The little things in life

I really love a good cup of coffee in the morning. We bought a Starbucks espresso machine many years ago - I worked for Starbucks while I was studying to be a social worker at U of C and I used the last of my student loan money to buy a machine when it was on sale at Christmas time. This was one of the best financial decisions that I've ever made (which should surely tell you something about the state of my financial affairs...)

We use our machine on a daily basis and I savour every sip of my morning caffeinated beverage (I switched to decaf for the first trimester of this pregnancy but have very quickly made my way back to one fully caffeinated Americano per day). We primarily use Oso Negro beans which I buy on the monthly 20% discount day at Nutters. I recently was given a half pound of ground espresso straight from Italy - fabulously smooth and mellow! I will search it out when I next go to Lina's Italian Market (a blog post for another day).

All this chatter about coffee and espresso machines was prompted by my recent purchase of Blackwell table cream at Demille's Farm Market in Salmon Arm (yet another post for another day - I really need to catch up after a summer of blog slacking!). I've bought this cream before but hadn't paid as much attention to it as I did this morning.  Simply put, it's the best cream that I've ever used in my coffee! It's only 10% milk fat but the flavour is fabulously rich. We stopped using sugar in our coffee after our Whole 30 experiment and while I have no regrets about that, I feel that this cream adds a little something special back into our coffee.

I have no idea whether Blackwell cream can be bought in the Bow Valley or Calgary but look for it at your local specialty food stores (or, stop in at Demille's when you are next passing through Salmon Arm - one of my next blog posts will hopefully give you more than one reason to stop!)