Tuesday tea tunes: Sweet baby jelly

"Jenny put the kettle on ..." Never a big fan of James Taylor, this is a pretty priceless performance of "Jellyman Kelly" from an old "Sesame Street," complete with spirited children more than making up for JT's lack of energy. And at least we don't have to censor any cleavage here ...

Some fresh Holyfield ear with your scone, Mr. Tyson?

Why? This video doesn't answer that question, but it is an amusing moment with someone I wouldn't expect to enjoy tea time with: boxer Mike Tyson. "Earl Grey sucks," he declares ...

Over the moon for equinox and Chinese festival

Last night, I stepped outside late for a breath of air. Great night for it: room temperature, a friendly breeze, the city seemed loose-limbed and comfy. I'd been sipping pu-erh while working. I was in tea mind.

The moon is something I try not to take for granted, and last night it wouldn't let me. The air must have been unusually clear, because even through the heart of Chicago's light pollution I've never seen such a crisp, bright round glow. With my naked eyes, I could make out more features than I'm used to. It hung proudly in the sky, just to the southeast, and shone forth the very definition of radiance. Arresting, tracks-halting, gasp-worthy. And directly below it, like a diamond pendant, hung Jupiter. Crown jewels laid out on indigo velvet.

I didn't know till this morning that what I was looking at had a slight astronomical significance. It was a "super harvest moon." Summer ended and autumn began shortly after I stepped outside, at 10:09 p.m. Central. A full moon, particularly a harvest moon, rarely occurs on the equinox — thus the "super" additive. The position helps make the moon brighter, bolder. (Some photos here.)

I was, however, aware that yesterday was the Mid-Autumn Festival on the Chinese lunar calendar — also called the Moon Festival. The central sweet treat offered in China and Vietnam for this festival is the mooncake, a round, fluted pastry filled with a lotus-seed paste (easy recipe here). I was served these once with gongfu, but at a much different time of year. Next year, I'll plan ahead, "super" or not.

Watch the 'Tea Mavericks' panel discussion

I finally caught up with this interesting tea event, a discussion with five "tea mavericks," held last week at Samovar in San Francisco. The folks are Rishi Tea CEO Joshua Kaiser, noted tea writer James Norwood Pratt, Numi Tea CEO Ahmed Rahim, the leader of info-sharing website Digg, Kevin Rose, and tea source expert David Lee Hoffman, with Samovar founder Jesse Jacobs. It's about an hour, and you can watch here ...

Tea Mavericks of America from jesse jacobs on Vimeo.

Tuesday tea tunes: Return of the lung ching

OK, let's return to our Tuesday tunes, via YouTube until something better and embeddable comes along.



Erykah Badu's "On and On" — in which she sings: "I'm feelin' kind of hungry ’cause my high is comin' down / Don't feed me yours ’cause your food does not endure / I think I need a cup of tea ..."

Tea smokin' in Carolina, and Lady Grey's drunk

Catching up on some magazines — found a couple of interesting features:

Food & Wine's Sept. issue has a profile of North Carolina chef Andrea Reusing. The writer launches the piece mentioning that he first heard of her when a restaurant co-worker asked him, "Have you heard about the woman in Chapel Hill smoking chicken over tea?" Loved by celebrities and rock stars as well as lucky locals, her restaurant, Lantern, is revered worldwide despite its relatively remote location. For her "legendary tea-smoked chicken," Reusing brines the birds in a spicy mixture, then uses a combo of rice, tea, spices and chile to smoke with. The full recipe is here. (The magazine previously interviewed her here. My Earl Grey-smoked pork roast meal, plus other tea foods, is here.)

Martha Stewart's Everyday Food mag (I'm not always crazy about her, but this is a nifty little monthly book full of some great simple recipes) this month had a recipe for a sweet tea cocktail — a mini-infusion, of sorts. The Spiked Berry is simply: Combine a cup of sliced strawberries, a cup of vodka and a bag of Lady Grey tea. Steep it an hour. In a pitcher, stir together a quarter cup of powdered sugar with a cup of fresh lemon juice. Toss the tea bag and pour the vodka mix into the pitcher. Yum.

Faithful tea folks, life-changing tea moments

Just want to share a couple of beautiful posts from fellow tea bloggers for your hump day morning.

In the first, Diane at T Ching recalls a faithful tea customer in "George Wednesdays." It's a touching tale of personal connection and those meaningful relationships that sneak up on us, which we then ruminate over during meditative steeps.

