Purely Tea

Serendipitea’s Fiji is a loose green tea blend flavored with wild pineapple and papaya. Before steeping, this aromatic tea smells exactly like my mother’s pineapple upside-down cake cooling on the kitchen counter. Freshly brewed, Fiji offers a mild, sweet, almost tropical fragrance. (For those of you who read my Lapsang Souchong review, Fiji falls at the extreme opposite end of the olfactory spectrum.)

Fiji is a superb tea blend that somehow manages to equal even more than the sum of its parts. The flavor is a seamless synthesis of pineapple, papaya, and quality green tea - one of those unusual flavored greens that maintains a perfect balance among all of the ingredients. This tea achieves a flawless synergy, with no single element overwhelming or detracting from the others.

I first sampled Fiji at Ruby Foo’s on Manhattan’s upper west side. The food was decent, the company excellent, and the tea absolutely sensational. It paired nicely with the mildly flavored pan-Asian cuisine, and even carried us through a delectable dessert of chocolate banana spring rolls. I purchased my own supply the next day and have been enjoying Fiji every evening as a dessert tea with just a touch of sweetener. Highly recommended!

Tip: Fiji is available directly through Serendipitea, but if you purchase it through Amazon using the A9 discount, it’s slightly cheaper.

Featured on the Web site of South American artist and designer, Sebastian E., this set of teacups looks perfect for sharing your favorite tea with someone special. Valentine’s Day is less than two weeks away, but unfortunately, it doesn’t look like this teaware is commercially available yet. Check out the “objects” section of Sebastian E.’s site for more pictures of his inspired teacup design.

(via thedesignblog.com)

Sure, you can brew your tea in a carefully seasoned Yixing pot or a handcrafted cast iron Tetsubin, but where’s the fun in that? A current eBay auction offers you the chance to own your very own haunted teapot.

(Republished with permission of the eBay seller.)

The seller explains:

I ended up taking a total of 20 pictures and they continued to come out like these. The face of this cat is creepy to start with…. As you can see in the second photo there is something else in the photo. I took the photos with fabric behind the tea pot. I can’t explain the dark shape in the pictures.

I think I’ll stick with the teapots I have, but if you’re looking for a conversation-starter for your next tea party, this might be it.

Stymied by what to do with your used Celestial Seasonings packaging? Borrow some inspiration from celebrity fashion designer Brett Cooper. Commissioned by Celestial Seasonings, Cooper transformed close to 700 packets of tea into a Moulin Rouge-inspired gown, complete with matching hat, handbag, and high heels. In video filmed during the making of the dress, Cooper proudly described the model wearing his creation as “a walking teabag tree.”

The red gown was assembled as part of a campaign devoted to raising awareness about the risk of heart disease among women. 8,000,000 American women live with heart disease, and 1 in 3 women in the United States will die as a result.

As a sponsor of the campaign, Celestial Seasonings will donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale of two new flavored black teas (Vanilla Rose Decaf and Black Cherry Pomegranate) to WomenHeart. The packaging features a red dress icon symbolizing the fight against women’s heart disease.

Celestial Seasonings is also helping to spread the word that antioxidant-rich black tea may help lower cholesterol, a major risk factor of heart disease for men and women.

While you won’t see any tea-influenced couture in my closet any time soon, I will be looking for the Black Cherry Pomegranate Black Tea on my next trip to the supermarket. At $2.99 for 20 teabags, you can’t go wrong.

via PR Newswire

This recipe was submitted to the January 2006 Lapsang Souchong TeaChef contest. The Lapsang Souchong tea infuses these hors d’oeuvres with a subtle smoky flavor.

If you enjoy this recipe, you can vote for it on the TeaChef site. Voting remains open until the end of January.

Prep/Cook Time:
Prep time: 10-15 minutes
Marinating time: 1 hour
Cooking time: 20-30 minutes

Serving Size:
8 hors d’oeuvres

Ingredients:
8 ounces of brewed Lapsang Souchong tea
4 slices of pork bacon cut in half
4 thick crispbreads sliced in half (Kavli Hearty Thick Crispbreads work well)
1/2 cup freshly grated asiago cheese
1 small tomato, diced
A few shredded pieces of leafy salad greens

Directions:
In a large, shallow pan, marinate bacon in hot Lapsang Souchong tea for 1 hour.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Place 1 tablespoon of asiago cheese on each crispbread and wrap with 1 strip of marinated bacon. Do not wrap too tightly since bacon shrinks as it cooks, causing the crispbread to curl.

Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet for 20 - 30 minutes until bacon is done. Place immediately on paper towels to drain for a minute. Garnish with diced tomato and your favorite salad greens and serve hot.

Notes:
If you prefer, parmesan cheese may be substituted for asiago.

If Kavli Hearty Thick Crispbreads are not available in your local supermarket or health food store, triscuits will probably work, but the cooking time may need to be adjusted.

