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Meet The Staff |
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Helen McPherson
Helen joined our staff in late August, about a month before Ike disrupted the neighborhood and complicated our lives. As happens with many of our best people, she has been learning her job from the ground up. For most of her time with us she worked the short shift at night and for that reason, many of you may not have met her.
She has been working hard and learning everything she can and has recently been taking over the responsibility of shift leader. The good news is that more of you will have a chance to get to know her.
She lives in Nassau Bay with her mother and has an older brother and two older sisters. If you visit the neighborhood you might see her rollerblading with her black Lab, Scout. (Her Chihuahua, Ricky, just can't pull her as well.)
Helen is also a full time student at San Jac where she is working on clearing away the basic requirements before focusing on a major. She expects to continue her education at U of H and is interested in criminology and interior design.
She paints in both oils and acrylics in an abstract style. She admits, however, that between her work at Coffee Oasis and her studies she has not had much time to keep up with her interest in painting recently.
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| An Angel Tree |
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Count your Blessings
Then, Be a Blessing
We are partnering with the Salvation Army to help brighten this holiday season for local children who might otherwise have a very meager time.
When you come into the shop in the next few days you will notice our new 9 foot tall Christmas Tree festooned with lights and decorations. You will also find it covered with Angel Cards.
Each card has the name and description of a child who needs your help. It also has several hints about appropriate gifts. (That should help those of you who, like me, never know what to buy.) It includes information like age, gender, sizes and special wishes.
The gift suggestions are just that, suggestions. They were provided by the parents. However, the gift comes from you and you are encouraged to give what ever you feel is appropriate.
The process is simple:
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Take an Angel from the tree.
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Shop for the child
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Return the unwrapped gift and the Angel Card to Coffee Oasis by December 16th.
That's it. We will take it from there. With the help of the Salvation Army, we will see to it that the gifts are delivered in time to brighten a child's eyes on Christmas morning.
With your help, what will start as a bunch of angles hanging on our tree will be transformed by your generosity. First, they will take the form of a mound of presents under the tree. Then, they will emerge as the sound of scores of children laughing all around the area.
As the song says:
"Please put a penny in the old man's hat.
If you haven't got a penny,
Then a a hay penny will do.
If you haven't got a hay penny,
Then God bless you." |
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Coffee of the Month December |
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Ethiopian Yirgachaffe
Ethiopian Yirgachaffe
One of Ethiopia's most prized coffees, Yirgacheffe is grown in the lush highlands of the Rift Plateau. This is very special tasting coffee, very satisfying with a winey taste with a peach overtone. One of the fullest bodies of any coffee nicely complements this flavor. This particular variety is light bodied and carries the flavor of lemon peel, apricot, honey, and jasmine. A true connoisseur's cup and it is certified as an organically grown fair trade coffee.
Special Price: $11.25
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| Cooking with Coffee |
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1/2 cup brewed espresso
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1 (18.25 oz) package moist dark chocolate cake mix
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1 (3.9 oz) package instant chocolate pudding mix
4 eggs
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3/4 cup coffee flavored liqueur
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1/3 cup vegetable oil
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1 (16 oz) package dark chocolate frosting
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3/4 cup coffee flavored liqueur
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and grease and flour a tube or Bundt pan.
Combine the cake mix, the pudding mix the coffee, the eggs, 3/4 cup liqueur, and the oil in a mixing bowl. Mix at low speed until moistened. Beat at high speed for 2 minutes. Pour the batter into the prepared pan.
Bake 45 - 55 minutes, or until done. Cool for 30 minutes.
Invert onto a serving plate and prick the top with a fork.
Heat the frosting in a small pan. Remove from the heat and stir in 3/4 cup of liqueur.
Drizzle this glaze over the top of the cake, allowing it to soak in and run over the sides. Continue until all of the glaze is used up. Let the glaze set.
Share this with 11 of your best friends. | |
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Greetings!
In his book, The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg wrote, "In true communities there are collective accomplishments. People work together and cooperate with one another to do things which individuals cannot do alone." He argues that we need places where people gather to initiate and execute collective volunteer action and that places like coffeehouses are such places.
Over the years I have watched as you, the members of this community, have gathered in any number of configurations to achieve "collective accomplishments." Sometimes it is an informal group of friends planning to help another friend calibrate a marriage, a birth, or mourn a loss. Sometimes it is political, like a group of civic minded people gathering to consider how to fix a neighborhood problem. Sometimes it is a formal organization like a PTA meeting. Sometimes it is just a couple of old friends meeting to help one another.
This week we are kicking off one of these collective projects that is open to the entire Coffee Oasis community. We have established an Angel Tree to help ensure that local children whose families are in difficulty have something to open on Christmas morning. (Read more about it below.) By working together, and each of us who is able doing a small part, we can spread a great deal of joy where it is well needed.
After all, "Tidings of Comfort and Joy," is what the season is all about.
