At this point one might be wondering, what is Temonte’s Italian American? Well, right now it’s a blog and an Instagram where I post Italian-American style food I make. Some of this food, I feed to my family and friends, and some of it is development work for my eventual pop-up bakery.

Progress on the pop-up is slow. Much slower than I thought it would be. Part of the tardiness is the that I am concurrently taking care of two small children (only one of whom is old enough to go to preschool a few hours per day). So, work gets fit in where it can (shout out grandparents for childcare help!). The other thing is, I am in the process of applying for a cottage industry food producer permit.

Washington State adopted a law some ten-ish years ago that allows for food producers who are making certain low-risk foods (ex: baked goods), and not exceeding a certain amount of gross sales, to produce that food in their home kitchens. For someone like me, who doesn’t have a bunch of extra money laying around (see the part about two small children), this is a pretty sweet deal since it cuts out the cost of renting commercial kitchen space. By far, the biggest overhead cost for a food producer like me.

So, what does this application involve? First of all, one needs to get their food worker card and business license. These tasks are pretty simply and cheaply accomplished online. Check. Check. A processing plan is required, involving detailed accounts of the food production space floor plan, accounting of equipment and utensils, cleaning and sanitation plans, packaging methods and materials, processing dates, sales plan, children and pet management plans (they can’t be present during food production).

Ok, this might take a while.

And then there’s the longest part, for me anyway, documenting recipes and making labels for all products. It’s not hard, per-se, to write this all down, and I once had a job as a labeling manager for a food company, so I know I can do it. There are so many things I make, though, and the recipes are mostly in my head. What it really takes is sitting down at the computer and pounding it out. That’s not my strong suit, the “sitting down” part.

Something I’ve learned from this whole endeavor is that I can make food faster than I can take pics of it, faster than making an insta post, faster than I can write up a recipe, faster than I can make a blog post about the whole thing. And my family can eat what I make faster than any of those steps. So, it’s a process.

I mention all of this as a form of documenting the process. I hope, in doing this, that I can be a resource for anyone else who’s interested in starting their own food business in this manner. That’s not to say that I know I’ll be successful… it’s a journey. And this is kind of my journal.

So, let’s get back to the whole sitting down and documenting recipes part… You know what helps with that? Coffee. Actually, I’d venture to say that coffee helps with most everything. Especially if you are a person, like me, with tiny children for an alarm clock.

Most mornings I stumble around with my aeropress and manage to get one cup in my system while also making kids breakfast, getting their layers on for outdoor preschool, getting them to use the potty, making their lunch, trying to eat some sort of something myself, and all the other things that need to get done first thing in the morning.

Sometimes though, like when staring down the recipes section of a cottage food industry app, one needs a little something extra. Enter Magic Coffee, or as I call it, Caffe Dell’oos.

Magic coffee is a little something I discovered when I lived in Madison, WI. Those really were the days. On my modest grad student stipend, I was able to rent a gorgeous top-floor, one-bedroom apartment right near the center of town, the Capitol Square. When I first moved there, in 2009, a place called Cafe Soleil existed on the square. It was an extension of Madison’s fanciest restaurant, L’Etoile, but it was a coffee and pastries kind of place. As fate would have it, Café Soleil closed within a year of my moving to Madison. L’Etoile then opened a new, sleek, sister restaurant called Graze (which thankfully carried on the Magic Coffee tradition). But, I still hold onto memories of cozy Cafe Soleil, and their delicious Magic Coffee.

I’m not the only person obsessed with this coffee. Articles and copycat recipes are just a quick Google search away. What I know is, the drink involved both brewed coffee and espresso, cinnamon, brown sugar and cream. I know, it sounds like too much. Perhaps the reason it’s called “magic” is that despite being high-octane, it tastes quite balanced.

So, I set about brewing up a beverage that matched my memories of the creamy, warmly-spiced coffee that existed in a time and place where $800 a month got a person their very own lovely downtown apartment.

I found that the beverage does need both brewed coffee and espresso, or in this case, espresso powder, for the coffee flavor to stand up to the cream and sugar. My method involves an overnight steep of cinnamon sticks in the coffee, rather than ground cinnamon, for maximum flavor without all the pesky grittiness of ground spices.

Finally, since the theme here is Italian American, I had to give this drink a fitting name. Caffe Magico? Eh, too on-the-nose. Caffe Dell’illusione? Too long. Employing the Italian American linguistic tradition of dropping the final syllable of an Italian (or Italian-ish) word, I settled on Caffe Dell’oos. And now that I pronounce it that way it feels like “delusional coffee,” which just might be an apt name for the beverage that fuels me through the taking-longer-than-expected cottage industry app.

And I haven’t even mentioned, the next step in the process, a big kitchen re-organization in anticipation of… dun, dun, dun; a home-inspection by a WSDA officer. Expect some before and after pics in this blog’s future!

Caffe Dell’oos

Based on Magic Coffee from the late, great, Café Soleil in Madison, WI.

Yield: two large beverages

Time: 15 minutes plus an overnight steep

Ingredients:

For Coffee:

4 cinnamon sticks

2c (500mL) hot brewed coffee

2T (30g) brown sugar

3/4t espresso powder

pinch salt

For Serving:

ice

half and half (milk, or non-dairy milk)

1. Place the cinnamon sticks in a large glass jar.
2. Combine hot coffee, brown sugar, espresso powder and salt in a measuring cup, or other pourable container, with at least 500mL capacity.
3. Close the lid to the coffee jar and allow it to steep in the refrigerator overnight.
4. To serve: In the morning, fill a pint glass with ice.
5. Pour coffee mixture over ice, holding back the cinnamon sticks, and leaving at least a half inch of room from the top of the glass.
6. Pour half and half over the top of the beverage and observe the cascading curli-cue effect it makes as it trickles through the ice.
7. Stir and taste to adjust the amount of half and half to your liking.
8. Repeat serving process as necessary

Brewed coffee tends to develop off flavors the longer it sits in the fridge, so I recommend drinking this beverage within 1-2 days of making it. If your consumption is like mine, that shouldn’t be a problem.