Shiny Object Saturday: I Love My Keurig!

Did you ever buy something and just fall in love with it immediately? That's exactly how I felt when I bought Pinckney a Keurig one-cup coffee maker for his office for Christmas. It was so cute, so compact, so...sensible.

We frequently spend big bucks on coffee at Panera. We rarely make pots of coffee at home because P drinks regular coffee and I drink tea or decaf--so a lot can go to waste. And I hate, hate, hate stale coffee. Years ago, when we were in NYC for something or other, I overhead a long conversation at a nearby table in a cafe about coffee. The one woman worked for a coffee company, and she said that coffee made in a regular coffee maker should be refrigerated within forty-five minutes. So I got in the habit of doing that. Still, it got wasted, and it bugged me.

Then, a few months ago, I was looking online for water-processed decaf tea, and Timothy's Tea popped up on Amazon. When it arrived, it was in these weird little plastic cups. I just opened them up and put them in my tea ball for steeping. Just before Christmas, I finally saw the actual machines they were supposed to fit in--I felt a vaguely foolish for not making the connection earlier. Silly me.

P is an early-adopter of most techie things. (Fortunately, he doesn't see a big future in 3-D televisions--3-D nauseates me.) I'm surprised he didn't find the Keurig first, but, then again, he'd rather put a fork in his eye than follow me around Kohl's or Bed, Bath & Beyond. But when I saw the Keurig Elite in the store, I knew it was the office mate for him. We tried it out Christmas Day, and were so impressed that we decided to buy him a slightly smaller one--the Keurig Mini--for his office, so we could keep the Elite at home.

Now, before you run out and buy one of these puppies, be sure to read the reviews. They're very, very mixed. Many folks complain that their machines have stopped working or are dispensing less and less water as time goes on due to scaling problems. I haven't descaled ours yet, but I should probably do it soon.

Here's what the K-cups look like. They come in a blue million varieties, and though some people aren't thrilled with the lack of steeping time for tea, it always tastes fine to me. (You can also put a regular tea bag in the machine, but it doesn't work as well.)

I confess that I feel a smidge guilty using all those little plastic cups. Because I don't drink a wide variety of coffee, like P does,  I bought one of these reusable filter inserts. It's so small that it's hard to scoop coffee into with a spoon or measure, but I just keep my coffee in a plastic container instead of the bag and dip the filter right into it to scoop it out.

The K-cups work out to about 50 cents per cup. Not bad. And they're great for households like ours in which everyone drinks something different. There are those in the house who don't always care for what the chef is cooking, either. But we haven't found a machine for that!