I originally posted this entry on June 6, 2011 on my old blog. My update is at the bottom.
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Lately I’ve been in a soup mood. It has nothing to do with the outside temperature (hovering around 100 degrees everyday), but how easy it is to make soup.

How easy it is to make soup, usually.

Lately, soup recipes have been giving me trouble. One is a Black Bean Chili recipe I got from my friend, S. She has made it for years, she said, and it is one of her favorites. It is vegan and it looked easy enough, so I decided to make it.

First time I made the Black Bean Chili recipe, I could have renamed it 5-Alarm Chili. My mouth was on fire and my eyes were watering. What had I done wrong? I checked the recipe and nothing seemed to be out of kilter with what I had put together. Well, not-out-of-kilter or not, there was no way I could eat that without cutting the heat. I ended up adding about five cups of water and three baked potatoes. This downgraded it to 3-alarm chili soup and I could eat it with only mild sweating.

The second time I made it, it was a déjà vu experience. Smoke was practically coming out of my ears. I verified my ingredients against the email S. sent me. What could explain this result? I then checked the online magazine where S. had found the recipe. Did I mention that jalapenos and cayenne pepper are two of the chili’s ingredients? I used two jalapenos, just as the recipe called for. But I was also using one teaspoon — one full teaspoon — of cayenne pepper, as S.’s email listed, but the online recipe called for only 1/8th of a teaspoon. Eight times the desired amount of cayenne pepper may possibly, sort of, probably, might, could, should explain the spiciness of the chili.

That’s what I thought until I made it yet a fourth time with only 1/8th of a teaspoon of cayenne pepper. It was still 5-alarm chili. I have no idea what my issue is with this recipe. But I like it well enough to continue to make it and so I have adapted: I always have two or three potatoes ready to be nuked in the microwave and added in, to cut the heat. The original water amount is 3/4 of a cup, but each time I made it, I ended up with about 5 cups of water and now that’s the way I like it. So for me, it’s 3-Alarm Black Bean Chili Soup. That’s as good as it is going to get.

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Update: I’m still working on making this soup mild enough that smoke doesn’t come out of my ears when I eat it. So far, I am unsuccessful in that effort. This last time I left out the cayenne pepper altogether. I put in the two Russet potatoes to help bring down the alarm level. It still didn’t work. I think that when I take the soup container out of the fridge, I won’t even have to heat it up; it still makes me sweat.

I posted the original entry on February 12, 2011. I have added my update at the bottom.
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Coffee-flavored water. That’s what I get from the break room sometimes.

There are four carafes and one professional coffee maker machine (office capacity). One carafe has an orange top for the decaffinated coffee. One has a black top and two have brown tops. I want the (hot) water to always be in the black top carafe. To my thinking, if water is the only substance ever in this carafe, it will have a better chance of not tasting like coffee. That leaves the two with brown tops to always have caffinated coffee. A place for everything and everything in its place.

Commonly, whoever takes the carafes off of the coffee maker in the afternoon sits them on the counter without rinsing them out. Occasionally they will already have coffee baked into the bottom because some coffee drinkers put them back on the warmers when they are mostly empty. What little coffee is in the carafe evaporates and leaves a film of coffee in the bottom.

The next morning arrives, and the people who come in early to make coffee try their best to get the baked-in coffee out of the carafes. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. The coffee drinkers can’t tell the difference (probably) because coffee tastes like coffee. But using a carafe with baked-in coffee for water makes the water taste like coffee. And I don’t want coffee-flavored water for my tea. I’ll go out on a limb here and guess that people who get hot water for their oatmeal have the same aversion to coffee-flavored water.

And that brings us back to the idea of always having the black carafe for water. If water is the only liquid in that black-topped carafe day after day, then no coffee can be left in it overnight and we have a good chance of the water that goes through the coffee machine for heating purposes to come out tasting like water.

You know that saying that goes something like “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change how you think about it?” Well, this is something I could change, so I did. I’m an early arriver to the office, so now I go into the break room, rinse out all the carafes to my liking and make hot water, one carafe of decaffinated coffee and one carafe of caffinated coffee.

Voilà! Water that tastes like water!

But unless I stand guard at the coffee maker, it’s not a foolproof plan. Yesterday I went back into the breakroom to get some water about mid-morning. Bleck! It tasted like coffee. What happened? Someone who made a subsequent carafe of hot water must have thrown out the coffee grinds from the filter holder and put it back in without rinsing it. Voilà! Coffee-flavored water. Again.

(Postaday2011 #43)

Update: The coffee service people came to give our coffee machine a check up. They noticed that our carafes were the “old style.” They took away all the brown-tipped carafes and replaced them with black-tipped ones. Now I can’t tell which carafe is which, as we only have the orange one for decaffeinated coffee and three black carafes. The frequency of my getting coffee-flavored water has increased noticeably. Rats. Guess I’ll have to find stronger tasting tea.