Irish Breakfast for Afternoon Tea, With Ramblings

This has been one of those days where I've been asleep since I got up, so I thought Irish Breakfast from Adagio might help the situation.  This is a blend of their Ceylon Sonata and Assam Melody teas.  The dry leaves are all pretty dark brown to black in color.  They have a definite aroma of chocolate, of all things.  I brewed it for 4 minutes with boiling water. 

I was surprised the tea was a fairly light colored amber.  I expected it to be almost black.  Sadly, it lost its chocolate scent and just smelled like good, fresh tea.  Oh well.  The tea was fairly lightweight in both body and taste.  I guess I set my expectations too high, as I was hoping for a real jolt.  It tastes just fine, but I have always read that of the 3 British  Breakfast teas, the Irish was the strongest and this wasn't.  I would consider it more an afternoon tea.  It goes very nicely with a cake I made for a party - Grandpa's Birthday Cake, which is a fairly rich cross between a yellow cake and a pound cake, further enriched by pouring hot butter, orange juice and sugar over it and letting it soak in.  Definitely an occasional treat.

The willows are a spectacular pale, but quite intense yellow-green.  They really show up against the still gray hills.  They mix well with the red buds of the maples, too.  I noticed the coltsfoot on the corner is blooming - another early spring sign of life. They got called that because folks thought the round leaves looked like a colts foot.  It doesn't to me, but that doesn't matter.

I've mentioned before that it is easy to grow your own mint, but that one needs to be careful, as it spreads mightily.  I was cleaning up in the garden today and found peppermint runners and tiny plants 3 feet from the original quite small plant - this is after only 1 year.  Lots of plants for the plant sale.  All my seeds have sprouted, so much faster than last year.  I'm already hungry for fresh basil.

Bird wise, I think the Orioles are back, as is the red wing blackbird and the northern flicker and the brown thrasher.  We are so fortunate to be surrounded by so much life!  The peepers have gotten quieter.  I gues they are too busy mating to sing as much.

A German Church where some of my ancestors were christened.  I am such a "mutt" as my husband says, that I could visit most of the European countries and call them home.  One half Swiss and the rest is German, French, Norwegian, Italian, Scots, Irish, maybe English, Swedish, Flemish, Belgian, Dutch and Mohawk Indian.  Those are the ones I know about.  Oh, early Canadian as well, which might be the English.  My own little melting pot, all in one person.  My husband, he of the "pure Italian" is a blond, blue-eyed Southern Italian with a red beard, go figure.  His mother's cooking had Greek and other Eastern Mediterranean elements.  The world is not nearly so distinct as we'd like to think. 

This wasn't much of a tea blog, but there you are!