Kettle's on, soup's on

Every now and then, I run into posted recipes for tea soup. The variations are myriad, but the best ones, in my experience, center on green tea and salmon.

This is the one that crossed my path recently, a quickie from Samovar which trims away some of the traditional Japanese ingredients in favor of a few extra steamed veggies. The one that's always worked for me is this one: blanching some veggies, poaching the salmon, then steeping the tea in the broth. A little matcha for presentation is a fine idea.

Of note: there's also an old meat-fish-and-potatoes soup colloquially referred to as Fisherman's Tea, though tea is not an ingredient.

Egg hunting? Try Chinese tea eggs

As Easter weekend arises, no doubt many of us have eggs on the brain. The kind of egg dying I prefer to do as an adult, however, involves cracking the shells and boiling them in tea.

Chinese tea eggs are typical mixtures of beauty and nourishment. Here's a good recipe for the tasty snacks, fairly easy to make — though, in my experience, a skill requiring some finesse.

Gimme a break!

Perk No. 734 to my new Amazon Prime, free-shipping account: Matcha Kit Kats, delivered!!

Real tea, imitation vanilla

Just a curious factoid: I had to rush to the corner convenience store for some vanilla extract during a fit of holiday baking. Imitation extract was only available. While the real stuff contains oils extracted from vanilla beans in an alcohol solution, the fake stuff substitutes the synthetic and more cheaply available "vanillin." To round out the flavor profile, though, I notice the ingredients also include "extractives of tea."

And, you know, a teaspoonful in a mug of some holiday blend ain't half bad.

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.

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.

Big Jones is kind of a big deal

Photo from Grub St.

I had a wonderful photo of my own to go here, of a gorgeous cup of Iron Goddess of Mercy tea next to a plate of beautiful beignets. Alas, my iPhone-to-iPhoto transfers sometimes freeze up and eat my photos. Macs never crash, but the software does. Grrrr.

The purpose of the photo was to entice you, fellow Chicagoans or summer tourists, to visit the Big Jones restaurant in Andersonville. The coastal Southern cooking is scrumptious — their Tuesday night fried chicken special earned it high praise in Bon Appetit — and the red velvet cake made with beets and cocoa is absolutely stunning. We visited for brunch last weekend, and I was once again bowled over by the chow. Catfish for breakfast? Hey, I tried it, on a bed of cheese grits with eggs to order. In a word: momma!

But why I mention them here is because they have a great tea menu (actually, that link is old, the selection we just saw at the restaurant is better). Their sign and advertising includes "tea time" next to "brunch," "dinner" and "cocktails" (hit those four bases and it's a home run, eh?), and there are a dozen excellent teas, from the previously mentioned Iron Goddess to a surprising pu-erh, supplied by Numi. Really, how many basic, genre restaurants have pu-erh on the menu?! Originally, one of the managers said during our brunch, the place hoped to use tea as a late-afternoon attraction — not as an official afternoon tea, but just something to join a late-day, pre-cocktail nosh. It's a Southern place, so the teas can be made iced, of course.

(Also, given the oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf, according to this story even Big Jones' seafood supply has been affected.)

London: Some twists on afternoon tea

So I ask you: should I cry or laugh?
Drinking tea in a King's Cross caff
A leather jacket against the cold
Gone down to London, changing coal into gold
— Joe Jackson, "Down to London"

Well, blokes and birds, I'm just back from four nights (well, five after the canceled return flight) in London, the sole purpose of which was to drink as much tea as possible. I organized the trip with the help of the friendly folks at Visit Britain, and I'll be writing about the trip extensively here on the blog this week as well as for other outlets in the near future. So here goes ...



The mission of this voyage was to dive into the epicenter of afternoon tea, that storied Western (and specifically British) custom, and explore some places that are trying to do it a bit differently. In four afternoons, I sat for five afternoon teas. Here are some thoughts on three of them ...

