I've never been a real food snob, but living in the Pacific Northwest for many years has rubbed off on me in this undeniable way: I now have a deep and abiding love for good coffee and good beer.
It's funny because I don't drink very much of either beverage. (I couldn't even if I wanted to, for reasons that will soon become apparent.) But the time I do spend drinking good coffee or good beer is an EVENT. Something to be savored. Something to be planned around, even. This is serious business!
Or it had been, at least. Until I had a kid.
It literally took months for me to awaken enough from my sleep-deprived stupor to realize the new pattern that was afflicting me, not just every now and then, but every single day. Each morning I would pour myself a cup of coffee and doctor it up in just the right way, with a little bit of sugar and milk. Then I'd begin tending to my infant son. (As the months wore on, he transformed into a toddler son.) Rush-rush-rush, hustle-bustle-hustle-bustle ... and then I'd finally remember my neglected cup of coffee and take a sip.
"Oh no!" I would think. "It's cold." (Not just lukewarm, by the way. COLD.)
Good coffee ain't cheap, so I'd nuke my cup and soldier on. And then it would get cold – again!
That's when I'd reach a crossroads: Do I nuke it a second time?
I'm frugal, and I already feel guilty enough about the money we spend on coffee, so you can guess what I've been doing. And I'm here to report that thrice-nuked coffee is DISGUSTING, no matter how good the pot was when it was fresh. The milk in it even starts to curdle into solid little doohickeys that float along the top. (Why does THAT have to happen??)
I also can tell you that coffee sitting in a pot for seven-plus hours doesn't taste that great by the time naptime finally rolls around, either – no matter how much you've been waiting to savor it.
I often encounter a photo-negative of the exact same problem in the evenings with beer – not every day of the week, as happens with the coffee, but often enough to notice a pattern. In a spirit of generosity, my husband will crack open a frosty Sierra Nevada for himself and grab one for me too. That open beer bottle will sit there, forlorn and increasingly dripping with condensation, from approximately 6:45 until 9:15 p.m. when I can finally sit down. That's when the beer and I come face to face with one another – and again, I reach a crossroads.
"Hey Michael," I'll say to my husband. "If I put this back in the fridge, will you drink it when it turns cold again?"
"Why would I want to drink an open beer?" he'll say. "I'll just get a new one."
"But this is a perfectly good beer. It just needs to turn cold again."
"Why don't you drink it?"
"I don't think I'll last that long. I think I'll be sleeping by the time it finally turns cold."
And so it comes to pass that on many a weekday morning, I find a bottle of cold Sierra Nevada sitting open on a refrigerator shelf, losing precious fizziness and zip. I'll feel so cut to the heart by this sight that I'll cover the top of the bottle with plastic wrap or tin foil and vow to drink it that night at approximately 9:15 p.m.
It's so nice to have treats like this to look forward to at the end of a long day, isn't it, moms? :-)