A Sip on the Wild Side

Korean tea is very slowly making its way into the American market.  For one thing, there isn't a great deal of it and it tends to be expensive.  Koreans don't drink a lot of tea.  They generally drink coffee or "teas" made from barley, corn, fruit and various other herbs and trees.  I got my Wild Pear Tea from a booth at World Tea East.  The booth had been hurriedly put together and was manned by folks whose command of English was minimal.  I don't know the name of the company but here is the website. www.jukro.co.kr  It is in Korean with a few English words here and there.

The dry tisane smelled of dried pears and appeared to just be small pellets of pear, very dry and very hard.  I brewed it for about 10 minutes with boiling water.  There wasn't much aroma.  I chewed some of the  by now soft pellets and they tasted like pear and were very grainy, as pears are.  I have to say the resulting brew didn't taste like much except slightly sweet hot water.  Perhaps I didn't use enough.  When my Korean friend, Mae, returns from Washington, I'll ask her how to make it and get back to you.

Hooray, today is sunny, only coolish, and the wind has stopped blowing.  It's been a gale around here for about 5 days and quite often you'd hear a crash as an old tree or limb bit the dust.  Speaking of trees. did you ever wonder why their branches grow the way they do?  In the winter, I am often looking at them and wondering why they twist and turn so much, especially trees that are older and have clearly been by themselves, without interference from others.

Some of the bulbs I planted last fall are finally poking up their noses.  I was wondering if they all died.  They aren't far enough in the ground, but we only have 3 inches - really, I am not exaggerating- of so-called topsoil over gravel and there's a severe upper limit to how much digging out of gravel we'll do.

A simple gold candle holder, about 5 feet tall.  Where else, Vienna.