Afternoon tea at the Ritz
I started in the belly of the beast, as it were, figuring that tea at the famed Ritz would set the controls on this experiment. Tea at this Piccadilly hotel is an institution in London, and the service wins awards fairly regularly. People line up for the experience; reservations are required and must be made months in advance. The Palm Court is certainly an opulent room, just off the hotel's Long Gallery (read: lobby), rich with golden decor and an air of wealth that stops surprisingly short of stuffiness.

But I must say, I found the whole tea experience there fairly underwhelming. I ordered a strong tea, Russian Caravan, which was not strong, though it was served in a splendid, heavy silver pot. It's a basic menu. But the sandwiches were bready and a bit stiff, the scones were biscuity and bland (they could've come from a tube, really), the sweets were OK (the coconut macaroon with a fruit jelly is a winner). The experience seemed more touristy than traditional. They pack people in for five seatings a day — the first afternoon tea seating is at 11:30 in the morning — and charge £38 for the basic tea and up to £49 with champagne. That's a lot of silver for tea that's fine but not spectacular, and an experience you can't really linger over because they're fluffing the tablecloths as the next round of hungry shoppers drifts in.

My favorite part of the Ritz tea was the pianist, Ian Gomes. This kind of playing — providing ambiance, background, subconscious support without performing — is so difficult, and this guy was so smooth knocking out lively but not too lively takes on standards from "Tea for Two" (of course) to "Puttin' on the Ritz" (of course). I chatted with him during his break. Fascinating career: he had a rock band in his native India ("playing real rock, you know, Elvis 12-bar rock — not like these bands today where everything is called rock") and then worked for Sinatra for 11 years. He wasn't Sinatra's on-stage pianist; Gomes played for the Chairman after hours. "He'd finish his show and want to hear piano music in his hotel suite while he entertained guests, people like Gene Kelly and others dropping by to see him," Gomes said. "I played every night for him, from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m." As Gomes returned to the keys Thursday afternoon, as he has at the Ritz for the last 15 years, he asked if I wanted to hear something. I said, "Play Frank's favorite song." He sat down and slid into "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?" He then merged it into "Chicago," both as a Sinatra reference and a wink to where I'd just come from.

Afternoon Tea for Men at the Mandeville Hotel
Since afternoon tea is often viewed as a feminine pursuit, the deVille restaurant at the comfy Mandeville Hotel has fashioned a tea service that might appeal to XYs. The idea is, according to the hotel's PR folks as well as my waiter, to create an occasion for discussing business that's not as dramatic and maybe even more conducive to talking than a heavy lunch, dinner or cocktail hour. Makes sense. So imagine my surprise when, during my Friday afternoon visit, the tea patrons included me ... and about 20 young women, all in pink sashes and pink dresses sitting with pink balloons, celebrating some lass's impending nuptials.

Here's how the Mandeville butches up afternoon tea: heartier food, and whiskey pairings. It's pretty brilliant, really, and it works. The waiter was flummoxed when I asked for bourbon selections instead of whiskeys (damn Yank) but he brought me a neat glass of beloved Woodford. I have to say, the sweeter nature of a bourbon is a better choice for this than a peaty whiskey. It envelops the flavors of the manly chow — a sirloin sandwich with red onion and thyme jam (awesome), grilled veggies with brie on toast, a sesame beef skewer, chicken satay and a smooth crab salad. The only drawback to this approach is that this chow is served hot, as opposed to the typical tea sandies, and it cools quickly. The second plate, with the scones, included — get this — a deep-fried fig dusted with powdered sugar and with chocolate injected into its center (brilliant, and lighter than you might expect). The usual jams and cream were delivered, plus a chili-cream sauce (great on the satay) and an anchovy paste. Here's where we make our manly "Home Improvement" woofing sounds.

So you don't necessarily want a light green tea to go with this. I ordered the Mandeville Special Blend, made especially for the hotel by London's Jing; the menu said this was smoky, but it wasn't very — rather surprisingly light, but solid enough to mix cheerful company with the second and third plates. And it paired beautifully with the bourbon, creating an eye-popping butterscotch flavor when the tea followed the liquor. The only oddity about the tea service here is that the waiter pours your tea but doesn't leave you the pot, so when you want a refill you have to flag someone down — which is no mean feat while 20 bachelorettes are playing party games.