In the other, the blogger at New York's Mandarin Tea Room shares a beautiful tale of a tea epiphany, titled "Why Do I Use Tea to Meditate?" The answer to that question is a bit of a stretch, but the tea moment described is poignant and moving — simple and natural, as a tea moment should be. "Try to remember this feeling," says the muse in this tale. "This tea moment, you will never forget it."

Teapots hanging in the family tree

My mother recently moved and, as aging mothers do, pared down her belongings. My father, before he died, lived in constant preparation for this event. Closets were always being cleaned (and then refilled), piles always being made. Every visit home would end with, "Do you want to take that ____?" or "Come on out in the garage, there's some stuff you should go through before it gets hauled off." He'd be impressed by Mom's relatively Buddhist trimming down of material possessions.

Part of that process, you may have experienced, involves making sure the stuff with family history — and stories attached — is passed out among the children. I'm eager to share my wares: She handed off two beautiful tea sets from her side of the clan. There's this set, from which I'm drinking keemun right now as I write ...



I know nothing about china, patterns or the intricate histories thereof. Nor does my mother, who remembers very little about the set, which belonged to my great-grandmother. "I don't even remember anyone using it," she says. Always a sucker for early 20th-century design, I love the modern lines and adult baby-blue of this china. I have been able to confirm that it's made by the Noritake company in Japan, manufactured between 1914 and 1921. The cup (there's just the one) is so light and thin I feared it would crumble in my hand as I cleaned it. Great to drink from, though. Here's to you, great-granmamma, wherever you are.

The other treasure is this silver service ...



This was grandmother's. By contrast, this was "used all the time." Mom says: "Mother always was having her little lady friends over. She entertained a lot, and poured tea with this." It's a splendid silver pot — I'm beginning to understand why wealthy Brits insist silver is the best vessel for tea — with a sugar bowl and creamer. Very well-to-do, ahem.

Another random bit of family history came to me this week from my dad's sister: "You may not know this bit of family trivia, but your great grandmother, when she came to America as John's wife, was unable to bring much with her. She did however bring a tea pot and teaspoons and some linen napkins. I'm sure she was horrified when she saw the Nebraska home where she was supposed to live and raise a family. Probably having things from England helped her to adjust."

Hey, I'm just glad to know I'm descended from people who, when evaluating which material goods really matter, include the teapot.

New liqueurs for tea cocktails from Koval

This weekend we toured Chicago's new Koval Distillery, a craft still on the North Side. They make organic (and kosher!) spirits from a variety of grains, including wheat and oats but also spelt and millet. They make five different white whiskeys — clear, not aged, basically legal moonshine — from the different grains. Most of them are sharp and subtly flavorful, but in our tasting the Raksi Millet whiskey was the stand-out, the only one with any real smoothness and nutty flavor.


My reason for going, though, was to investigate the liqueurs. Koval makes five: rose hip, chrysanthemum honey, jasmine, ginger and coffee. These are unusual liqueur flavors and, as you might imagine, they are ideal for tea cocktails. We tasted the first three of those. Two were quite good — the rose hip utterly surprising, sweet and jammy and clean, and the jasmine really enchanting, with just the right floral notes. The chrysanthemum honey was unfortunately cloying, all honey and no blossoms. Pour the jasmine over ice with some Zen green tea liqueur and you've got one little piece of heaven, the perfect aperetif on either side of an Asian meal. The Koval site also has a recipe for Tea Koval, a simple cocktail of Earl Grey with the rose hip liqueur.

Koval distributes to Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, and Tennessee, plus these national online sellers.

The correct ratio for an Arnold Palmer

So sayeth the creator and namesake. From ESPN's Page 2:

Jean-Luc Picard likes "tea, Earl Grey, hot"

Adding some sparkle to everyday iced tea

It's already chilly in Chicago. This morning had a definite autumnal bite, and after walking the dog the flip-flops were put away for the season. So, drat, I meant to write about this while the weather was still a bit steamy ...


One of the things we encountered on our European travels early this summer was sparkling iced tea. In the vast majority of cafes we visited, when one of our companions, Richard, asked for iced tea, he was served a bottle of sparkling, usually a Lipton variety.

Richard, it's important to note, likes nearly all of his liquids to be as sparkling as his personality. At home, in fact, he possesses his own carbonation system, with which he adds bubbles to his drinking water. It's pretty marvelous: a faucet, a Brita filter and a SodaStream Penguin Water Carbonator — no more wasting money and glass buying Pellegrino or Perrier. Richard "penguinizes" everything he can, so when we returned home, of course (and at my urging), he tried penguinizing his own tea.

