Fred Aiken Writing

Category: Blog

November 8, 2024

How to Brew Coffee with an Aeropress

  • Pick a coffee. Any coffee will do. Most industry professionals will tell you that it needs to be whole bean, and freshly roasted, and naturally processed, and ethically sourced, and single origin, and have had no impact whatsoever on the environment lest that coffee be part of the problem rather than the solution. But I guess if those sorts of coffees aren’t available, then choose whatever is most convenient.
  • Grind the coffee. Unless it’s already pre-ground, in which case you can skip this step because while you’re coffee is a little more stale, you saved that extra five seconds of grinding it with an electric grinder or five minutes with a hand grinder, so you can take that extra time you saved and lord it over the plebeians that are stuck with having to grind their own damn coffee beans.
  • Invert the aeropress with the plunger level on the tabletop and put the ground coffee in the brewing chamber.
  • Heat up some water. You probably should have started with this as the first step. But it’s too early to remember the most efficient way to brew your coffee, and you just want the early-morning voices to shut up by drowning them out with as much caffeine as possible, but you can’t do that yet because you haven’t brewed the coffee. Begin to think this entire process is taking to long, and contemplate just buying a keurig. Yeah, sure, they’re really bad for the environment, and those little pods are outrageously marked up. But all it takes is pressing that little button in the morning and the damn thing spits out some pod coffee. And while pod-people coffee might taste like toilet-water sludge, it at least takes little to no effort, and you wouldn’t even be questioning your life choices at this moment. You’d be sipping on your shit pod coffee!
  • But hey, the water finishes heating up, so you no longer have to worry about killing the environment and, by extension, yourself because now you can pour the water into the brew chamber of your aeropress to the very tippy-top. Some coffee professionals measure out this whole process by using x amount of grams of coffee and y amount of grams of water. But your scale’s batteries died a month ago, and it always sucks buying batteries, and for some reason they’re always the most difficult things to remember to buy. And even when you remember to put batteries on the list to buy at the store, they’re never in a convenient place. It always feels like you’re on a scavenger hunt, and none of the employees at the store want to help in your quest to find some little lithium tube that looks suspiciously like a sex toy for gadgets, so instead you decide to go the easy route and just let all of your electronics that run on single-use batteries to die until your parents or sister gift you batteries for xmas or your birthday, though neither of those things are any time soon, so it’s best to just go without batteries. Go without measuring your coffee and water ratio properly. Like a maniac.
  • Wait!
  • Continue to wait. But less aggressively this time. Maybe pick up a book. Like one of those books that you keep on the shelf in the living room to impress guests that swing on by, even though none of those guests really care about the books that you pretend to have read because they’re too busy waiting in line for the new apple and orange product, or some such nonsense. Either that or your guests are too busy tweeting more so than being. But either way, after contemplating how things used to be and how much better everything was back when you were a kid, it will be time to filter the coffee so that you can get on with your day and stop reminiscing and/or romanticizing the past that never was or will be. Perhaps use a timer next time. That’s what all the cool coffee professionals do. But buying a timer does also mean you have to keep track of yet another material object—one that requires a battery of all things!
  • Drink black coffee! No matter how good or bad the coffee is, always drink it black. It’s not so much because of the purity of the matter, but rather because it’s better to taste the coffee rather than some saccharine abomination drowned out by too much milk, plant, moo-moo, or otherwise, and all those things keep adding up, like pennies weighing down your pockets without a thought. Before you know it, you’re pantless with a cup of milked-up luggernaught sludge sauce careening carelessly through your veins at top speeds, no brakes, until the thump of plague tears down your arteries from all that milky-way-out-there-too-far-out-there coffee you keep on drinking. No, no, no, my good sir or madam, tis better to bark up at the black moon of a cup of joe screaming to the testament of pure caffeine.
  • While thinking about how much money you saved, realize that this whole process might have been significantly easier if you had just gone to the cafe a couple blocks down the street. Sure, the markup would have been a couple hundred percentage points. But at least you wouldn’t have spent all this time grumbling and mumbling about this or that. Though if you’re being honest with yourself, and I sure hope you are, then it probably doesn’t matter one way or the other. You would have complained about your coffee no matter what, whether you made it yourself if you had some undergrad working to pay for their degree and cheerios made your coffee.
  • So, I dunno, maybe come to some realization that, sure, coffee might be an art form, but it’s kinda one of those plebeian art forms that everyone can do, and everyone can mess up, like royally mess it the f— up. So maybe don’t be so harsh, cause it’s kinda bringing down the mood on society’s buzz.
  • Rinse. Repeat. Coffee on.
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August 24, 2024

