Iced Caffe Latte – Afternoon Pick Up!

This Iced Caffe Latte wasn’t my idea.

I’ll explain. You see, there is one very lovely young woman here at work. She is both very pretty and quite smart. (And before I get in trouble with that opening line let me say there are actually quite a few young women here who fit that description — but right now I’m thinking of one in particular.) Despite the early morning hour this young woman works to spread her high energy and bright smile throughout the halls of our workplace.

I avoid her at all costs.

It isn’t that I don’t appreciate pretty, smart and cheerful young women.  These jewels of personkind make the world a far better place if you ask me — but with this one, well, I have to admit I need to go cold-turkey. The slightest contact leads to trouble of some sort and I am powerless against her charms; charms which are made dangerous when they get accompanied by her helpful, but not-in-my-best-interest, suggestions.

Yes, she is a Bad Influence.

Perhaps you know her too? Bad Influence is the office friend who invites you out for a “quick drink” after work and then ends up sending you home at midnight drunk in a cab. When you ask Bad Influence for advice on which pair of expensive Italian shoes you should buy, she thinks on it a moment, and then quite convincingly suggests you buy both — which you end up doing because her reasons made perfect sense in the moment — but get you in trouble back home when the financial reality sets in.

Yeah, that’s her. I could go on.  And this Iced Caffe Late is her fault.

Bad Influence and I mostly meet up in the office kitchen where we invariably find ourselves standing in line at the coffee machine where we bitch about bad machine coffee. We are both avowed coffee junkies who regularly get our fix every few hours lest too much blood gets into our caffeine streams. Even though there is no actual coordination of effort going on between us, the measurable and constant half-life of caffeine  ensures we bump into each other several times a day, like clockwork, and always in the kitchen, next to the coffee machine.

That is until recently when I finally decided to cut back the joe to just two cups a day.  Gasp! Two rather large cups, but two nonetheless. I did this for no particular reason other than it just seemed a prudent thing to do after successfully cutting back the diet soda to trace levels   Coffee seemed like a natural next temperance target.

I had been having a degree of success with my weaning efforts and had managed to curb my daily intake considerably. I achieved this by mostly limiting coffee intake to my morning cups at home and then snapping my wrist with a rubber band the rest of the day whenever the impulse to ‘brew-up’ crossed my brain.

All was well until one afternoon when I finally ran across Bad Influence in the copy room.  We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of weeks.  She said she had missed seeing me and assumed  I had been sick.  I explained  that I was cutting down my  joe intake  and that I had never been that much of a fan of afternoon coffee in the first place and never felt quite comfortable drinking what I had always perceived as a morning beverage in the afternoon.

Bad Influence was remarkably understanding. I guess I had expected her to respond to my admission in the same violent manner my sister did when I told her I thought “Xena: Warrior Princess” was a stupid show. Instead Bad Influence was quite supportive.  She agreed that the office coffee wasn’t all that appealing anyway and suggested that if I was going to limit myself to only one or two cups of coffee a day I had better make sure they were worthy cups. Were my home cups espressos or lattes?  What continent did the beans I use come from?

We dished on our favorite blends, what methods for brewing we liked best and how much better a home made cup of espresso was than that crappy Nespresso machine we had at work. Sadly I confessed to her that I rarely had espresso at home.  I did not have any counter space (or cash) for a decent machine and that my Bialetti stove top espresso maker was the 6 cup model and not the three cup model so it sat unused in the garage unless company was over.  To make good espresso in these machines you really need to make a full pot and I didn’t want to waste the shots I didn’t use just to make a cup for myself.  (You can only make so much espresso graninta with the overflow after all.)

And then she did it again.

“Why don’t you just save your “overflow” in a mason jar to use as iced caffe lattes later in the day?”

Um, because I never thought of that before. Because I didn’t know how fantastic an ice cold caffe latte in the late afternoon would be. Because if I ever knew how good a home made iced caffe latte made with premium espresso and a rich, fresh cup of whole milk would be my coffee intake would spike right back up to my pre-semi-abstinence levels right then and there.

That’s why.  Dammit.  And now that I know all these things it is unlikely I’ll be revisiting my caffeine withdrawal for at least a little while longer.  I’m too busy pouring off my morning espresso overflow into mason jars and mixing up lattes every afternoon to worry about it. And its all her fault.  Again. She is a Bad Influence. She knows who she is.

Iced Caffe Latte

Thanks a lot Bad Influence. Its all your fault.