Every single morning, I go to Dunkin Donuts and I order a Medium Iced Latte with skim milk ONLY and a wheat bagel with strawberry cream cheese. I spend exactly $5.85. Say in an average month I work 22 work days. Yeah I'll do the math for you, that's: $128.70 a month just for breakfast. I won't get into what I spend for lunch every day. But for now let's start with breakfast.
Finally I decided this was getting out of hand. I generally don't like hot coffee. I will drink hot coffee if it's around and I want coffee, but I much prefer cold coffee and iced lattes are even better. So my goal for 2013 is to make my own iced coffee at home and add lots of milk, effectively making it an iced latte. I searched for recipes online and they were all pretty straightforward. Cold water + a lot of coffee= iced coffee. I have been practicing for a few weeks now and I think I have the perfect recipe. So here it is. I'll pretend I'm a food blogger and show it to you with pictures. How exciting.
Step 1: the coffee. You're supposed to use more coarsely ground coffee but I never find any at the store so I use whatever coffee we have in our house. Currently it is this one from Costco:
Step 2: Here is the tricky part. You have to figure out a good ratio of coffee to water so the iced coffee tastes nice and strong. Especially if you're going to add a lot of milk. Most sources say double the coffee/water ratio for hot coffee. One source said do 1 part coffee to every 4.5 parts coffee. So I went with 5 coffee mugs of water to 1 coffee mug of coffee. So 1 to 5 ratio. This seems to taste the best but you should experiment. Here's the coffee mug I used. Really I just wanted to show it to you. It's a picture of me and my two girls when my littlest one was born back in January.
Step 3: Mix everything together in some kind of container. I use a really fancy 51 oz Bodum Iced Coffee Press that my husband bought me. It's pretty and green. You can seal it up and then it comes with a press part that squeezes all the coffee down to the bottom leaving you with the good stuff. This comes 12-24 hours later. The mixture looks like hot chocolate.
Step 4: Put it away in the fridge with a nice tight sealed cover and wait 12-24 hours. You will soon see the beautiful layers of coffee on top.
Step 5: After patiently waiting many many hours, using your plunger thing push all the hard coffee on top down to the bottom and enjoy!
Here is a stock photo of how perfect your coffee will look. Except not really because that's hot coffe below. Yours will look and taste better. And I've heard it lasts a few weeks fresh in the fridge but mine is gone in one week.
