Lots of Lovely Tea

Yum, yummm green tea ice cream.  We visited some friends near Philadelphia this week and had dinner at our favorite Korean restaurant.  Dinner was delicious, but the ice cream was superb.  it was made with good quality matcha and wasn't too sweet.  Not was it full of too much tea, but a really lovely balance.  It was served with very lightly battered banana chunks that were deep fried.  Altogether a lovely dessert.

There was Korean tea to drink also, which was green, very light and delicate and tasting of spring.  My lack of Korean and our waitress's lack of English prevented me from discovering its name.  We had it before our meal, it never could have stood up to the flavors of the food.

We also went to our favorite Indian restaurant for lunch and savored their masala chai.  It was very milky and heavy on the cinnamon.  The owners of this restaurant are from northwestern India, so it is not surprising their chair is different from that of my friends from southeastern India.  The tea was in an urn on the buffet table, which indicates to me, again, that tea in many forms is gaining a large share of American taste.

Not to leave out breakfast, we had that at Paneras, which has wonderful breads and I had some Tazo Ginger Peach.  The water was actually really hot and the tea was good.  For tea bags, I think most Tazo teas are quite tasty.

The World Tea Expo is next weekend, June 1-3 in Las Vegas.  If you can, I would urge you to go to it.There will be hundreds of exhibiters, many new teas and tea infused products to try, plus a huge range of educational opportunities.  There will also be a Wu-Wo tea ceremony, which is one designed to make all tea drinkers equals.  There is a good description of it on Wikipedia.  At least, I would encourage you to go to www.worldteaexpo.com and check it out.  It's their 10th anniversary, so there are all sorts of celebrations.

Mountain laurel is blooming and the wild phlox is absolutely riotous this year - I've never seen it this fine.  One of my neighbors has a stand of it fronting some brilliant orange poppies - eye candy.  I have very few lilac blooms this year, but the ones that are here are incredibly intense in smell.

Another photo from the museum at Ballenberg