All in all, though, this was a great experience. And I felt very manly. Harumph, harumph.

Afternoon tea at the Dorchester Hotel
If the Ritz seemed to prostitute its traditions a bit for the sake of turning the tables, the Dorchester stands proudly with an afternoon tea service that illustrates how magnificent the experience of afternoon tea can be. No gimmicks, just superb service and fine offerings, presented well in a beautiful room.

If you're going to splurge for the glass of champagne during an afternoon tea, do so at the five-star Dorchester. They offer some decent basics, but they also have a bottle exclusive to the hotel, the Gabriel-Pagin 1er Cru 2000, and it's a treat for the tongue — glowing with honey tones and hints of citrus, and it pairs so beautifully with the menu that the sense memory is making me salivate as I write. The sandwiches are vibrant and obviously fresh; they're basic, really — egg salad, chicken, etc. (and roast beef "because it's Sunday," one of my servers said) — but each is made with a different bread (caraway seed with the cucumber, yum) so the basics seem not so basic. After that, the Dorchester offers something that might be my new favorite word: a "pre-dessert." Just a little vanilla panicotta to clear the palate. Then comes the tea, provided here by Harney & Sons. I went commie again, choosing the Russian Country, a blend of four blacks plus (finally, someone gets this) the exact right amount of lapsang souchong. The scones, fine. The jams, delish. The sweets, inventive. (One was a basil-lime macaroon, which was delicious ... but not with tea.) The service throughout was absolutely impeccable. When your tea pot needs refreshing, they don't just bring you more hot water; they whisk away your pot and cup and bring you brand spanking new ones. Huzzah!

The only bad thing I can offer about the Dorchester tea experience is the nature of the room. The Promenade is elegant without being showy, but pay attention to its name. It's called the Promenade because it's just that — a walkway for people strolling between the lobby and the rooms, and the restaurants, piano bar, etc. On one hand, this makes for some fine people watching — London is nothing if not diverse, even in its fine hotels — but, on the other, the traffic can be distracting.

The Dorchester offers just two seatings a day (2:30 and 4:45 p.m.) and is, no surprise, booked way ahead. But the maitre d' gave me a tip when I chatted with him on a very cold, rainy London afternoon: "My worst days are when the weather is beautiful," he said. "That's when we can get up to 20 to 25 percent no-shows." The lesson: If you want tea at the Dorchester (and you do) and you don't have a reservation, try them on a sunny spring or summer afternoon. They hold reservations for half an hour. If folks don't show, you can likely snag their table.

Using chai throughout the kitchen

Another winter walk this weekend with a mug of chai in hand. How I love it. But in addition to drinking the stuff — bought or blended at home, with hot milk and honey — I enjoy applying the spicy flavors throughout the kitchen. Some things I've tried and tinkered with:

• The chai syrup recipe I posted a while back is fabulous for mixing up a quick serving, but it's also scrumpdillyicious over ice cream.

• A neighbor of ours adds chai powder or mix to his pancake batter. I also recommend this recipe for Oatmeal-Chai Buttermilk Pancakes.

• By now you know my love of vodka infusions, and the chai liqueur I made last fall has been a delicious dessert treat and nightcap all winter.

• Chai makes a great poaching liquid for fruits, especially pears.

• I've even used it to deglaze a pan or two when sauteeing onions, when the spice and the carmelizing might be perfect together.

• Speaking of savory recipes: Chai makes a lovely brine for meats, too, a la this Chai-Brined Pork Tenderloin we enjoyed last night (alas, without the apple chutney). Cooking Light magazine has been a good friend for many years; their recipe for Chai-Spiced Winter Squash Puree is awesome, too, over pasta or by itself.

• Over the holidays, we also made shortbread rounds spiced lightly with cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and pepper. No actual tea, but we called it chai shortbread, and in addition to dessert uses it sure tasted good with a cup o' chai, too.