I’m about to submit my first recipe to Adagio’s TeaChef contest. The sample of this month’s tea, Lapsang Souchong, came packaged in a cute, reusable tin. Adagio describes it as a smoky black tea and says, “you’ll either love it or hate it.” I was eager to figure out which group I would fall into.

For some reason when I hear “Lapsang Souchong,” my mind does this weird word association thing and calls up an image of a Lhasa Apso (a long-haired Tibetan dog, for those who aren’t familiar.) When I first opened my tin of Lapsang Souchong and breathed in the aroma, I almost wished it was a Lhasa Apso. The smoky scent was so overwhelming I was tempted to chuck it in the trash right away.

While I wasn’t prepared for the olfactory assault, I decided to bravely persevere by brewing a cup to taste. The scent of brewed Lapsang Souchong is not nearly as intense as before steeping, but the flavor just isn’t subtle enough for my palate. I tried adding some sweetener, but decided that as a beverage, this tea just isn’t for me.

Fortunately, Lapsang Souchong seems to mellow out when combined with selected foods and actually made a wonderful recipe ingredient. I prepared Smoky BLTea Crisps using Lapsang Souchong as a marinade for the bacon. The tea imparted a subtle smoky flavor to the bacon and the strong stench smell was virtually gone by the time I removed the crisps from the oven.

So, the final verdict on Lapsang Souchong: I don’t intend to keep it in the house, but if a restaurant had a Lapsang Souchong-based dish on the menu, I might be tempted to try it. I’d love to get comments from others who’ve tried this tea. Tell me about your first Lapsang Souchong experience.

It’s not surprising that the English language is peppered with references to tea. Many tea expressions are so common that we now see them as clichés. But when did these idioms enter the language and how have they evolved? I’ve never been able to resist a little amateur linguistic sleuthing, so I tracked down the answers in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Cup of tea

This phrase, referring to anything suited to one’s taste, has only been traced back to 1932. We frequently hear it used to describe things we like, as in “That film was exactly my cup of tea,” and things we don’t like, as in, “Shag carpet just isn’t my cup of tea.”

By 1940, calling something “a different cup of tea” meant that it contrasted sharply with something else. However, this phrase seems to have fallen out of fashion - a quick Google search yields results in the hundreds whereas searching for “not my cup of tea” leads to more than 300,000 hits.

Tempest in a teapot

This vivid American expression is akin to the phrase “much ado about nothing.” It first appeared in written English in a Latin dictionary published in 1854. The original Latin phrase was translated as “to raise a tempest in a teapot.”

In non-American English, the idiom is usually “storm in a teacup.” The recognizable ancestor of that phrase, “a storm in a cream bowl,” has been found in writing as early as 1678.

Dressed to a Tee

The Internet is littered with explanations of this idiom that trace its roots to a bastardization of “dressed for a tea” or “dressed to go to tea,” and it is often written as “dressed to a tea.” Since the phrase is applied to someone dressed neatly and crisply, that definition makes sense. However, the trusty Oxford English Dictionary offers another interpretation.

The OED defines “to a tee” as “exactly, properly, to a nicety.” Also written as “To a T,” this phrase has been around for more than 300 years. The original derivation has not been proven, but the OED notes that “to a tittle” was used in the same sense as early as 1607 in Francis Beaumont’s play, The Woman-Hater, suggesting that “to a T” may be an abbreviated form of that expression.

Not for all the tea in China

As a tea drinker, I enjoy this phrase because it gives great value to one of my favorite things. Defined as “not at any price,” references to “all the tea in China” first appeared in Australian slang in the 1890s. A little more than 100 years later, this expression has become almost unbearably clichéd.

Can you think of any other common tea expressions? Leave a comment and I’ll see what info I can dig up. (Yes, I know, I’m a word geek.)

Welcome to PurelyTea.com! This blog will explore tea in all its incarnations - as a beverage, as a recipe ingredient, and even as a health and beauty aid. While this site is called “Purely Tea,” I’m most definitely not a tea purist. I love black tea, green tea, and oolong, but I don’t discriminate against herbal infusions. I like to experience new teas and learn new things about tea, but I’m not a fan of tea snobbery (that’s probably fodder for an entire series of posts, so let me not digress.)

I have wanted to start this blog for months, but haven’t been able to make it a priority. Well, now it’s a new year and National Hot Tea Month, so what better time than now? I’ve also received my first TeaChef sample from Adagio and will be participating in January’s Lapsang Souchong recipe challenge, so this will provide a place to post about my experience.

Before I end this first post, I’d like to thank Christine of Morning Coffee & Afternoon Tea for sharing her National Hot Tea Month icons with the tea blogging community. If you haven’t had a chance, check out her awesome blog for tea (and coffee) related insights and recipes.