Mundanities

Maximize Your Coffee: McDonald’s

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I wrote a rantlet about McDonald’s coffee pricing on Facebook the other day, before starting this blog series. I am rewriting the rantlet here.

As a connoisseur of cheap coffee, I have a fair amount of experience with McDonald’s coffee. In particular, McDonald’s iced coffee has been a better deal than 7-eleven’s, or it was during summer of 2019. You know, last week and last century all at the same time. Coffee is part of McDonald’s dollar menu. Any size, hot or iced, for just $0.99. If you, like me, consume a large part of your caloric intake as sweetener in your coffee, McDonald’s iced coffee is great. A large is 32 ounces (the size of a 7-eleven Big Gulp), and if you are like me, a large iced coffee can last you from your walk to work to lunchtime.

I order my coffee through the McDonald’s app. My rantlet which follows applies to the app; it might not apply if you order in person, but since the pandemic started, I have ordered using the app anywhere I go that has one. Here’s the process for ordering: select “Deals” and scroll all the way to bottom. Select the $0.99 coffee deal. It will take you to the coffee menu. And on the coffee menu, every size and flavor of iced coffee is listed individually. If you order an iced coffee, it comes to you perfectly creamed and sweetened. (Okay, maybe a little too sweetened.) However, if you want hot coffee, the only choices are size and regular or decaf. When you select your size and caffeine level of hot coffee, you then do have the opportunity to customize your coffee with dairy and sweetener. Here’s where my rantlet comes in: 1. you have to know how many creams and how many sugars you want! It took me a week of orders to decide that 2 creams (what’s the volume of “1 cream”? I don’t know) and 5 sugars (see above regarding my calorie intake from sweetened coffee) was a workable combination for a large coffee. And 2. if you want a flavored sweetener, you have to pay extra! I mean, $0.39 isn’t going to impoverish me, but as a matter of principle, I feel like the flavor is the same whether it’s hot or iced coffee, so why is the price different? (Yes, I realize this is a stupid complaint, made more so by the fact that I should just appreciate that the iced coffee isn’t more expensive than the hot coffee, unlike basically everywhere else.)

Bottom line: if you like your coffee “light and sweet,” stick with iced coffee at McDonald’s.

Mundanities

Maximize Your Coffee: 7-eleven

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I fell in love with 7-eleven coffee at some point shortly after moving to my current home. 7-eleven is extremely close to my house (not as close as ThreeFifty Bakery, which opened after I moved here, or as close as Starbucks, but still close) and is on my way walking to almost everywhere I go. In particular, it is on my way to both jobs I’ve had while living in my current home. Since I am pretty bad at both making halfway decent coffee and at having milk in my refrigerator that hasn’t turned, getting coffee on my way to work is the rule in my life.

Even before the introduction of the 7-eleven app, coffee deals made 7-eleven a great place to get not only coffee but also various breakfast baked items for cheap. Now, the app is necessary for taking advantage of these deals (and yes, “taking advantage” is really the right phrase), so sign up and download it.

Here’s.Monday of the month, not the first DAY of the month. So if you, like me, were looking forward to an anticipated coffee deal this month, you, like me, may have been disappointed if you expected it on November 1st.

Why are combos the key? I’ll explain. An extra-large hot coffee is $2.39. (It may be less in less expensive markets.) This month’s deal is ANY size coffee and any muffin for $2. So I got a muffin not for free, but for -$0.39. Or, you could say, I sacrificed my opportunity to eat the very delicious homemade banana bread waiting for me on my counter for $0.39.

$2 is not the least expensive coffee around. (That designation belongs to McDonald’s, though for the time, coffee is free at Wawa on Tuesdays–stay tuned for a post about that even though Wawa is a full mile from my home.) However, when you add in the cranberry orange muffin, which is my favorite, or you consider that ANY hot coffee, which includes machine-made espresso drinks, is $2, the value is definitely high.

A few other notes:

  1. Donuts. Often the coffee and baked good combos involve donuts. If the deal specifies a basic glazed ring donut, obviously that’s what you should choose. But if it doesn’t, I and my sweet tooth recommend the chocolate frosted donut. After a long history with Dunkin as my go-to coffee, I can state unequivocally that 7-eleven’s chocolate frosted donuts are far and away better than Dunkin’s. This is because 7-eleven’s are glazed before they are frosted. Dunkin’s are dry when they are frosted, so they are not as sweet.
  2. It turned out that my coffee flop yesterday at 7-eleven was due to my attempt to get a machine-made mocha while the machine was out of hot cocoa powder. I spent about 15 minutes there today while they diagnosed the problem and then tried to solve it. They happened to accidentally make it worse, so I got a regular drip coffee, the kind that one expects for a total of $2. There is absolutely no reason to complain about drip coffee from 7-eleven.
  3. Iced coffee is another ballgame. My 7-eleven got a fancy iced coffee set up shortly before the pandemic and I’ve never used it. If this series is still going strong when it gets back to iced coffee weather, I’ll check it out and post.

