallons of water lasts her about a month if kept tightly closed in the fridge. A pound of coffee is about $10-$12 bucks, and that lasts a month? Way more economical, too. 39¢ a day, plus however much a splash of milk costs.

Hello, beautiful!

Adventure #16 -- Thinking about Style Icons, How I look, and What I Want

Oh, how you've all missed me, amirite? Well get excited for the best kind of blog post evah: the kind with lots of pictures! 

So, at the end of last summer, I got rid of most of my casual summer clothes. I had worn them into the ground. Right now I have a grand total of... two t shirts and one or two sundresses? And just about nothing else. For real. I have one pair of shorts, but they, uhm, seem to have shrunk. Damn you, shoddily made shrinking shorts!

At any rate, there is this notion of Style Icons. You know. Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy and people like that. Do any of these women look remotely like me? No.

How I dress vs. how I look for real.
I clearly do not know how to dress so that I look how I look.
I don't know if I want to dress how I look. It's... a conundrum.
I would have fit in super well in the '50s though, I tell you what.

I actually can't seem to find a woman of the petite and hourglassy type to study. Maybe Elizabeth Taylor before all the pills? But it's not like I can go prancing around in skintight slips and satin heels waiting for my gay alcoholic husband to want to do a thang.

Not work appropriate?
What about for a quick jaunt to the Publix?

Super helpful, right? 

So I've been looking around online for some inspiration for idea of things I like, if not for actual women who look like me, and this is what I've come up with:

Casual clothes

These five images are from Sweet Southern Prep. She shops pretty much exclusively at J. Crew and Tory Burch, from what I can tell. I think all of the above clothing items are from J. Crew, except for the Lilly shorts. What I like about her style are all the bright colors. Everything looks so crisp and clean but comfortable and appropriate. 

These three images are from Classy Girls Wear Pearls. In fact, I had a slight life crisis and almost wrote a long-winded post about how old and insecure I felt after reading her blog... you should all be lucky that I had the good sense not to publish that post. I realized I was being absurd when I found out that this girl is a model and the girlfriend of Kiel James Patrick. So yeah, obviously she's going to look amazing and wear $1,000 outfits every day and be photographed by some genius. She wears a lot of long sleeved tops with shorts, which I approve of. She wears bright colors too, but if you go to her website, you'll see that she also wears a lot of interesting prints, mostly of animals. I am obsessed with that sheep sweater. It turns out that someone else was too:

So here I am with plenty of ideas of things I like and not really a clue if they look good on me. When I google "dressing an hourglass body" all I get are pictures of very tight, sexy dresses, none of which are made from natural fibers, and all of which involve a prominent showcasing of the boobies. Not helpful.