Signs of Spring

Those who know more than I about weather and plants and such things, say this long slow start to Spring is good for all the growers and I will take their word for it.  I am just impatient and I do know they're right.

On my travels, I see that the willows and alders are yellowing, a sure sign of our best season.  Everyday, there are more and more little bits of green sticking up out of the cold, cold earth and I must fight with myself not to go out and scrape away the detritus that is protecting them.  The ducks are returning to our ponds, the turtle doves are mating and the geese are flying overhead in great numbers.  The grass is even just barely green and it must be good - every morning and evening our little herd of 9 deer grazes eastward and then westward on it.  If only they could be trained to eat weeds!  Up here in the Owego Alps, we have no buds on the trees, but down in the valley, by the river, they are suddenly discernible.

Oh drat, another tea I am not impressed by.  Another sample from World Tea East, which will be in Atlanta this year.  This is a Jasmine Green sample from the Lotus Leaf Artisan Tea Collection, www.lotusleaftea.com   It is a teabag, of the pyramid nylon type.  I brewed it with water about 170 degrees for about 2 minutes.  At first it had a rather peculiar aroma, reminiscent of seaweed, but with no hint of jasmine.  I am sorry to say it did not taste very good.  I don't think the tea type and the jasmine went well together.  It could also be my fault, for waiting so long to try it, even though I did have it sealed up, even beyond their individual wrapper.  I have some other samples I got from them, so I'll try some others.

All decked out for a Sunday Stroll in Vienna!  Actually, I think these toppers are to keep flies away from eyes and ears.

Snails For Tea

Today's tea is Upton's "Season's Pick" Yunnan ZY07  Black Snail.  When I opened the packet, I was greeted with a winey, moist earth aroma, with an understory of tangy floral.  Already I am intrigued.  The little tightly rolled almost balls of greenish black tea resemble the "snail" Oolongs, but are not as carefully and tightly rolled.  They seem a good transition into Spring teas, and the smell is intriguing.

I brewed the tea for 4 1/2 minutes, with boiling water.  The result is a very dark liqueur and even with the extended time, many of the fairly large leaves have not unfurled, so I brewed them again, this time for 51/2 minutes.  We'll see how it is.  As it brewed, the first lot smelled wonderfully fresh, still with that sweet undertone.  The tea is a tad sweet, tasting somewhat spicey and nutty and of wet bark in the spring.  It takes milk really well, which rounded off some of the tannic edges.  Four minutes and a little less tea would have made this ideal.  The second wash is nowhere near as good as the first, but it will water plants just fine.

The Season's Pick teas are ones that Upton's packages for retail.  Bigger packages mean a somewhat lower price.  This one for which I would gladly pay full price.

Today is Maundy Thursday in the Western Christian world.  It is part of Holy Week, the time from Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem through his "trial", crucifixtion and resurrection, celebrated on Easter day.  This will be my last post until Monday, as I spend much of this time in prayer, meditation and worship.  I hope that all of you will have a blessed and meaningful Easter and that you will also experience your own resurrection and re-birth.

This is the main altar in the Hapsburg Chapel in Vienna, Austria

Oh, I'm Hap-Hap-Happy

Today is a happy tea day - I got my order of S.D. Bell's Breakfast Tea from Best International Tea, along with some samples and a big box of samples from Life in Teacup.  Oh happy da-ay.  Lots of exciting things to try.

I had a small treat today I've not had before.  I am a big fan of baklava.  Today I had some made with chocolate.  The phyllo sheets were quite dark with cocoa and I think there was some cinnamon in it as well.  It was Dee-lish!  What's not to like - honey, butter, nuts, chocolate, all in one bite.  Another of my favorite Middle Eastern pastries is borecki, which I probably didn't spell right.  Think of a big shredded wheat bisquit taken apart and "glorified" with some pastry cream, some nuts, some honey syrup.  Yum.  All would go very well with some good solid Breakfast Tea, to off set the sweetness.

Yellow tea is a fairly new offering on the American market.  As far as I know, it is only made in China, not much is made and very little gets exported.  I have some Ancient Yellow Buds from Rishi Tea and I must say, I like this lovely delicate tea.  The ancient refers to the trees it comes from.  The dry tea is not really yellow, just faintly so over a gray to beige coloring of the buds, which are long and slender.  It is processed somewhat simlarly to green tea, but it is piled up for a day or two, so the buds dry a little and yellow from lack of sun, much as that pile of weeds does if you don't pitch them right away.   

I brewed it for 2 minutes with 180 degree water.  The aroma is a quiet mix of lemon and flowers.  The flavor has a bit of tang, but nowhere near anything called citrus.  There is a hint of flowers, a hint of bright clean straw and something that speaks of spring.  It's not quite warm, but carries a bit of cold lingering in the shadows.  Because these are buds, do not expect unfurling - it won't happen.  It is well worth at least trying, even if you don't want to run the expense of a big order.

A gold Bible cover.  Those Hapsburgs lived very well.

When Life Gives You Lemons...Make Tea

Oh dear.  Our church has been trying pretty successfully to become more contemporary in it's worship.  This means an increasing use of electronics.  Wouldn't you know, today when much was planned, much went wrong, from the internet refusing to function, to sick performers to.... you name it, it went wrong.  But folks trooped on and we all could see the lesson about who's really in charge.  Sometimes you just need to grin and bear it and tell the troopers thanks for being so willing to step up and carry on.

