In which I tell you far too much about coffee

Since the days of my youth when my mom's friend Bonnie used to buy cases of canned soy dogs direct from a Mennonite community, the world of meat/dairy substitute soy products has grown significantly. From Tofurkey to Neatballs and oh so delicious soy sour cream, today's vegan/veggie can partake in a diet that your 1950s nuclear family would be proud of. And while there is some division amongst my tribe of meat/dairy eschewing friends on the topic of Fake-B-L-Ts, there is one product that pretty much all of us have come to worship: Silk Soy Creamer.

Now I've typically always taken my coffee with milk. I've never been a cream girl. I chalk this up to my family of origin in which the choices were: drip coffee with milk (mom's daily addiction of choice) or dad's Rocketfuel. Now, as an adult I appreciate the stronger side of coffee. Everything from the luscious crema  on a strong espresso with a twist of lemon rind, to a good cup of arabic coffee with cardamon and rosewater. As a 14 year old, when I started drinking coffee, I was a fan of something with a bit less personality. For as peach schnapps is often the training wheels of alcohol consumption (how we survived those days of chugging that stuff behind the gym I will never know), so too is sweet, weak coffee the entryway for a lifetime of blessed caffeine adoration/addiction. And so, my dad's morning beverage was not up my alley. Rocketfuel was made every morning on the stovetop in a blue enamel turkish-style coffee pot by mixing a few scoops of coffee, a few scoops of demerara sugar and some water. This mixture is then boiled and cooked to a thick syrup and the top liquid was poured off into little chinese tea cups. And while that may be a decent option as a 30 year old, it definitely wasn't on my teenage radar. And so, I was a coffee with milk and a bit of sugar girl.

I dropped the sugar fairly early on, though I can't quite remember how long ago now. And while I still sigh deeply everytime I think of the many litres of truly divine caffe latte I've consumed both in my own Italian neighbourhood here and particularly in Italy over the years, a few years ago I began to drink soy instead of dairy, converting my latte to a soy latte. Same too for my morning coffee (made in a stovetop Italian stainless steel pot bought in a hardware store in a small town just outside of Rome almost 10 years ago now), which for a short decadent period of time was partnered with vanilla soy milk and then eventually just the plain stuff. Then came Silk Soy Creamer.

I can't remember if it was Inga or my friend Theresa who introduced me to Silk first. My hunch is it was Inga on a trip to Olympia many years ago, when it wasn't even yet available in Canada. However it was, I was sold. Slightly sweet, definitely thick and creamy, there was really no going back. Until, perhaps, this morning. For this morning while having grapefruits and coffee with Martin and his daughter for a leisurely Sunday breakfast I took the last savoured sip of my first coffee of the day and encountered something that can only be described as: blobby. Gelatinous, slimy, icky: blobby. I'm quite sure it was from the Silk as there was no where else it could have come from, and while I am also 98% sure that there was nothing wrong with it -- afterall they have to put some kind of goop in there to thicken that stuff up -- the experience of something solidish and definitely slimy in my morning cuppa has thrown me off.

And so: 2006 may be the year of the Americano. Black. Maybe I'll think of it as the sophisticated caffeine of my 30s....