Tea infiltrates your holiday treats

It’s sad to watch snow struggle to be snow. It’s been doing that all day — trying to fall as snow, but barely eking out a crystal. Just rain, really. Still, I’m in uber-holiday cozy snuggle hibernate mode. (And it’s looking like we’ll have a white Christmas!) My partner reaches for hot chocolate in this mode. I’m reaching for tea. Believe it or not, there’s common ground here.

One of my favorite sites, Lifehacker, shared this suggestion: using teas to flavor hot chocolate. Like a little mint in your cocoa? Toss in a Celestial Seasonings bag o’ mint. Do you usually add a little vanilla extract? Try infusing a vanilla tea with the choc. These folks even tried “less obvious choices like Earl Grey.”

I’m also ready for egg nog, by gum. Bigelow has a nog-flavored tea (read: tea ‘n’ nutmeg); I find it a bit noxious, but a friend says it’s great infused with almond milk. A good chai, or the lip-smackin’ Singapore Breakfast, goes well with a goblet of egg nog, or perhaps some eggnog bread. Me, I’ve been known to whip up some egg nog scones. Delish …

The recipe: Mix 3 cups flour, ¼ cup sugar, 2 ts baking powder, 1 ts baking soda, ½ ts salt and a pinch of nutmeg in a large bowl. Cut in ¾ cup of chopped butter (got a pastry knife? or use two knives) till it looks and feels like cornmeal. Make a well and pour in a cup of eggnog. Stir with a fork till the dough pulls away from the bowl. Divide into two balls, pat ‘em with flour, flatten ‘em into thick discs and cut into wedges. The wedges go onto a lightly greased baking sheet. Before firing them, you can brush the tops with a couple tablespoons of milk, then sprinkle with sugar and/or cinnamon. Bake at 425 degrees for about 12 minutes, till they lightly brown on top. Eat and be jolly.

Head 'em up, move 'em out

When my dad started tinkering with restaurant ventures with a relative many moons ago, he learned the most important operating procedure for even hoping to make money in this rewarding but tough business: turn those tables. That is, attract the customers, but then feed 'em and get 'em out, so new paying customers can sit down. The last thing you want, if you really want to make money, is people who linger at the table, stretching out their single check over an extra hour in which another check could've been earned.

That said, it's still kinda ridiculous that this email recently came to Michael Bauer's blog at the San Francisco Chronicle:

My husband and I don't live in San Francisco, but went up to Spork last night for the first time, and while the food was overall very good, the service was off. One weird thing that happened was that when I tried to order tea (iced tea during the meal and hot tea with dessert) I was told that they don't carry tea. At dessert, the waiter finally explained that the restaurant had taken tea off the menu because "tea-drinkers would stay an hour and a half after their meal ended, it was ridiculous." Do you think this is true? Have you seen this at other restaurants?

Bauer investigated the matter here. I wonder, do tea drinkers linger longer than coffee drinkers? I'll bet we do. Tea is all about time, don't chai know.

Tooting my horns

When my ship finally comes in (if it's not a leaky skiff) I've always dreamed of taking a year and traveling the entire Mediterranean rim. I'd start at the south side of Gibraltar and work my way to the other side — north Africa, the rim of the Middle East, Turkey, Greece, Balkans, Italy, the Riviera and Spain. In my current status as a landlocked wage slave, however, I must experience these places in the kitchen via one of my favorite cookbooks, a round-up of some crazy-good recipes from all of the places just mentioned.