I also want to pass along a special thanks to all our staff. Things have been very difficult since Ike blew in. Many of our customers have had to struggle with significant losses. The lives of some of our staff members were also disrupted. In some cases they were thrown into chaos, and in some cases new opportunities opened up. Sometimes things were bad and sometimes they were just inconvenient.
We have had a great deal of turn over since Ike but these remarkable people never missed a beat. From the day we got power back they have been here making you feel at home, making your drinks, making food, keeping the Internet network up under considerable stress.
They have made this place work and kept it open even when I had to travel out of town. And they did it with a smile.
For that I am grateful.
Thanks for being part of the Coffee Oasis family.
Rusty |
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To see what else is going on at the Oasis, check out our calendar or look over the weekly events listings on the table tops |
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Brewing it Up |
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Cuban coffee is actually simply a sweetened espresso drink with the sugar added as the espresso shot is being pulled. Of course, it is popular in Cuba but you can also enjoy it at restaurants and walk-up coffee bars throughout Miami.
When we say sweetened
espresso the emphasis should be on sweet. (1 to 3 teaspoons per three ounce shot of espresso.) The sugar not only contributes to the taste but also to the body of the drink and the character of the crema.
The trick is to place the sugar in the shot cup before the espresso is made. Then, as the first drops of espresso meet with the sugar it is stirred so that the sugar joins with the espresso's natural crema to form a frothy foam which the Cuban call "espumita." This sweet espumita is a key to enjoying an excellent cup of Cuban coffee.
There are two common variations: 1 Cafe con Leche, in which a shot of Cuban coffee is added to a cup of steamed milk and 2 Cafe Cortadito in which a tablespoon or two of steamed milk is added to the cup of Cuban Coffee.
Es muy bueno. |
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In the Beginning ... |
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Europeans Introduced to Coffee
It took almost a century for the pleasures of coffee drinking to spread across the Ottoman Empire from Yemen to Arabia, to Egypt and ultimately to Aleppo and to the heart of the Turkish empire in Constantinople. It was in these northern reaches of the Empire, the crossroads where European cultures met the Orient, that European adventurers, traders, and merchants first discovered coffee and the coffeehouse culture surrounding it.
A Turkish Coffee House
The first documented encounter of coffee by a western European was in the city of Aleppo in Syria. There, in 1573, Leonhard Rauwolf of Augsburg in Bavaria entered a local coffeehouse and noticed Turks drinking a beverage he described, "as Black as Ink." As a natural philosopher he took an interest in the drink and soon learned of the medicinal properties of coffee. Evidently, he also obtained a supply of raw coffee berries completely unprocessed. From these, he wrote the first botanical description of the plant in western literature and included samples in his personal library.
The discovery of the coffee culture, as opposed to coffee horticulture, was led by the merchant class. In 1605, King James the First of England chartered the Levant Company and awarded it a monopoly on trade between the Ottoman Empire and England. This was an enormously profitable concession.
These merchants were the real cultural ambassadors of the 17th century. To ply their trade they would travel the world at a time when travel was a difficult and risky business. They had to experience the local cultures in as much breadth as possible in order to discover trade opportunities. They used this knowledge to identify products that could be profitably purchased locally to be sold back in their home countries and goods that were needed locally that could be supplied by the returning ships.
In order to facilitate trade, the Levant Company established communities of traders in their principle markets: First in Constantinople and Aleppo and later in Smyrna and Cairo. These communities operated much as modern businesses do with ex-pats today. There would be defined area in which the Foreigners, in this case Englishmen and their families, were allowed to live in a style and with institutions much like they were familiar with from their homes. The endeavor would be led by a representative of one of the company's leading families and served by a collection of local workers and foreign nationals.
In addition to the usual retinue of servants, each of the key merchants would have a personal assistant. This person would be skilled in many languages and the many cultures of a major cosmopolitan port city. They would assist in negotiations in the bazaar, act as a clerk, translator, social diplomat and (when the occasion arose) a body guard.
In the 1640's one such merchant, assigned to Smyrna, was Daniel Edwards and his personal assistant was a young Greek man named Pasqua Rosee. Among his other duties. Mr. Rosee was entrusted with the preparation of Mr. Edwards coffee in the Turkish style.
Having spent many years in the coffeehouses of Smyrna, Mr. Rosee was something of a master of coffee brewing. He did such a fine job that Mr. Edwards, as did many of the Levant merchants, developed quite a taste for the drink. It was a taste he was to take back with him to London when he returned with his loyal servant, Pasqua Rosee in 1651.
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Rusty's Corner |
The Redwood Grove
I recently took a trip back to my family in northern California. An impending family event made the journey both necessary and important. The somber nature of the visit put me in an especially reflective and nostalgic frame of mind. While there I was drawn to places that had been important to me as I was growing up: the family home, my old high school, and some of the redwood groves where I had played as a child and young man.
