Lovely day for a cuppa chai

Beautiful snow today. A sprinkle of dancing, whisper-light flakes, straight out of a fairy tale. After a couple of days of spring-like temperatures, the cold felt like a surprise. It was a perfect day for chai. (For my southern readers who're enjoying almost summery temperatures today, try pouring the chai over ice for iced spiced chai instead.)

Spiced chai
Adapted from a variety of internet sources

2 cups milk
2 cups water
8 whole cloves
1 stick cinnamon
8 cardamom pods
1 slice fresh ginger root (approximately 1/8") diced
5 black peppercorns
2 tablespoons sugar
4 tea bags (black tea...we used Twinings Irish Breakfast)

Crush cardamom pods to crack them open. Pour milk and water into a small saucepan. Add cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, and peppercorns and bring to a boil, stirring frequently. Reduce heat a little, stir in sugar, and boil for 5 minutes while stirring. Remove from heat. Add tea bags, cover, and steep for 5 minutes. Remove tea bags and pour through a strainer into a teapot. I like to squeeze the teabags against the side of the pot before I remove them.

The above teapot, by the way, is after we'd already drunk a few cups. We've been brewing up more time- and attention-intensive warm drinks lately. Perhaps it's just an outgrowth of my attempts to live more mindfully. I'm finding that the rewards of homemade chai or slow-poured coffee far outweigh the small amount of extra effort required.

And speaking of living mindfully, I recently realized that it's a sad fact that I don't have time to write two blogs. Not if I want to write them really well. My initial idea was that perhaps through learning to live more mindfully, I can find my most authentic self in the suburbs, amidst the laundry and the extracurriculars. I think I underestimated how much time laundry and extracurriculars require.

The idea of mindful living and exploring its many facets still intrigue me. Perhaps some day I'll have that precious resource of time to devote to it. So while 2011 will still be my year to live mindfully, I've decided to fold my Year of Living Mindfully blog into this one. All appropriate articles will be labeled as "year of living mindfully."

Love is a slow pour

Or more accurately, love is a slow pour-over coffee. No bitter. No sour. Just a complex dance of flavors.

My husband is a self-professed coffee geek. He's also a thrifty coffee geek which is why we still have our cheapo grinder from our newlywed days and an inexpensive coffeemaker. Every once in a while, we'd eye something more splendid. After all, who wouldn't want this beauty, the Elektra Micro Casa in copper and brass, adorning their counter? 



Okay, maybe that's a bit steampunk for many. The point is that we'd always believed that one had to plunk down something in the four figures to purchase a professional-quality espresso machine.

Well. That may be true.

Or you could spend $100+ (much less if you already own a very good grinder) for the very best coffee of your life.

Welcome to pour-over or manual brewed coffee. This is not coffee for mass production or mass consumption. Not a hyperactive, multitasking brew. With hand-poured coffee, the coffee is brewed in very small batches. One cup at a time. Two to three small cups at most. The tools are simple and beautiful. Sculptural. Note the almost nautilus-like swirls on this Hario V60-02 ceramic cone. The beehive shape of the swan-necked pouring kettle.

Again, the technique is simple yet artful. One grinds a certain amount of coffee and places it in the filter in the ceramic (or glass) cone. One heats a precisely measured amount of water to the correct temperature and then slowly...very slowly...pours a thin stream over the coffee over a period of a few minutes. One must not rush this step. It is mindful living at its essence. To be in the moment, inhaling the aromas released from the beans. A small break from a frenzied, overscheduled day. Best of all, this break doesn't take hours. No. This is a small pleasure that takes only minutes.

Intrigued? Boston-area readers, head over to barismo to dip into the world of hand-poured coffee. This small-batch roaster and purveyor of manual brewing equipment in Arlington, MA, will pour you one of the best cups of coffee you have ever enjoyed. Warning. Barismo is a cash-only store (as I found out to my chagrin on my first trip there). Also, they rarely have decaf coffee ready to pour (though they had sealed bags of decaf whole beans available to purchase when I visited the store).

