My cup of 'Kaapi'..!!

Imagine this scene!

Heavy rains lashing outside, you are back from an outing, thoroughly drenched. You get back home and after drying yourself, mix a hot cup of coffee, the way you like it and sit by the window watching the rain pelting down. Your fingers curl around the mug of hot coffee and you draw a sip from it, letting the hotness burn your tongue but at the same time relishing the bitter-sweet taste. :-)

Phew!

I miss home. I miss filter coffee. Sigh!

I have been a coffee addict for as long as I can remember. Of course people who know me now will shake their heads and say there she goes lying on her blog! But no! I swear! I love coffee. But it has to be made in the right way. Then it’s a pleasure to drink.

I was initiated into coffee by my grand mom in Coimbatore. When we were little kids, she used to give me and my cousins something called ‘drop coffee’. This was like the original coffee except the amount of coffee in it is not more than a couple of drops since we kids were not allowed to have that ‘grown-up beverage’. I used to wonder how it would be to drink the coffee that the elders drink – thick, strong with heaps of sugar in it.

Of course, as we grew older, mom stopped giving us the customary children drinks like bournvita, milo, horlicks etc and started mixing coffee for us along with the rest of the household. Filter coffee! Mmm.. She used to mix in just the right amount of the filtered decoction, mix it in with the boiling milk and add sugar liberally. She would then pour it into a tumbler and hand us the ‘Filter kaapi’ teeming with froth. As I grew older, I preferred my coffee to be strong, bitter and with just half a teaspoon of sugar in it. I liked the bitter taste. I still do!

One of my quirks (Yes! I have many that way!) is to strain the coffee because I don’t like the skin that forms on hot milk if you leave it for some time. This oddity as my family termed it stretched to such a great extent that even when we were visiting friends / relatives and they offered us coffee, I would sneak into the kitchen and make sure I got a strained cup of it. But we are digressing here!

When I left for MBA at ASB, I missed the coffee! Of course we used to have coffee served to us there along with the options of milk and tea, but the coffee was nothing like what I was used to.  It was pale and watery and had these little bits of the skin floating about. Yuck! So yours truly switched to tea! The tea was not any better but by comparison it was way higher than coffee.

And then came the time I moved to Hyderabad. I then tried mixing coffee at our flat with the instant coffee that you get these days. Came out terrible if I say so myself! Horrible! And then yet again it was back to tea for me until I left Hyderabad and came back home for my marriage! But I did get to taste the authentic filter kaapi at my brother’s place in Hyderabad where his mom used to make it just the way I liked it. So whenever I missed home I would land there promptly and his mom would serve me with the original filter coffee.

The only other times that I used to have coffee which was quite frequent if I think about it now was when we used to hang out at Café Coffee Day or Barista. In all honesty, I like the coffee (cappuccino as it is called by one of its names and forms) at Barista a lot better than the one served at CCD. The flavor of coffee at Barista was stronger and they comparatively used lesser milk than CCD which was how I was used to drinking it. So Barista scored higher there! I still miss the coffee powder they sold there!

Okie this is turning out to be quite a long post. But I am not done yet!

When I came to Singapore after my marriage, one of the things that I was looking forward to here was Starbucks! Yes! I was waiting to have my first taste of the famous coffee and to see whether it lived up to its name and fame! And yes it did!

Ever since I read about Starbucks during my MBA for one of the case studies, I have been waiting to taste this famous coffee. But no store in India! :-( (That’s one thing I am still pissed about – though I am still loyal to Barista that way!). Coming back to the point or rather my never-ending coffee-ramayan; I found references to Starbucks in a lot of other books that I read, like ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ for instance and my feeling of trying it just got stronger. So the feeling was satisfied when I landed in Singapore and the first weekend here my hubby bought me a cup at a Starbucks outlet here. It’s ridiculously expensive and not something I can have every time I want to have coffee out here (I drink tea at home! I don’t take too many chances with instant coffee!)  But it’s still totally worth it.

I love the coffee at Starbucks & Barista. Way to go guys! :-)

And thus ends my post on coffee, kaapi, cappuccino whatever you want to call it…

And I am still missing the homemade ‘filter-kaapi’ at the end of this long post.

Sigh! And double sigh!