For those of you who have never spent time in an old growth redwood forest, it really is something you should consider for a place on your bucket list. These are mystical and magnificent places. The sense of life there, emanating from the enormous and abundant trees, is overwhelming. These are powerful places that help put our small brief lives in perspective.
As I walked through one of my favorite groves I was reminded of so much that I might not have noticed when I was much younger.
The ground is soft to the foot. The centuries of accumulated fallen needles, branches and even the occasional tree have buried the earth deep below. Yards deep, these fallen pieces shed from the massive trees cover the forest floor and cushion each step. The decaying duff covers the shallow roots and nourishes the forest.
Like all forests, the grove was full of sounds. There was an active community of birds singing, chirping and calling to one another. I could hear as well as see a group of deer walking in wary parallel with me. (They would not allow me any closer but felt no need to run away.) Squirrels leaped from branch to branch. About fifty yards to the south Bull Creek rushed over stones. From time to time, branches crashed to the ground.
Still, there is a special quiet in a redwood grove. The thick, soft and porous bark of the great trees and the spongy forest floor muffles and removes the sharp edges from each sound. It is a hushed place, as seems appropriate to this living cathedral.
It is a place where you can hear yourself think ... if you are so inclined.
Where the forest thins, along the stream bank, other trees grow where the sunlight is less dappled. Aromatic pepperwood and the crooked madrone with its rust colored bark reach out to the light. These act as a kind of parenthesis marking the edges of the grove.
There, one of the great trees had fallen some years earlier. It spanned from bank to bank, forming a natural bridge. I sat on the downed tree, directly over the running water. The stream was low that day.
I remembered that soon the rains would come and the stream would fill the banks and at times overtop the dead giant on which I sat. Even then, the stream will not be able to budge that log, wedged as it is among living trees on both sides. For decades to come, travelers in the forest, human and otherwise, will be able to cross the creek dry footed. Still, the stream is patient and some day it will rot and wear away the wood until the bridge is gone. But the forest is inexorable and by then another tree will have fallen across somewhere else.
From the outside, a forest is a mass of green; or rather a mass of varying shades of green. From the inside the dominant color in a redwood forest is brown. The floor is a yellow-orange brown of the dry decaying needles. Where the top has been disturbed it is a deep black brown like swamp mud without the water. The thick redwood bark is a dark red brown that dominates the view from the ground to the first branches fifty to seventy-five feet overhead. Then there is the black. Ancient fires burned through these woods. Most of the old trees were unaffected, protected by their insulating bark. Sometimes a particularly hot fire would find a way to burn through the bark and hollow out one of the massive trees leaving a multistory room in the still living tree, a shelter for many of the forest animals.
To see green you could look up or down. There are patches of ferns growing like fringe around carpets of redwood sorrel ... deep green throw rugs on the forest floor.
I laid down in one of these spots and looked up to the green canopy above. The vision, with bits of blue sky and streams of sunlight, seemed like a stained glass window built on a wonderful unimaginable scale. I lay there and I let my mind wander. I thought of my life and my family. I thought about the things I hold dear and the things I miss.
On a more mundane note, it being November 3rd, some of my thoughts meandered to the issues and debates of the upcoming election. I was, in that setting, struck by the cartoonish way we have reduced our political discourse. One side chides the other for its seemingly selfish devotion to the individual and the second side scoffs at the first for its stifling elevation of community over its members. In this cartoon world, one side would promote mediocrity over excellence and the other freedom over obligation. These simple-minded sketches create a false dichotomy unrecognized by nature.
The trees seemed to mock these ideologies, as well they might. After all, these trees have been there for more than a thousand years. Not just the forest, but these very individual trees have stood and flourished for millennia. Many have reached more than 300 feet tall. Each has grown into a massive monument to the power of life and taken together they impress like nothing else can.
The forest is awesome and humbling. The forest is more than the trees because without it none of these trees could have possibly grown to be more than a suggestion of their potential. The tall trees would lose their tops in gales without the shelter of the nearby giants. The shallow rooted redwoods would be toppled long before reaching maturity if they were not interconnected with the roots of hundreds of other trees in the same grove. Without the duff to hold the moisture the roots would die. Absent fungus growing on the downed limbs and needles, returning them to their base nutrients, the trees would be weak and puny. The forest is magnificent because of the magnificent trees it protects and nourishes from seed to their fullest potential.
I have come to believe that what is true of the redwood grove is true for us as well. Without the support of our families and communities none of us would reach our full potential. Equally, we have obligations to our communities because if we fail them no one will flourish. As John Dunne said so long ago, "No man is an island, entire of itself ... for I am involved in mankind."
It's just a thought. | |
We hope you enjoy this newsletter almost as much as you enjoy your favorite treat at Coffee Oasis. Let us know what you think. Feel encouraged to tell us of any topics or features you would like to see in future issues.
See you soon at the Oasis.
Sincerely,
Rusty Cates
Coffee Oasis | |
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