It's tricky and messy experimentation, as most liquids refuse the carbonation if they already have something else dissolved in them. Richard found it easier to brew the tea separately, and strongly, then add the sparkled water. Here's his conclusion:

1. Prepare steeped tea, 3x strength; chill.
2. Prepare simple syrup [Water and Sugar, 1:1]; chill.
3. Place about 1T of syrup in a highball; add squeezed quarter of lemon wedge; fill 1/3 full with strong tea; and top with penguinated water.

As for buying it bottled, I still haven't located sparkling iced tea in any U.S. stores yet, though Lipton says varieties like this green tea with berry flavors is in stores (and was just launched last year). But given that it's just another bottled drink that's mostly high fructose corn syrup, I haven't looked that hard. Nestea and Lipton both have sparkling varieties throughout Germany and some of northern Europe.

p.s. Here's a great recipe for homemade sparkling tea with lemon, cucumber and mint!

Sweet folks and sweet treats at the Drake

Daniel enjoys his tea, during a recent birthday celebration
at Chicago's Drake Hotel. Thanks to everyone who joined us!

Tea is fast food

As much as I admire the slow food movement and the farmer's market missionaries, I can't help wonder sometimes if they're all craving a pastoral innocence that never really existed. This hunger for uber-fresh foods and produce absolutely untouched by the hand of man, certainly machine, strikes me as a psychological response to urban living more than any real nutritional or health benefit.

A new story in Utne Reader, "In Praise of Fast Food," builds on that perspective, pointing out that processed foods were often the only kind earlier humans would or could eat. Rachel Laudan writes:

For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad. Fresh meat was rank and tough, fresh fruits inedibly sour, fresh vegetables bitter. Natural was unreliable. Fresh milk soured; eggs went rotten. Everywhere seasons of plenty were followed by seasons of hunger. Natural was also usually indigestible. Grains, which supplied 50 to 90 percent of the calories in most societies, have to be threshed, ground, and cooked to make them edible.

So to make food tasty, safe, digestible, and healthy, our forebears bred, ground, soaked, leached, curdled, fermented, and cooked naturally occurring plants and animals until they were literally beaten into submission. They created sweet oranges and juicy apples and non-bitter legumes, happily abandoning their more natural but less tasty ancestors. They built granaries, dried their meat and their fruit, salted and smoked their fish, curdled and fermented their dairy products, and cheerfully used additives and preservatives—sugar, salt, oil, vinegar, lye—to make edible foodstuffs.

Eating fresh, natural food was regarded with suspicion verging on horror; only the uncivilized, the poor, and the starving resorted to it. When the ancient Greeks took it as a sign of bad times if people were driven to eat greens and root vegetables, they were rehearsing common wisdom. Happiness was not a verdant Garden of Eden abounding in fresh fruits, but a securely locked storehouse jammed with preserved, processed foods.

I think about this in relation to tea quite often. It is one of the most processed products on the planet, and it wouldn't be that tasty or enjoyable if it weren't. People used to (and still do) chew fresh tea leaves. I tried this once. You think your overbrewed cup is bitter? Our human know-how tames the bad parts and brings out the good parts. Yay, science!

Teaku No. 8

Even when it's hot
I still take afternoon tea.
Summer, winter — meh.

Not knocking Knoxville for tea treasures

My, we've done a lot of traveling this year, and still more to come. Last week we found ourselves in eastern Tennessee — a family reunion, of sorts, and yes Dollywood was involved! — and the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains. While killing time waiting for someone else's flight one rainy afternoon in Knoxville, I Google Mapped "tea" and discovered (thank you, tea gods) that we were very near someplace called Tea & Treasures. I believe the route we took can be described as a beeline. Or a tealine?



Tea & Treasures is a typical Southern shop, a converted old house — as its brochure says, "located under the magnolias at the corner or Martin Mill Pike and Keeble Avenue" — full of what my mother would describe as "antiquey crap." The tea part of the Tea & Treasures equation is misleading and disappointing — a small table by the stairs with a tureen of hot water and some Harney & Sons packets in a styrofoam cup. Some treasures, however, can be had. Bypass the ticky-tacky from local "artists" (though one woman does make a cute array of hand-painted tea cups, and I almost bought one painted like wood on a saucer painted with red autumn leaves) and head for the piles of junk china and old teaware. Among these, I found my favorite new teapot for an absolute steal ...



It's a beautiful, deep pink glaze, with a matching ceramic tray and one tiny cup, and it's weighty and large, holding several cups. Just thought I'd share my find!

Not a spot of tea, just a drop

A note leftover from our summer travels: One other item I purchased at the Sing Tehus in Copenhagen was a packet of Green Kiss tea drops.



