a toast to lillie

The Guenoc 2007 Victorian Claret is  a fine and fairly inexpensive holiday wine which also features British actress and beauty Lillie Langtry on the bottle.  Lillie tread the boards on stage and had her share of royal and otherwise romances, along with chumming around and exchanging choice words with Oscar Wilde.  The wine has an appealing chocolatey-spicy taste and can stand up to other strong flavors, although general wine buff advice is to let it breathe for a good half hour before serving.  

The sentimentalist ages far more quickly than the person who loves his work and enjoys new challenges.  -- Lillie Langtry   (Pictured:  Lillie contemplating her next challenge and/or glass of claret.)

random tea gift picks

I haven't tried this Presto electric kettle that has specific temperature settings to steep various types of tea right inside the kettle itself, but I certainly am curious about it.  Sounds like a good gift for a tea lover, and even not-too-frequent tea drinkers seem to love Harney & Son's Holiday and White Christmas teas -- especially tucked inside little gossamer silken sachet-type bags.  And speaking of Harney's, I'm not a big green tea fan, but Harney's lightly delicious Bangkok blend with lemongrass and coconut makes sipping green more exciting and exotic.  If you're my mother and you like to brew tea by the pot yet take a good while to drink it, Harney's votive flame tea warmer base might be apropos.  Smith Teas' No. 45 Peppermint features peppermint and chocolate notes -- quite perfect for this snowy/frosty time of the year.  An easily found, affordable and interesting stocking stuffer from Target's grocery section is Archer Farms Chocolate Berry Earl Grey.  One might raise an eyebrow at the concept of cocoa, carob, berry, pink pepper and licorice combined with bergamot, but it works well and the bags are also the silky sachet type, adding more panache to your present at $3.99.   And if you want to get continental and splurge a little, Kusmi Teas offers a variety of blends with irresistible names like Prince Vladimir and Anastasia, and with beautiful keepsake tins to match.

glug a glögg

'Tis the season for the magical brew of glögg, which comes from the Scandinavian lands and makes winter worth living through.  In Chicago, one of the greatest places for glögg is at Simon's Bar in Andersonville up on Clark Street, where $5 gets you a small but heady glass cup of cheer and accompanying ginger cookies.  Simon's itself is a worthwhile experience, having been there since 1934 when the Swedes dominated Andersonville and still maintaining its unique ambiance of the pleasantly rundown combined with the curiously magnificent.  An old-fashioned cash register, fireplace and comfy sofa, bar stools scraping the weathered floor and hitched up to the mahogany bar itself, which has served many a round.  Making glögg at home is a fun adventure too, with the combination of warmed red wine, brandy, spices, orange peel, nuts and raisins adding to any holiday party--or something to spirit up writing out all those cards or wrapping, taping and sticking on the big shiny bows.

(Pictured:  side view of Simon's from the bar, while glögging)

random tazo tea wisdom

From one of Tazo's Awake Tea's tea bag tags:  Time to turn over a new leaf.  Preferably a tea leaf.

Featured Art:  The Tea (Mary Cassatt, ca. 1880 @ Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

rickshaws and monkey kings

Lipton's Rickshaw Tea isn't available everywhere but I did spot the bright red and black box in a local grocery store around here recently and of course had to buy some.  It's a black blend with a nice kick, and it can be used to make this tasty Hong Kong Milk Tea.  If you can't find Lipton's Rickshaw, you can always use a good Ceylon as the recipe says; if you do have Rickshaw on hand and it's the bagged variety, you might want to use two bags when brewing to get the appropriate strength.  And I'm going to pair the Hong Kong Milk Tea with Timothy Mo's The Monkey King for the first Tea and a Book selection here, as The Monkey King details the curious adventures of the confused yet crafty Wallace Nolasco, his wife May Ling and and May Ling's family in Hong Kong.  There are many quirky funny characters and a tone that’s like one of Mr. Mo’s other novel titles, i.e., Sour Sweet.  And Mabel Yip takes her tea with lemon, thank you.

macchia + to

• Macchiare -- Italian:  to stain or mark
• Caffè macchiato -- Espresso speckled or stained or flecked with milk (and/or macchiare il caffè)
• Latte macchiato -- Latte speckled or stained or flecked with espresso
• Macchiaioli -- Group of 19th century Italian artists who used an Impressionistic-like technique of dappling or blotting with paint (before the Impressionists did)
• Ralph Macchio -- Just turned 49 according to imdb.com; may or may not like caffè or latte macchiato; should try something different and make a movie about the Macchiaioli

DIY chai

If you don't fully celebrate Diwali, the Indian Festival of Lights, why not try making your own blend of Chai to mark the holiday?  Strand Teas in Oregon--Oregon clearly being a major Land of Tea--has a recipe for a homemade potion that goes as follows, with a delicious and healthful use of fresh ginger: 

• 10 whole peppercorns
• 5 whole cloves
• 8 whole cardamoms
• 1 stick cinnamon
• 1/2 inch knob of fresh peeled ginger very thinly sliced
• 2 cups filtered water
• 2 Tbsp organic sugar
• 1 cup organic whole milk
• 2 full tsp ASSAM KALGAR

Combine all ingredients except milk and tea leaves in a clay, glass or stainless steel pot and slowly bring to a boil. Turn off heat and steep covered for 15-20 minutes. Add 1 cup of milk and bring to a boil again slowly, turn off heat, add 2 full tsp ASSAM KALGAR and steep covered for 5 minutes. Serve immediately and sweeten to taste.