Mundanities

Maximize Your Coffee: A New Series That I Will Likely Forget About After Two Posts

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Welcome back to my long-forgotten and oft-neglected blog. After posting on both Facebook and Twitter that I am a “connoisseur of cheap coffee” I figured I should share my hard-earned (and occasionally expensive) wisdom on how to maximize one’s coffee value. This series that I will likely forget about after two (or maybe three) posts will not be limited to cheap coffee; I have words of wisdom to share about expensive (aka “fancy”) coffee as well.

Last night at 3 in the morning, after being awakened by an otherwise adorable kitty nose in my ear, I mentally drafted a post about my anticipated trip to 7-eleven this morning. Unfortunately, I managed to screw up my “how does a machine make a mocha for $2?” coffee, so instead of waxing poetic about how amazing 7-eleven is and has been, I’m going to ramble about coffee more generally and what I anticipate including in this series. More about 7-eleven soon. Tomorrow maybe.

So: maximizing your coffee. This is about deals you can get, quality vs quantity (I’m the one who drinks $2 lattes from 7-eleven, so you might not want to trust me on quality), the unreasonable number of places to get coffee within a half mile of my house, and randomly sending people $5 for their fancy coffee accounts. (PS you can randomly send ME money for my Starbucks account at rak at my blog’s domain.)

Map with circles indicating a quarter mile from an address near my house and a half mile from that same address near my house.

That’s basically where I live, with a quarter mile and a half mile around a neighbor’s address. (I’m pretty careless with my privacy, but I can at least not tell the entire world exactly where I live.) Google Maps doesn’t make this easy; that map looks like Google Maps but was actually made with another tool that overlays on Google, so I couldn’t easily figure out a way to also label all the places where coffee can be purchased within the circles. Instead of a visualization, then, a list, in alphabetical order (where there is more than one location of a chain, I’ve listed only the closest to my house):

Coffee within a quarter mile:

Additional coffee within a half mile:

Until the pandemic, there was as also a Peet’s, a Panera, and a Wawa in the half mile radius. The closest of each of those is now 0.9 miles (Peet’s) and 1 mile (Panera and Wawa) from my home. For Reasons, I intend to include posts about Panera and Wawa in this series, and might or might not post about Peet’s. (They just changed their rewards program, so unless Peet’s becomes more convenient–which it will if I am offered the job I’ve been interviewing for–I won’t be able to speak to its value.)

Finally, any coffee-selling-institutions within the half mile radius that are not listed here were not skipped intentionally. If there are any locations I should add to my list, please let me know in the comments or any way that you know to reach me.

Over the coming undetermined length of time, I’ll share my tips for maximizing your coffee. Stay tuned!

DC (dot) nerd, Laws and regs, Libraries and information

Thoughts on FOIA, Part 1

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By the title of this post, I’m implying that my thoughts on FOIA will be a series. You know me. The next post in the series might not happen for a month or eleven. They are on my to-do list, though, so that’s a step towards it actually happening. In the meantime, the DC Council will be voting on bills (emergency and temporary) to continue the trolling–er, tolling–of timelines for responding to FOIA requests, and this is generating discussion on Twitter. Unsurprisingly. And I have THOUGHTS.

  1. At the beginning of the pandemic, it was understandable that there would be difficulties in responding to FOIA requests in the statutory timelines. We were all sent home to work remotely, many of us without adequate technology. Everything took longer. Heck, just checking email took longer. And of course any responsive records that were on paper weren’t accessible. Other barriers would have been file sizes, for example when OCTO transfers email packages to an agency FOIA officer; if files are too large and the FOIA officer doesn’t have adequate bandwidth to download the files, that could cause delays. And if the computer provided to the FOIA officer doesn’t have software that can manage redacting, that’s another source of delays due to inadequate technology.
  2. But as time went on, new technology was acquired–or could have been acquired. Here we are 18 months in, and agencies really should have ensured by now that FOIA officers have what they need to work from home. Plus, DC government employees are supposed to be working in the office three days a week, as far as I understand.
  3. SO! Timelines really ought to be back to normal.

Now, I have MORE THOUGHTS. Those thoughts include likely controversial opinions about email, about the purpose of FOIA, and how transparent government ought to be. Stay tuned for a hopefully more thoughtful and actually researched exposition on “government translucency.”

Crafts and cooking

The Great Pandemic Baking Show: Trifle

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Whoa. Trifle is a bit…much. But what is one to do when one has most of a batch of apple pie filling left? Right. Make a pie. (Or make apple cinnamon oatmeal. Or eat it on vanilla ice cream. Whatever.)

