News from Hi Point Coffee and Cafe 11/26/10

I hope y'all have climbed out of your food comas. I have just enough to crave more pumpkin pie, so I'm writing this note quickly before I find myself in recovery mode from Thanksgiving Round II. Love it! I hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday so far! Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone, the baristas are busy putting up Christmas decorations, serving up peppermint mochas and the like. I'm getting ready for some serious candy making, which I'm kinda excited about. We'll be offering our caramel sauce, a variety of barks, brittles, hot cocoa mix and homemade marshmallows for holiday treats. We'll be rolling out the different goodies over the next week, all packaged for individual treats or to make mix and match gift boxes. I love making Christmas candy, as I know many of you do, but there's only so much time in the day. So, I'm making the candies I've given as gifts for years for Hi Point, so that perhaps we can save you a little time and have a little something for yourself, as well. :) I hope you're having a wonderful day and I look forward to seeing you soon! XOXO Sarah PS Open mic has been canceled for tonight! We'll be back on track next week. Also, crafters, please read the craft section as I'm re-imagining what how to best serve our crafting community during our craft time. l

Sunday Brunch Special  9am to 1pm Considering everyone will be pigging out on a regular basis for the next few weeks, we're scaling Sunday brunch down to just one, yet totally delicious course. This Sunday... Roast potato and spinach galette topped with glazed ham, 2 eggs to order, caramel sticky bun and fresh grapefruit sorbet. Special Breakfast Libation! Blood orange mimosas

New Book Club Selection! We've chosen to read something light, holiday and coffee-related for the Christmas season. No reason to be too serious in December, right? We'll save that for 2011. So, please join us in reading The Holiday Grind by Cleo Coyle. It's a murder mystery, it's holiday and it involves a coffee house. How perfect! I love a good mystery. :) We'll be meeting 12/19 at 2pm to chit-chat about this one. Discuss, I'm sure, is too heavy a word for this one. Please read and come enjoy the afternoon! I'm including the Kirkus review of this one below... Kirkus Reviews Amateur sleuth Clare Cosi investigates the murder of a Santa who gave her a tip on how to rev up coffee sales. The cops write off the shooting of charity Santa Alfred Glockner on the chilly streets of lower Manhattan as a mugging gone wrong. His daughter, claiming he owed big bucks to their tough next-door neighbor, begs Clare to investigate. Since the Village Blend manager and barista profited from Alf's advice about creating holiday lattes, she feels obligated. Clare's boyfriend, NYPD detective Mike Quinn, has no time to help; he's immersed in his own case and may be hiding other problems. The cop on Alf's case, who has an odd reputation, ignores Clare until she turns up some possible suspects, one of whom pushes her off the Staten Island ferry. Emerging from the waters, she assesses divorce, double dealing and drugs as potential motives in this complicated case. Though her former husband is afraid she'll be killed, stubborn Clare soldiers on until she and daughter Joy, home for the holidays, become the killer's next target. Coyle's coffeehouse mysteries (Espresso Shot, 2008, etc.) are packed with believable characters and topped with serious coffee lore and holiday recipes. This one will keep your cup piping hot.

Sunday Craft Afternoon 2:00pm Well, I've been thinking about Sunday craft time. We've had a smattering of interest, though I'm not ready to throw in the towel on this one. Here's a couple ideas of how we can use this time.  Let me know what you think... 1. A coffee shop in another town (I forgot where!) sells knitted, reusable coffee sleeves. The proceeds of the sale goes to a selected charity and they are knitted by volunteers. Hi Point would supply the needles, the yarn and the instructions. So, you could come and knit a sleeve in an hour, while hanging out with other knitters and raise money for whatever charity we choose to support. The sleeves sell for 10 bucks, so your hour of time would provide a wonderful gift to a charity and a pretty cool thing to cut down on waste. 2. I've been thinking about different paper crafts that we can do as a group. We would have a selected craft that you can come, pay for the kit of supplies and receive instruction on what your're doing.  By the end of the hour or two, you have a wonderful homemade craft that's yours to take. Now, I'm not all that crafty myself, but I've been talking to other folks who are and how we could partner up to have this sort of event happen where at the end, you have something truly wonderful and a fun afternoon, to boot. 3. We can do both ideas, as well. We could do the knitting thing most Sundays and then do a special paper craft Sunday once a month. Thoughts?? Please email me and let me know what you think. I think this would be much fun, particularly the paper craft event. I know how to knit and could knock out several sleeves in a blink, but to learn a new skill and find a new artistic outlet sounds grand to me. I hope you agree, but please let me know!:) BTW, for the knitting thing, I'm sure there's several of us who would be able to teach the basics of knitting, if you want to learn.

Open Mic Night has been canceled for tonight only! Sorry, folks!!

Drive for warm stuff! A wonderful Hi Point customer wants to start a drive to gather warm stuff to send to Reno's homeless shelters. So, please bring in your clean coats, scarves, mittens, sleeping bags, blankets, etc. We'll be glad to take it down to St. Stephens, especially since we take food to them regularly. It's gonna be a hard winter, I'm afraid, so anything helps. Thank you!!