Covering France, Ireland and Switzerland With Tea

Wish I could see the courtyard behind the big doors.




I'm back with the Golden Moon Tea sampler I ordered and today I am going to compare their French Breakfast with their Irish Breakfast Special Reserve. These are both excellent teas, worthy of a good morning, but they are quite different in character.


The French Breakfast is a high mountain Ceylon and dry it smells like very good tobacco with a very small whiff of perhaps cherry and a hint of cinnamon. I brewed it for about 3.5 minutes with boiling water. It has a nice smooth, almost light taste, with perhaps the barest hint of lemon. There is no bitterness to the tea. It is improved by some cream and a bit of sweet.


The Irish Breakfast was quite different, smelling like good quality hay or chestnuts when it was dry. I steeped this one the same as the French and added a bit of cream. It has a deep fruity taste, like plums or prunes or dark cherries. A bit of sweet brought out even more of the flavor. It is heartier than the French, but not too much.


Both of these teas were a surprise. Somehow, I expected the French to have a bit of cocoa in it and the Irish to be almost bitter and very very strong. Neither was true. I really liked both of them and felt they were excellent choices for mornings or, really, anytime of day. They are both strong enough, sturdy enough and that is their beauty – enough, not too much.


I just had to make a big pot of tea in addition to the 2 cups we tasted because I just received my BIG Swissgold teapot infuser! I think I am in love with it. It fits all my big teapots, it has a handy, dandy top that becomes its drip catcher and I can make 9 cups of tea at once in it with no loss of flavor, because it is so BIG and holds all those leaves with space to unfurl. Hooray!



It is indeed becoming Spring. The skunks have begun to come out of hibernation. Sadly it means a number of them are killed on the road. They may smell bad, but they do a good job keeping down mice and insects. We once lived in a small town with a huge population of them and we all learned to get along without incident. In the evenings, both people and skunks would stroll the sidewalks.

March Came in Like a Lamb

An old gravestone I liked. If you turn your head sideways, is that Adam and Eve dancing under a tree? Probably not.

Hey, hey, it is March and around here it came in like a lamb, with warmer temperatures, sunshine, snow melting. It makes your heart lift and shout "Yes!!!" Spring is really coming in. Two more weeks to daylight saving time, two more weeks and the Frog Pond, our local farmers market, will be open, complete with a whole raft of new piglets, chicks and bunnies.

I am trying a sample I got with my order from the Tea Spot. It is called Boulder Blues and surprisingly, it is a green tea flavored with strawberry and rhubarb. I am amazed I am trying it, as I dislike strawberry/rhubarb pie or jam. I much prefer raspberry with rhubarb or any of the three on their own. I am also a bit taken aback, because I would have expected this to be a black tea. However, here we are, with a most attractive tea, lovely fresh, long leaves of the Chinese Dragon Well variety and a few bits of strawberry. It smells like ripe berries. Following directions I brew it for 2 minutes at about 170. I don't think it's quite done, so I do it for another minute. Don't faint, but I actually liked this tea. It tasted like very ripe berries, but it was saved from being cloying by a good dollop of tartness from the rhubarb. I couldn't decide if it really tasted like a combination of the two or not. You can taste the freshness of the green tea as well and that makes this, in my opinion, very well done. I think it would make an excellent, refreshing, cold tea for summer. The Tea Spot recommends having it with dark chocolate. That sounds like a plan for my next pot!

I am looking for a new infuser for a large teapot, so I decided to go to http://www.amazon.com/ – every one's go-to-one-spot-shopping mecca to see what I could find. I quit after 300 and there were still pages and pages to go. Everything from tiny stars, seashells, hearts, through very strange concoctions by Copco and others, on through Finum and Swissgold. This last one is what I will get. It is large, it is Swiss, it is gold, what more could you ask for? A lower price. But, you can't have everything and I want to use my pot without using two infusers, especially if there is anyone but us chickens having tea. I shouldn't give in to the desire to look good, but I did anyway. So much for becoming an eccentric old lady.