From obscurity in this country, pour-over coffee is beginning to reach a wider audience. The New York Times Magazine recently published an article, "Coffee's Slow Dance," on this subject. Williams-Sonoma has begun to sell the implements for brewing pour-over coffee.

And so to my husband, the coffee geek, happy Valentine's Day. May we have many years of savoring great coffees simply brewed at home. Happy Valentine's Day to all of you too. I hope that you all feel warm and loved today.

Living life while paying attention

Recently, I've started reading a new book, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball. Her story is Eat, Pray, Love meets The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's what happens when a Harvard-educated New York City urbanite falls in love with a draft horse driving, electricity-eschewing farmer. He woos her by cooking meals of such authenticity that dirt is literally clinging to the vegetables and the meat is practically warm from slaughter. She moves from the city to a farm that they create together, trading in her 4 a.m. lattes for 4 a.m. farm chores.

The book is engaging, and Ms. Kimball writes well. Her evocations of fragrant, fresh, succulent meals mingle with the narration of their romance.

I skidded through her words. A few chapters in, I noticed that I was tickled by a niggling feeling.

Was that annoyance?

Which made me pause for thought. (Note: this pause for thought is rare for me, but as it was Sunday, I had the luxury of a little time.)

What was bothering me about her narrative? Was it envy? After more than twenty years of marriage, did I begrudge her rhapsody over her farmer's "long, chiseled torso, the size of his callused hand over [her] breast"?

Then it struck me. Can authenticity not be found in the suburbs? Memoirs such as this one or Eat, Pray, Love seem to be founded on a fundamental premise that one must leave in order to find one's authentic self. A person must go to Italy (or India or somewhere equally far-flung) or drastically change lifestyles (from urbanite to farmer's wife).

Why can't I find myself amongst the laundry and afterschool activities?

My response came from an unlikely source: Facebook. I'd posed this question as my status, and it had generated an interesting discussion among my friends. One had surmised that it was easier to change one's pattern of thought after making a drastic change, and that it was far more difficult to find time for self-reflection in between one's daily activities.

What if you didn't pause for thought between your activities? What would happen if instead, you just paid attention to your activities? After all, isn't that what a huge change does? It forces you to pay attention. To focus on gaining mastery of a new skill. To focus on how to navigate an unfamiliar landscape. To notice little details because you haven't grown used to them.

We call it "multitasking" or "using our time more efficiently." I'm a habitual offender, routinely browsing the web while catching up on a Tivo'd show. I'm constantly juggling. When I'm folding laundry, I'm thinking about dinner. When I'm cooking dinner, I'm thinking about this blog and checking my email and making sure my son practices guitar. Etc. etc. What's coming up in the next few minutes, the next hour, the next day, this week?

I remembered an article I'd read in the New York Times last fall. "When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays" focuses on research that showed that people "tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else." In fact, As Dr. Daniel Gilbert, one of the Harvard psychologists conducting the study, stated, "The heart goes where the head takes it, and neither cares much about the whereabouts of the feet."

So my feet don't need to be in an ashram or on a well-tended wheat field. They can be firmly planted in suburbia, as long as my head and heart are there as well.

So, how do I go about paying attention? My first impulse was to do something big. I'd take a photo of some detail of my life every day and publish it on my blog. But that would become another dreaded "must do" on my ever-expanding "to do" list. Not exactly the road to self-awareness, joy, and my most authentic self.

My delayed new year's resolution. I'm not going to dash to Indonesia (or even Maine), and I'm not going to forge a vastly different life from the one I already live. What I am going to do is to live my life while paying attention. Which sounds simple. But I'll bet it's not. And I'll write about it. Or maybe not. We'll see how it plays out. Maybe in the process, I'll discover that you can indeed find your most authentic self in the suburbs, amidst the laundry and the extracurriculars.