Tag: coffee machine

World’s easiest scrambled eggs

I made the fabled “Espresso Machine Eggs” last night. Well, they’re not fabled. I’d been reading about people’s scrambled egg making exploits for some time. I thought I’d give it a burl.

Here are the steps involved.

  1. Buy an expensive coffee machine (one with good steam pressure)
  2. Put eggs (four) and milk (a dash) into your milk jug – I used my big one because I wasn’t sure how much egg spray there’d be. Give it a whisk.
  3. Steam the eggs like you’d steam milk.
  4. Serve with steak for the perfect lazy Sunday night dinner.

They were very fluffy. I’ll do it again.

Here are the photos…

December 7, 2009

Location, Location

Robyn is pretty thrilled. A little bit of a furniture rearrangement has rescued our kitchen bench space (and given me a sore back).

We now have a little coffee island in the dining room – making use of a buffet that was previously a fishtank stand and place for general clutter.

I have a habit of buying coffee sacks wherever I can – and I’ve finally put them to some use.

If you’re in the area why not arrange a time to drop round for a coffee… if you’re not in the area, you can always visit…

One day I might get a coffee machine that’s designed for home use.

August 12, 2009

Forced sale

Judging by the title you thought I was going to plug my Luke Skywalker auction. Didn’t you. Admit it. Well I’m not. Except that I just did. At the very least there are some new Q&As to check out…

No, what I’m here to tell you today, is much more exciting. Michael Jackson is auctioning off all his stuff from Neverland. The Guardian website has photos of the good stuff. Including this custom built Gaggia coffee machine.

If that doesn’t grab your attention how bout these rhinestone encrusted socks?

No? Picky. How about this nice little train engine teapot. The going rate is expected to be somewhere in the $100 – $200 range. This is like an online garage sale.

February 18, 2009

All fixed now

Well, almost. My blog was down for a while today. My hosting provider – dedicated host – had some issues switching over to a new payment system. They lost payment details and suspended my account. Apologies to anybody who has been trying to get on today…

Dedicated Host have the best customer service I’ve experienced from an online company. I emailed today at about 4.00pm notifying them of the problem and I had a response in minutes and the problem fixed very shortly thereafter. And a free month’s hosting as a sweetener. They get an A+ for customer service.

As do Coffee Dominion. My coffee machine issues were not as simply fixed as I thought last weekend. There was a leaking seal spraying water all over the control panel’s circuitry. Water and electricity don’t mix. I normally order parts online through coffeeparts.com.au – who are good. But postage for a small o-ring is expensive and the Coffee Dominion team pointed me to their local seal supplier. Who were also helpful. My machine is now up and running safely.

I isolated the power issues in my computer – my video card died a painful death at the hands of either the tropical heat or humidity. I’m not sure which. But it’s working now too. Thanks to the onboard video card. 

So, now it’s just the breadmaker. Which has been almost completely dismantled. In fact, everytime I overcome one problem with it and get a little excited, I break something else in my haste. There aren’t many more pieces left to break. And I now know exactly what goes into a breadmaker. I guess that could be exciting for some people.

February 15, 2009

A bright spark: Coffee Machine update

My coffee machine is working again. It seems the water that I found in various parts of the machine was probably the problem. Based on my diagnosis (which could well be flawed) the waste water bottle being full caused the issue. But if the problem occurs again I’ll have to go back to the drawing board on that one.

I did get to pull the machine apart again and used that as an opportunity to comprehensively photograph its gizzards.

My desktop PC and Breadmaker are both still out of commission. Hopefully not permanently.

February 9, 2009

Failblog: Coffee Machine

Everything electrical in my life is dying. Painful deaths. Yesterday, before dismantling my breadmaker (and killing it), I discovered my trusty desktop PC is dead. I think it’s the power supply. Anyway, it’s gone. 

The breadmaker situation was all my own doing, and has been well documented. 

My coffee machine, the appliance I am most dependent on, gave up the ghost this morning. 

It was working last night before we went to bed. We only turned it off as we traipsed up the stairs to bed. So I haven’t done anything to hurt it. The waste water bottle was backed up which meant it wasn’t draining properly – but I couldn’t find any water that was interacting with the electricity. 

When we came downstairs this morning everything was off. We couldn’t figure out why. I checked the fuse box. Our circuit breaker was on “off”. Something was wrong. The usual suspect at this point is the coffee machine. And sure enough, when I turned it off power was able to be restored to the house. 

Subsequent testing (including pulling the machine apart and looking at all the wires) showed nothing structual was wrong with the machine, no wires were frayed. None were touching each other causing any short circuiting. All the earthing wires were still earthed. I am at a complete loss to figure out what’s going on.  

Could it be all the moisture in the air from all this rain?

February 8, 2009