‘Next Chapter Coffee House’ opens at library

You may have noticed a few changes and some new faces in the cof­fee shop at the Delaware (Main) Library, located at 84 East Win­ter Street. In the last week or so, there has been an almost seam­less trans­fer of own­er­ship of the café, which is now called “Next Chap­ter Cof­fee House.” The new own­ers are no strangers to oper­at­ing a café, though-they also own The Depot Cof­fee House in Urbana, a thriv­ing gath­er­ing place that has been oper­at­ing for sev­eral years. They are anx­ious to make the Next Chap­ter Cof­fee House bustling, busy and engaged in the Delaware com­mu­nity, too. What hasn’t changed is the great Crim­son Cup cof­fee that they serve-freshly ground with each cup-and the tasty spe­cialty drinks like lattes, cap­puc­ci­nos, and other fla­vored treats. And they have added home­made, organic and preser­v­a­tive soups, along with sand­wiches, sal­ads, and a vari­ety of desserts. I hope you will stop by the Next Chap­ter Cof­fee House every time you visit the Delaware County Dis­trict Library. You will not be dis­ap­pointed with the qual­ity and vari­ety of drinks and food that you will find there, and you will be sup­port­ing a new, local busi­ness, too. You are wel­come to enjoy your drink (with a lid) and food in the Library. What could be bet­ter than a sat­is­fy­ing cup of cof­fee and a good book? Enjoy­ing them both at the Library! What is the ori­gin of red vel­vet cake? Accord­ing to What’s Cook­ing?: A His­tory of Amer­i­can Food, dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, fam­i­lies were using less food col­or­ings and extracts. While the sav­ings was good news for fam­i­lies, it was bad news for the Adams Extract com­pany. To counter slump­ing sales, the com­pany came up with the Adams Red Vel­vet Cake recipe, a con­coc­tion that used red food col­or­ing and but­ter extract instead of the tra­di­tional ingre­di­ents. Before food col­or­ing became the pop­u­lar way to make the cake scar­let, the hue was much more sub­tle and was caused vine­gar, cocoa, and but­ter­milk in the recipe react­ing together. The “vel­vet” comes not from the color of crushed vel­vet, but from the smooth tex­ture of the cake. What is a jug­ger­naut? Jug­ger­naut comes to us from the Hindi Jagan­nāth, des­ig­nat­ing a form of Vishnu or his avatar Krishna. The title, mean­ing “lord of the world,” is derived from San­skrit. The Jagan­nāth Tem­ple in Puri in the Indian state of Orissa is a major Hindu pil­grim­age site. Dur­ing the annual Char­iot Fes­ti­val, thou­sands of devo­tees pull enor­mous carts bear­ing the tem­ple deities in pro­ces­sion. Reports of pil­grims crushed under the wheels of the char­i­ots gave rise to the Eng­lish word jug­ger­naut, mean­ing an over­whelm­ing or unstop­pable force. I checked in Webster’s Ninth New Col­le­giate Dic­tio­nary for this infor­ma­tion. How can water­mel­ons be seed­less? Seed­less water­mel­ons are a lot like mules — ster­ile hybrids formed by cross­ing genet­i­cally incom­pat­i­ble par­ents. Nor­mal, seeded water­mel­ons are diploid (have 2 sets of chro­mo­somes) with one set from the female and one from male water­melon. When the two com­bine, their seeds grow into a plant that looks like a com­bi­na­tion of its par­ents. Some­times, though, farm­ers treat the water­mel­ons with colchicine, a chem­i­cal that allows chro­mo­somes to dupli­cate but pre­vents them from split­ting into two cells, cre­at­ing a tetraploid — a super-watermelon with four com­plete sets of chro­mo­somes. The fruit is not genet­i­cally mod­i­fied; cells con­tain the same DNA as stan­dard mel­ons but twice as many. The farmer then intro­duces this new tetraploid water­melon to a reg­u­lar melon to pro­duce a triploid melon with 3 sets of chro­mo­somes. The result­ing plant will be a nor­mal look­ing vine that pro­duces flow­ers and fruit, but when it tries to repro­duce, the chro­mo­somes can­not divide prop­erly, and real seeds never develop. Check The Food Lover’s Gar­den for more infor­ma­tion. If you have a ques­tion that you would like to see answered in this col­umn, mail it to Mary Jane San­tos, Delaware County Dis­trict Library, 84 E. Win­ter St., Delaware, OH 43015, or call 740–362-3861. You can also email your ques­tions by vis­it­ing delawarelibrary.org or directly to Mary Jane at mjsantos@delawarelibrary.org. No mat­ter how you con­tact us,

Posted by Halley Miller on Mar 9 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.