Warm enough water?
All I wanted was a cup of hot coffee. All I got was some coloured water. Today, the wind came up.
I have a Coleman stove. Generation Two, using expensive little canisters of fossil fuel. Unlike the one from my youth, where we “pumped it a few more times” to get the naphtha to hiss and heat. Gen Two is clean and easy. Except… when the wind blows.
Twenty-four minutes and the watched pot had not boiled. No rolling bubbles. Not even a trace of steam. Instead, some mist from the driving gale, as my liquid blew over the edge. At one point, the filter from the coffee gadget sailed away, like a tiny perfect Frisbee.
At home there is another stove. Designed to conquer Everest, burning aviation fuel siphoned from the plane of a rebel leader parked on foreign tarmac. I used to bring it along, until my children commented to perfect strangers about “how Daddy could burn a hole through the planks of a picnic table.” Too efficient to simply boil water (and oh, how I miss that efficiency).
Desperation begets desperate measures, and I now know that barely warmed water will not extract the essential oils from ground coffee beans. If you hear about a camper racing along the beach with a mouth full of ground coffee, there might be some truth to the tale.
Life goes on, and so we returned to the house store. Now we’re waiting to hear how much an “upgraded” version of the sale unit will cost. For the record, a new house has a lot more options than a new car, and they all cost a great amount of money.