They're basically lozenges, little football-shaped green drops with ribbed sides, a hard-candy confection of sugar and matcha powder. I'm kind of addicted to Ricola lozenges, as it is, so it was nice to force a switch to something tea-related. They taste just as you'd expect, like a sweet dose of matcha. I find them handy when I'm running errands or between afternoon appointments and unable to work in a cup of actual tea. It's not a huge shot of green tea, but it's better than nothing.

Difficult to find in the States, of course, but you can order them inexpensively from London's Harvey Nichols here — and in different flavors: regular matcha, cherry, lemon and mint.

Anton Chekhov and some great old Russian tea

In some recent travels, I picked my way through a particularly splendid used book store and came away with a slim volume of Anton Chekhov's letters from his 1890 journey east into Siberia. Cheers to the editor or academic who spotted the value of collecting this particular ream of correspondence; together it makes for a revealing travelogue, a piece of reportage about not only the sights and smells of a landscape many of us will never see but also the timbre of the society there at the time ("Out here nobody worries about saying what he thinks. There's no one to arrest you and nowhere to exile people to so you can be as liberal as you please"). I, of course, was struck by often he mentions tea in his travels, which take him down the Amur River, with Russia on his left and China on his right:

I'm drinking excellent tea, after which I feel pleasantly stimulated.

This is a reoccurring note in his letters, taking tea with other riverboat passengers, officers of the ship, folks in various towns. Can you imagine provincial tea north of China in 1890? Strong stuff! (salivate)

This, after all, from a man who lived a short while in a tea shop. Reminds me, too, of this passage from one of Chekhov's many short stories, this one focusing on a tea party and titled simply "The Party":

The tables were already laid under the trees; the samovars were smoking, and Vassily and Grigory, in their swallow-tails and white knitted gloves, were already busy with the tea-things. On the other bank, opposite the "Island of Good Hope," there stood the carriages which had come with the provisions. The baskets and parcels of provisions were carried across to the island in a little boat like the Penderaklia. The footmen, the coachmen, and even the peasant who was sitting in the boat, had the solemn expression befitting a name-day such as one only sees in children and servants.

While Olga Mihalovna was making the tea and pouring out the first glasses , the visitors were busy with the liqueurs and sweet things. Then there was the general commotion usual at picnics over drinking tea, very wearisome and exhausting for the hostess. Grigory and Vassily had hardly had time to take the glasses round before hands were being stretched out to Olga Mihalovna with empty glasses. One asked for no sugar, another wanted it stronger, another weak, a fourth declined another glass. And all this Olga Mihalovna had to remember, and then to call, "Ivan Petrovitch, is it without sugar for you?" or, "Gentlemen, which of you wanted it weak?" But the guest who had asked for weak tea, or no sugar, had by now forgotten it, and, absorbed in agreeable conversation, took the first glass that came. Depressed-looking figures wandered like shadows at a little distance from the table, pretending to look for mushrooms in the grass, or reading the labels on the boxes -- these were those for whom there were not glasses enough. "Have you had tea?" Olga Mihalovna kept asking, and the guest so addressed begged her not to trouble, and said, "I will wait," though it would have suited her better for the visitors not to wait but to make haste.

Some, absorbed in conversation, drank their tea slowly, keeping their glasses for half an hour; others, especially some who had drunk a good deal at dinner, would not leave the table, and kept on drinking glass after glass, so that Olga Mihalovna scarcely had time to fill them. One jocular young man sipped his tea through a lump of sugar, and kept saying, "Sinful man that I am, I love to indulge myself with the Chinese herb." He kept asking with a heavy sigh: "Another tiny dish of tea more, if you please." He drank a great deal, nibbled his sugar, and thought it all very amusing and original, and imagined that he was doing a clever imitation of a Russian merchant.

Heath Cereamics sets the bar

I just spent a while grooving on the tea-porn photos on the Heath Ceramics site. Heath is a tableware and tile company founded in 1948, based in Sausalito, Calif. The namesake, Edith Heath, used innovative glazes and some really simple but alluring modern forms to make pottery that's also functional. Heath was bought in 2003, and the new owners seem to be trying to spread awareness of their treasures. It's about time.

They make a lot of stuff, by hand, but here are some drool-worthy pics of their teaware:





The large teapots go for $175 ... but dig this small one — with a cork! — for $68:

Taking tea — no, really, stealing it

Speaking of the battle of the bottled teas, Honest Teas this summer has tried out their "honor system" gimmick here on Chicago's Michigan Avenue. It's a small stand of cold teas, but unmanned. You pay a buck on the honor system. Honest Tea, get it? Whatever, here's a video about the results ...



Chicago, I'm proud to report, fared well in this lil' test: 78 percent of people paid.