Lady Londonderry Comes To Tea With Earl Grey

Today is a very special day for me.  It is my birthday, but it is really special because I am alive to celebrate it!  Today is my 5 year cancer survivor's day!  All of you who are survivors or know survivors, raise your cups with me in a grand salute to life!  "To Life, to Life, L'Chaim:  L'Chaim, L'Chaim, to Life," to quote Tevya in A Fiddler on the Roof.  It is wonderful to be alive, to see and smell and taste and feel all the things that make up my life.  Thank you, Father for this time.

Part of my celebration, is, of course, tea.  I am trying something new that comes highly recommended by a tea friend, Marise, from Montreal, Quebec.  It is from Davids Tea and in English it is The Garden of Earl Grey.  It has strawberries along with the bergamot and some blue and yellow flower petals - quite lovely.  It smells very nice, too, with both the strawberries and the citrus of the bergamot front and center!  For me, it is like a cross between Lady Londonderry and the Earl.  I brewed it a bit too long - about 5.5 minutes, so there's a bit of an edge to it, but I put some milk in it and voila! that tamed it.  It really is a very good tea and would be quite perfect with scones and jam, cookies, birthday cake, lots of lovely things.

An old covered bridge in my family's hometown of Darstetten, Bern, Switzerland.

It is sunny and the perfect temperature today.  I am giving my friends the rest of my basil.  I just can't bear to do anymore with it.  It has been wonderfu, though and my freezer is stuffed and ready to produce summer in winter now.

The fall squashes are appearing.  Last night I mixed a delicata with an acorn, added a little butter and oh my, what wonderful stuff; sweet, spicey, almost a touch of lemon, but I had added nothing.  I had some plain Earl Grey with supper and the two were just perfect together.  I saw some of the huge hubbards and remember how my grandmother "peeled" them by dropping them on the sidewalk until they broke enough to fit the pieces in the oven.  She did a lot of creative things