Favorite Recipe; Simple and Out of Reach

Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite recipe?
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I do not like to cook. But I do like to eat. Not to excess. Or at least I don’t like to think that I eat excessively. Just the three meals and the occasional snack. But I do cook, both for myself and my wife–and she for me. We cook for each other. But it’s not like a thing that we do because we like cooking. I married someone almost exactly like me in that regard. We both enjoy eating and we don’t mind making meals, but it’s not our favorite activity. It’s sustenance. Cooking is a form of boredom for us both. And I suppose because of that reason, we tend to stick to recipes that are super simple and generally take less than 15minutes from start to finish.

This isn’t to say that my wife and I haven’t tried to cook more complicated meals. We have. But by the end of those super fancy meals that taste really nice and required a lot of effort because of all the different ingredients and cooking techniques and equipment needed, we’re exhausted. Our energies are spent, and we end up staying in bed for the rest of the night until we fall asleep.

But if the meals had something like 5 or less ingredients, and we can make it in about 10minutes or so, especially if we only need to use the microwave, then I am all over that recipe. There are a lot of meals that one can make that fall under this category. But yeah, I guess if I were to say which is my favorite, then it would be the Simplest Meal of Them All.

With that said, I do not do meal prep. I’m not a sociopath that eats the same meal six days in a row.

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July 24, 2024

Health-ish, Well, I’m a Being

Daily writing prompt
What strategies do you use to maintain your health and well-being?
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None whatsoever. I sometimes like to think that I have a strategy to maintain my health, but I’d be lying. I’m horrible at maintaining anything resembling a diet or consistent exercise routine. If anything, the one thing I do fairly well and consistently is walk every day for thirty minutes during my lunch break. And, not to brag, but I am pretty consistent with eating three meals a day rather than starve myself for some ghastly reason.

But my gastrointestinal engorging would probably be classified as unhealthy. Not terribly unhealthy. But I’m sure most, like 9 out of 10, would agree that I need to eat more vegetables. Not fruits. I eat plenty of fruits. Perhaps too many fruits. I have a horrible sweet tooth, and fruits, if anything, are the one thing I do not need to be convinced to eat more of.

It’s mostly just a lot of processed type of foods, though, that I would imagine a dietician would tsk-tsk me into guilt and shame until I stopped. I did attempt to do that whole literary exercise of reading the packaging labels of the foods and beverages I consume, but I find the whole exercise terribly boring, terribly laborious, like the food labels were written by Herman Melville and the sole purpose of food labels are to bore me into submission or, more than likely, bore me into hunger, especially since I am very quick and prone to be at my hungriest during the day when I am also at my bored-est.

I did go through a period of purchasing quite a few pieces of home gym exercise equipment, like a treadmill and a weight lifting bench and a pull-up bar. But alas, I feel as if the dead skin flotsam has a better exercise than I, and I often find myself apologizing to the exercise equipment for their state of un-use as if it were some sort of abandoned child left out in the elements to fend for itself.

I would probably classify myself as being a perpetual starter of diets and exercise routines, but in terms of any sort of long-term strategies, well, that I unfortunately tend to fall rather flat on my face due to the lack of upper-body strength I have in my mid-thirties.

Though I suppose I’m not all too bummed about my lack of physical health. In a way, I guess I’ve devoted the time and energy I should have been exercising and eating right to more so doing the things and activities that I enjoy most, like reading, playing chess, and watching movies. And eating a lot of ice cream. Perhaps a unhealthy amount. But considering my general practitioner hasn’t said anything about it during my annual physicals, I guess I’m alright.

So, I guess one could say that I have bit of the old cognitive-smognitive sort of health. The ole happy-and-I-know-it so I occasionally-clap-along-to-the-tune-in-my-head sort of health. What I’m saying is, my strategy to maintain my health and well-being is to never listen to an advertisement, spend virtually no time on social media, and try in every possible way to do the exact polar opposite of what Elon Musk would do each and every day. And that, in short, makes for good livin’.

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