Coffee contamination! Code Red!

So today I am sitting here sipping a delightful cup of Pumpkin Spice coffee from Quilter's Coffee- a delightful online store with lovely flavored and normal coffees. The beans are so aromatic and oily. The coffee is smooth and divine but lurking beneath the calm brown surface is a history of violent conflict. You see, this coffee is special. It is the first pot brewed in my coffee-making exile. No, no, let me start at the beginning....


As a single woman, I often enjoyed a cup of flavored coffee--delightful aromas of cinnamon and vanilla or mocha and spices would play about my nose. Equally perfect when savored while reading the Sunday paper or slurped from a travel mug as I stood in 20 degree weather waiting for the bus. Then I fell in love and moved in with a man who HATES flavored coffee. HATES it! He is a coffee purist. The beans must be oily and fresh and of course he grounds each pot immediatly before brewing (at least he hasn't made the move to using bottled water in the coffee maker yet--the fancy $80 coffee maker that has its own special water filters in addition to the paper ones, non-bleached natural ones from Trader Joes, that is). However, I continued to make flavored coffee occasionally, usually when he wasn't home and I'd be sure to wash out the pot and the filter basket to remove the evidence.

But 4 years later, I got tired of thoroughly scrubbing the coffee pot after each use just so he can come downstairs and make a pot of "his" coffee an hour later. So one day, one day 3 weeks ago to be exact, I DIDN'T clean the pot. I rinsed and returned. I dumped out the filter and put the filter basket back in the maker with nary a rinse. He made a pot of his coffee a short time later and proclaimed that it was contaminated and that it all tasted like cinnamon. I said, no way could cinnamon survive your double-strength Starbucks crap. But he insisted that it had.

Later that same day he went to Target. He came home with a 4 cup coffee maker and a pack of filters and the rest is history. Should I desire flavored coffee, I must use the little white coffee maker instead of the big fancy silver and black one (it was the reason we bought a silver and black microwave and a silver and black toaster oven--we had to match the coffee maker, just so you know how important it is). I've become so accustomed to making 8 cups of coffee and drinking them myself. Now I make a whole pot in my new coffee maker and it gives me a mug and a half. I suppose I can always make 2 pots....and use the thermal carafe he bought just for that purpose--so that my extra flavored coffee would not sully the "good" carafe that we use so the coffee doesn't get bitter from sitting on the hot plate. No, that carafe is for "regular only, please."

I suppose he sensed that I was feeling like an exiled patriot in a foreign (and smaller) land because yesterday he came home with a bag of coffee, coffee just for me....cinnamon hazelnut.

Well, they say marriage is about compromise, right? Don't get angry, just buy her a damn coffee maker of her own!

Freshly caffeinated, I return to my knitting....