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.

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