kettle

Our electric kettle sprang a leak, so My Darling B dug the old stove top kettle out of storage and I washed it up last night in preparation for making this morning’s pot o’ joe.

From what I could remember, it took a long time to boil water in a kettle on the stove top. My memory’s a little dicey, though, so after cleaning the kettle, I filled it with water, set it on a burner and cranked the heat all the way up. It took more than ten minutes before wisps of steam began to snake out of the spout. That’s way too long. I’m half-asleep when I start making coffee in the morning and will likely fall all the way back into deep sleep in ten minutes.

I dumped the water out and began again, this time measuring how much water I’d need to fill the carafe that holds our morning dose of coffee. I think it holds a little less than a quart, but that’s only a guess because, no matter how carefully I poured water from the measuring cup into the carafe, most of the water did that thing where it ran backwards down the side of the cup, over the lip of the sink and down my leg. I tried two different measuring cups, but they both did the same thing.

I could pour the water with a minimum of sloppage if I filled the measuring cup only halfway to the one-pint mark. Doing that, I could get what I thought was three pints into the kettle (dribble dribble), which boiled in about eight minutes. Much better. I can stay awake that long.

Weirdly, when I repeated the process of measuring out three pints of water this and brought it to boiling, it wasn’t enough to fill up the carafe. I couldn’t possibly have boiled off more than a pint, so I don’t even know. Maybe I hallucinated the previous evening’s kitchen experiment. Maybe I was too sloppy. Maybe I just can’t count. Whatever, I managed to get another pint boiling in just a couple minutes and fill the carafe so there was happiness for coffee drinkers at Out Humble O’Bode today.