A while back I tried several recipes from the North Africa chapter, one of which has become my favorite teatime treat: Gazelle Horns. It's just a simple dough recipe with which you wrap up a delicious and easy almond paste. The recipe in the book calls for making the dough; I use refrigerated pie crust and get the same result without my typically tragic baking mishaps. Here's a quick summary:

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Grease a baking sheet or two.
2. Throw 3 cups of blanched almonds into a food processor with a cup of confectioners' sugar. Blend it till the almonds are finely chopped.
3. Add 1/4 cup orange flower water (diluted orange juice works fine) and 2 tablespoons of melted butter. Process till the mixture forms a smooth paste.
4. To make the pastries, you can go large or small. The book recipe calls for dividing the paste into 40 portions, wrapping them in small 5"x2" rectangles of dough, crimping the seams and bending them into crescent shapes. I cut the pie crust dough into triangles and wrap them into about a dozen larger, turnover-shaped horns. (Mine look more like this recipe, but I don't use eggs in the filling.)
5. Bake 8-10 minutes till lightly browned.

Absolutely divine with black teas, particularly my beloved Keemun. Another bonus: they keep really well for a long time.

North Africa is, of course, the land of mint tea (like that cool seaside cafe) — green tea, sugar and fresh mint — which also works beautifully with these treats. The mint and almond are happy traveling companions.

Put the chai in the coconut, drink it all down

Photo from 5 Second Rule

Maybe out of season, but I found this recipe for Coconut Chai enticing — especially given the context in which this blogger found it. She was at a gala at an aquarium, eating seafood (is that cruel, eating seafood at an aquarium?), and the flavors in this concoction were a perfect foil. And I admire anyone who goes home and re-creates a recipe on their own.

A three-course meal: first flush, second flush ...

A small feature in Time Out Chicago this week (can't find it on their site to link yet) checks in with "what local chefs are doing with tea." The items:

• A chai cocktail — Darjeeling tea with honey and vanilla vodka — at the Dana Hotel.
• Green-tea dusted diver scallops, "gently" using matcha tea powder, with a pea puree at Boka!
• Chamomile ice cream at Takashi. The pastry chef steeps the flowers in cream first, then uses that to make the ice cream and serves it atop pistachio sponge cake and lemon curd.

Sounds like a complete meal to me!

(Time Out also has this ol' list of five great teahouses in Chicago.)

Smokin' out tea for dinner

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 cocktails
Recipe 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 loin
Adapted 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 salsa
Instead 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 garnish
Another 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 salad
Here'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 crumble
Another 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!

Cup of tea, cup o' soup

Behold the power of Twitter. Seems every chipper local newscaster is in my face every day now asking, "So what is Twitter?" We've been tweeting for a while now (well, we're just getting started with @teasquaredblog), and while I enjoy the quick-and-dirty ease of this particular means of communication, I can't help but chuckle at the various ways people try to cram their full-sized lives into Twitter's bite-sized bits. (Of course, my favorite use of Twitter is The Mime. Now that's online performance art!)

Case in point: the Twitter cookbook, in which a deranged chef attempts to boil down — and heavily abbreviate — recipes to fit into 140-character tweets. Example:

"Chocolate Cupcakes: cream4T buttr/8T sug; +egg. Sift1/8t soda&salt/6T flour/4T cocoa/.25t bkgpdr. Mix all+4T milk; fill6cups. 20m@375F/190C."

Hey, if it gets people cooking who would otherwise just nuke another cup of Ramen, I toast their efforts.

I only became aware of this madness while searching for some recipes today; I stumbled across one on the Twitter cookbook for Darjeeling soup. The tweet:

"Darjeeling Soup: fry leek&onion/T butter. Simmer15m+2c cauliflr/1tater&celery/4c Darj tea/s+p/bay. Rmv bay; puree+6T milk. Srv w nutmeg&pep."

Here's my translation:

1. Chop 1 medium onion and 1 medium leek. Sautee in 1 Tbsp. butter.
2. Add 4 cups Darjeeling tea, plus 2 cups chopped cauliflower, 1 cup chopped potato (I'd say red here), 1/2 cup chopped celery, 1 bay leaf, and salt & pepper to taste. Simmer 15 minutes over medium heat.
3. Remove the bay leaf. Puree the soup in batches in a blender or food processor (letting the steam escape!) with a total of 6 Tbsps. milk.
4. Serve the pureed mixture with nutmeg and pepper.

Sounds delish to me — something to file away for next fall!