But I’ve been contemplating combinations of deliciousness that could make a good trifle since I began this pandemic baking adventure, and this is the first time that I’ve thought of something that includes the traditional fruit element.

The plan:

Oatmeal cake: next time I’ll bake it at 350, which is 75 degrees lower than the muffin recipe calls for. The edges were a bit burnt tasting, but the cake itself (I made it without blueberries, by the way) was tasty and was a nice hearty contrast to the custard and cream in the trifle. (Look how well it came out of the loaf pan! It was a non-stick pan, and I buttered it with the bits of butter left in the pan from melting it for the recipe.)

Apple pie filling: this was in the fridge from earlier in the week. Just as good as the day I made it.

Custard: I made only half the custard recipe. It wasn’t that using eight egg yolks was so intimidating, more that having eight egg whites left over was going to be a challenge! Also, I didn’t think I needed as much custard as the recipe would make, and it turned out I was right.

Whipped cream: My guess is that most trifle recipes call for straight whipped cream, but the recipe I linked to above combines whipped cream with cream cheese and OH MY YUM. Highly recommended.

My parents don’t have a trifle dish (my mom says that she almost bought one when she worked at a kitchen store, but if she had, this would have been the first time it got used, 20 years later. So it’s for the best that she didn’t buy it) so I used the closest thing they have, which is a brown glass bowl. You can’t see the layers (sorry, Paul and Mary) but that’s okay. Really, it’s the taste that’s important, right?

Mom said she’d have this again. I’d have it again if someone else washed the dishes.

Crafts and cooking

Great Pandemic Baking Show: Schnecken

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Season 4, episode 6: Sweet breads

For over a decade, my family recipe for schnecken has been sitting in a “wouldn’t it be nice to make this” pile. I finally made them, and on one hand, the recipe is imperfect. On the other hand, the recipe is perfect.

It’s a family recipe, not copyrighted to someone else, so I’ll share it here.

Ingredients:

  • 2 packages yeast dissolved in “a little” lukewarm milk with 1 tsp flour and 1 tsp sugar (the recipe says “2 yeast”. I assume that means “2 packages” or “2 Tbsp” or another approximate equivalent)
  • 4 cups all-purpose flour* (*You may need more–I ended up adding about 3/4 cup.)
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1/2 cup melted butter
  • 3 eggs, beaten
  • 1 cup sour cream
  • more melted butter
  • brown sugar
  • pecans
  • raisins

Process:

  1. Add flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and sour cream to the yeast mixture. Blend and knead until smooth.
  2. Set the dough aside to rise. The family recipe says to refrigerate overnight; I let it rise in our cold kitchen for an hour or so.
  3. Divide the dough in half.* Roll the first half out to a rectangle–15″ by 18″? In my kitchen, it’s all approximate. (*This is where the family recipe really goes wrong. The family recipe says to divide the dough in three, but the dough gets really too thin, and who wants to wash three muffin tins, anyway?)
  4. Spread melted butter on the dough, then sprinkle with brown sugar, pecan pieces, and raisins (or dried cranberries).
  5. Roll tightly like a jelly roll or like Chelsea buns.
  6. Cut into 12 equal pieces.
  1. Butter a muffin tin, and put a dab of brown sugar and a half pecan in each spot. Put the filled and rolled dough on top of the pecans.
  2. Repeat with the second half of the dough (or wrap the dough well and put it in the freezer so you don’t end up with 24 schnecken that all need to be eaten before they get stale).
  3. Let the buns rise for an hour.
  4. Bake at 375 for 25 minutes.

Some of my notes about what makes the recipe imperfect are in the recipe itself. It somehow doesn’t call for enough flour, and it wants you to divide the dough into thirds instead of halves, which resulted in super thin dough and too skinny rolls.

BUT!!! The dough itself is my new favorite dough. I made a roll with just the dough and a smidge of brown sugar (from the ends I trimmed off) and HEAVEN in my mouth. I think it’s the sour cream that makes the difference (or the sour cream plus the melted butter). I will be using this dough for my sweet rolls from now on.

A few additional notes:

First, this is what happens if you don’t butter the tin adequately. Or maybe if you only use sugar for the filling instead of adding the nuts and raisins. If this happens, just soak it overnight and when you wake up, it will magically have been washed by your dad. If you don’t live with your dad, it will at least be magically easier to was yourself. You’ll note that I used walnuts instead of the pretty pecan in the recipe. I thought my parents had pecans, but I couldn’t find them when I looked. It’s not my fault that they have three freezers!

So pretty in the tins. I should probably have turned them out as soon as I took them out of the oven. That might have prevented the situation in the photo above.