Today's tea has little to do with that, but it is a nod towards spring.  The weatherman says it will be warmer this week, so I am drinking some green tea today in the hopes of encouraging it.  It is Lemon Myrtle Green Tea from Foxfire Teas.  It contains organic lemon grass, lemon myrtle, natural rose oil and green tea.  The packet smells heavenly, of roses and lemons.  I brewed it for 4 minutes with 180 degree water.  The aroma was almost identical to the packet, rosey lemons.  It brews up a bright, soft orange, and tastes wonderful, of a soft, soft, gentle lemon with just the right touch of rose to round it off.  Very well done.

Lest you think I have lost my curmudgeonly streak - although this has a lovely taste and I really like it - where's the tea?  No taste of tea.  Ah well, picky, picky.

If you wanted to make this yourself,  lemon myrtle can be purchased from herb sellers and rose essential oils can be as well.  You can easily grow lemon grass in your home (if your cat doesn't eat it all).  Being lazy, I'll just buy the tea.  Lemon grass can also be used in cooking, especially Asian dishes.  If you can find some with roots still attached in an Asian store, grab them and plant them in a biggish pot, keeping it well-watered and sunned.

This is a canyon in the middle of Sorrento, Italy.  Under all that greenery are ancient, abandoned houses. 

The Best Tea

Perhaps you have seen an ad for S.D. Bell's Tea in one of the tea magazines.  Robert Milo had been a tea drinker for over 40 years, but when a friend gifted him with some of Bell's tea, he liked it so much he became their exclusive US importer.  The website is www.bestinternationaltea.com and obviously, he thinks that's just what this is, the best tea.  The web site opens with a plain black tea, but there are many others to choose from, in both leaf and bag.

My sample is just a tea bag, one of those round ones, the plain black tea, which really is Breakfast Tea.  I brewed it with boiling water for about 2 minutes and my, how dark it is!  It is very hearty, very much in the British style, ready to accept and thrive on milk and sugar.  It quite takes me right back to the summer I worked in England and would run to the break room so I could get a "cuppa" without sugar.  It really is very, very good.  It's the tea that saw countless English, Scots, Irish and Welsh folks through the wars and sustained them every day.  It is full-bodied, flavorful and doesn't fall over into being more tannic than wanted.   I think I just found my new breakfast tea.  Best of all, it's on sale at the moment  and they also have chocolates!  Two favorite foods, you can't go wrong.  Indeed, I have to agree with Rob Milo, it's the BEST.

We are ever so cautiously approaching Spring.  The sune shines, a minute amount of snow falls, the wind comes up, the sun shines, it's warm, it's cold.  March came in somewhat lamb-like, but it is roaring out.  Even so, when I see those little green leaves, my heart leaps in joy!

Italian fishmongers on one of the market streets.  As one who absolutely detests fish, not a job for me.  I like the aprons, however.

New Doesn't Always Mean Good

A small square in Sorrento, Italy.  Looks nicely exotic, doesn't it?

The tea industry is forever trying to capture new customers.  Of course they need to, just as any business must.  I am trying one of their new ideas that I picked up at World Tea East last fall.  It is a packet of  liquid tea concentrate from The Asian Sun Tea Company  www.ASIANSUNTEA.com .  This particular one is decaf green with raspberry flavoring and sweetener added.  There's about a teaspoon of concentrate in the packet and comes out a deep red-amber.  it doesn't smell like raspberries, or tea.  I pour on hot water and now have kind of a pinky orange brew that smells vaguely fruity.

Oh my, this is very sweet.  Especially for one who doesn't use any sweetener in her tea.  The concentrate is also  for iced tea, so maybe it is more sweet for that reason.  However, it doesn't taste like anything, neither raspberry, nor tea and only very mildly of perhaps fruity.  I have to say, why would you bother to drink it?

I noticed yesterday that the hollyhocks by the front porch are putting out very tiny leaves.  They had a lot of seedlings last fall, but it was so crazy, weather-wise, that I am not sure if any survived.  They are the black hollyhocks and a nice foil for the pink and yellow day lilies in front of them.

As Captain Jean-Luc Pickard Would Say

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot.  Since I am living in the 21st century instead of his, I have had to use a tea pot, water and tea leaves, instead of a replicator, although the tea was sent by Think Geek.  The dry tea has a heavy bergamot aroma, that I tend to associate with Russian blends.  There are some blue flower petals and what appears to be orange peel.  Bergamot is an oil made from the rind of  bergamot oranges, once grown in Asia, now, for the tea market, pretty much grown in Southern Italy.  I brewed the tea for 3.33 minutes with boiling water.

As it brewed the aroma was much, much lighter than I expected, almost lemony.  The liqueur was a fairly light amber.  I'm not sure about the taste.  There is definitely something more than the usual bergamot to it.  It remind's me of St. Isaac's Blend, which has orange, lemon and grapefruit in it.  There is a small hint of flowers.  I don't really think this is what I would call Earl Grey, but I like it and find it quite refreshing.  I think it would make an excellent ice tea.

 Lest I get too excited about the snow being gone, Ma Nature gave us 8  inches last night.  Today we had something like freezing rain after almost a full day of sun, glorious sun.  However, on the green side, there are a few leaves of a day lily poking up.

This is a narrow side street in Sorrento, Italy.  The little tree in a pot in the center is a lemon tree.  they are all over the streets, even growing up through restaurants.