Drinking tea, yes, we love it. Eating tea, that's a different story.
I went a little crazy for the holiday, experimenting on my poor spouse with a full dinner menu of dishes containing tea. Here's what we had, and
how it turned out:
Lemon drop cocktailsRecipe from a book simply called
Green Tea: a mixture of green tea (chilled), pepper vodka, limoncello, stirred with ice and topped with club soda.
Bracing, a nice pick-me-up. Tart lemons, sweet syrup, a little astringency from the tea and, hey!, a little spice around the corner.Earl Grey-smoked pork loinAdapted from a recipe out of
Naturally Peninsula: Tea Flavours, a nearly ridiculous collection of beyond-gourmet recipes that no home cook would ever bother with. But you can extract some of its bones for more satisfying fare. This recipe joins the pork with a morel sauce, a lentil tapanade and some fried leeks for garnish, all of which I ignored. I just wanted the tea-smoked meat: soak Earl Grey leaves for about 10 minutes and drain, mix with orange zest (and I added brown rice per some previous smoking experience), then use it to smoke a 2-lb. pork loin. I butterflied the loin before smoking. Afterward, I seared it in a skillet and finished it in a 350-degree oven for about 15 minutes.
The Earl Grey smoke was quite acrid, but the flavor it imparted into the meat was delicious and quite unusual — tangy and sweet, in a vaguely mesquitey kinda way. I'll try this again, for sure.
The blackened tea leaves after smokin'.
Strawberry-avocado salsaInstead of the other savory flavors paired in the Peninsula cookbook, I opted instead to wed the salty, smoky pork with
a recipe from Cooking Light: cup o' chopped strawberries, 1/2 cup chopped avocado, some chopped red onion, 1 chopped jalapeno, cilantro, lime rind and juice, stirred together with a 1/4 teaspoon sugar.
A perfect complement to the smoky meat, spooned right over each slice. I mixed mine up a little too early, though, and it started to get mushy already. Assign this to those prep cooks you married into service.Baked potatoes with green tea garnishAnother adapted recipe from another tea book, from
Steeped in Tea: Grill (45 mins.) or bake (1-1.5 hours) 2-4 baking potatoes wrapped in foil. Slice 'em in half, scoop out the cores (as if making potato skins. Mash what you scooped out with butter, sprinkle with Gyokuro green tea leaves and place the mixture back into the potato halves.
Instead of actual leaves, I used some matcha powder. Careful, a little goes a long way. Made a nice green mixture for the potato skins and added a fresh, green flavor to the starchy taters.Spring pea saladHere's hoping fresh mint leaves qualifies for a tea menu. This recipe
from Real Simple is just a mixture of fresh peas (blanched), mint leaves, a sliced shallot or two, capers, lemon zest, olive oil, salt and pepper — and crumbled goat cheese mixed in at the end. Not cool, not hot, serve at room temp.
Damn tasty, but maybe too rich alongside these other dishes.Ice cream with Sencha crumbleAnother recipe carved out of a much bigger, sillier orchestration in the
Peninsula book: stir together half a stick of butter, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/4 cup cake flour, some almond powder (I crushed some slivers) and a small pinch or two of green tea powder. Spread the mixture on a greased baking sheet, slip into a 325 oven for about 15 minutes. While still warm, sprinkle with another pinch of tea powder and a little powdered sugar. Let it cool down and break it into pieces.
I slapped slabs of this on top of some quality vanilla and, oh mamma, it was great!
This is the one I'm most excited about. I used to make fun of oenophiles who kept journals and steamed labels off their favorite wine bottles to paste carefully in keepsake volumes. As a tea lover, I get it now. So many varieties, so much to keep track of. This little database app packs a wallop, allowing users to record the name of a tea with a rating, notes about dry leaf and wet leaf appearances, color, aroma, taste, a Web address (if applicable) and comments. You can even take a photo of the tea! The search feature is easy and accurate. So when I enjoy a new Nepalese white at Tea Gschwendner, I can make a few quick notes — even snap a shot — and be able to reference it next time I'm shopping. Or just use it as a database at home.
An essential tome for all tea lovers, The Book of Tea is an important resource for Asian history and traditions in teaism. Now you can have it with you anywhere. This app is simply the full text of The Book of Tea, readable chapter by chapter. Handy as a reference, or just to have something refreshing to read on the train. (FYI: If you have the whole Kindle thing going on with your iPhone, The Book of Tea is also available through Amazon as an e-book for $3.92.)
Utterly useless. But just weird enough to be entertaining. This geek app counts down three steeping times — green tea (3 mins), black tea (4 mins) and chamomile tea (6 mins) — but it does so using a binary clock. Good for buttering up the IT guys with a pot of assam, or just having something kind of arty to look at wwhile you wait. Worth every penny you pay for it, anyway.
The last one I do right out in the open anymore. I devour these books, and I'm not a huge murder-mystery buff. I enjoyed Agatha Christie novels when I was a teenager, but it never got beyond that. And the Laura Childs books are nothing that special — the plots are intriguing enough, the writing's OK and getting better — but I devour every one of them, and the tenth one was just published. The central character, the sleuth, is a woman named Theodosia Browning. She runs the Indigo Tea Shop in Charleston, S.C., where an awful lot of the upper crust tend to meet grisly ends in the first chapters. The joy of them is that the murder mystery is simply an excuse to hang out in Theo's fragrant tea shop; to discuss the creations of her assistant, Drayton, a "master tea blender"; and to describe the culinary concoctions of her cook, Hayley (recipes are printed in the back pages!). For me, a thirtysomething music journalist, it's all a little girly, for sure. And I can't reccommend them highly enough. I just got my sister hooked. Join in!