******

More recipes from Strand can be found here, and the featured image is from IndianGiftsPortal.com, where you can learn a great deal about Diwali and purchase all kinds of bright and beautiful Diwali items for your home.

when tea and monkeys turn evil

The 19th century Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu is famed for ghostly stories like "Carmilla" and the cautionary tale "Green Tea."  Cautionary for people who like their tea strong and who drink plenty of it, and for those who might be susceptible to strange hallucinations.  (To quote:  Tea was my companion--at first the ordinary black tea, made in the usual way, not too strong: but I drank a good deal, and increased its strength as I went on.) We may consider green tea to be full of antioxidants and healthy benefits nowadays, but if you start seeing a red-eyed monkey, you've had enough.  The story itself can be read here, and in the sense of following the old-school wisdom of write what you know, Le Fanu did indeed enjoy many a well-steeped cup.

Pictured:  Green Monkey -- George Stubbs, 1798 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK)

con leche

Café con leche is a delicious combo of hot milk and strong coffee, and sometimes sugar and sometimes cinnamon depending on whether the recipe comes from Cuba or Mexico, Spain or Puerto Rico, etc.  You can make it in the classic style with an espresso maker or machine, you can use a French press, or you can even try the richer blends of instant coffee--my favorite is instant Café Pilon.  And if you've ever seen the movie The Station Agent, this recipe seems probably closest to what Joe was serving up in his little traveling food emporium.  In Chicago, Café con Leche offers its signature drink on Milwaukee Avenue near Spaulding, a cup which has brightened many a gray morning Blue Line commute for me; it's right near the Logan Square El stop, which is like a dingy, tiled underworld and could use some brightening up.

tea tiger

I don't generally drink much Celestial Seasonings tea, but when I first had their Bengal Spice blend last month I was nicely surprised by the rich and sweet-spicy taste.  Doing some on-line review research shows that Bengal Spice is quite popular, particularly for fans of chai who want the same flavors but not the caffeine.  One thing to keep in mind, though, is that I double-bag almost every teabag-type tea that I drink if I'm steeping anything more than 6 ounces.  So my cup of Bengal Spice was double-strength, and I drank it straight without any milk or sugar (it really doesn't need sugar, perhaps due to the cinnamon).  But I never felt that it was weaker or "less" than black tea chai, just different, like the spices and vanilla seem to dominate more in a kind of heady way.  It's a good wake-up brew if you're cutting down on caffeine and -- since we're still in the Year of the Tiger for a few more months -- it's a fun tea with a beautiful striped feline mascot on the box to celebrate all that.     

random yogi tea wisdom

From one of Yogi Tea's Tahitian Vanilla Hazelnut teabag tags:  Unite with your higher self and create a friendship.

Featured Art:  Mystic Allegory or Tea -- Maurice Denis, 1892

smoke gets in your tea

Lapsang souchong:  it's rich and smoky; it's different; it's a taste that tea-drinking people tend to either love or hate; it's from the Fujian province of China and the leaves are indeed smoked over a pinewood fire.  I don't yearn for it all year long, just in the autumn and wintertime, but it did help me to kick the cigarette habit about five years ago.  Whenever I'd get a craving I'd drink the tea instead, and it also seems to stop bacon cravings too.  Twinings apparently doesn't sell the loose leaves version anymore in the States, just the bags, but they do sell loose Lapsang on their British site.  It's interesting too that Twinings describes the tea as "adventurous" on the American website, while it merely evokes memories of China (if you have them) on the UK site.  On the American site they suggest using it as a marinade for meat or fish, while in Britain they just suggest sipping it after dinner instead of coffee.  Neither mentions using it for nicotine withdrawal but with the Great American Smoke-Out Day coming sometime soon in November, it's something to consider.

Pictured:  The Tea Set -- Claude Monet

café and amélie

This is one of my favorite scenes from the movie Amélie, wherein our heroine has been going to such quirky elaborate lengths to show her love for Nino Quincampoix, but when he shows up at the cafe where she works as a waitress, she's too shy to talk to him face to face.  (Yet she somehow has the presence of mind and eye-hand coordination to write the daily menu special backwards on glass.)  I love how he sips his black coffee and lingers over the spilled scattered grains of sugar on the table -- when I went to Paris and London it seemed very important to bring back paper-wrapped sugar cube souveniers from everywhere I drank coffee or tea, and though the Paris cubes have sadly all disintegrated, the Tate & Lyle ones from London are still holding together.  

serpico and bergamot

If I'm remembering correctly, it was a small point of issue among many other bigger issues that Al Pacino's Serpico drank tea in the movie. This was America in the early 70s and it seems like at the time, tea was relegated to women, foreign people and hippies.  Or at least that's probably how the NYPD saw it.  Male cops drank coffee then, when they were on stakeouts or when they were at their desks smoking and pushing papers around in ugly precinct offices.  And it was surely overbrewed and bitter coffee for the most part, but that's what you as a cop drank and you just didn't have any weird fruity tea bag string floating out of your cup.  

So beyond Serpico's shaggy hair and beard, unusual policing methods and annoying integrity, he insisted on drinking tea instead of coffee.  That freak.  Nowadays he'd have all kinds of health studies and more expansive mindsets to allow his tea drinking, and a far greater selection of readily available  brands -- like Stash's Double Bergamot Earl Grey, which as a bergamot lover I was happy to find.  Stash notes how its bergamot comes from the "small Citrus Bergamia tree...grown in the southern part of Calabria, Italy."  And how they don't use other citrus oils in their Earl Grey, just pure bergamot, now double-strength and hopefully on the shelves of a supermarket or Target near you. More bergamot for the everyday people -- that's always good news.

divine exhilaration

Examiner.com was nice enough to offer me a position as their Chicago Tea writer, but due to a couple of other writing projects I wasn't sure if I could devote regular hours and posts to examining all things tea in Chicago.  So I'm veering over to Blogger instead, not so much with a total focus on tea, but also coffee and other hot and iced drinks -- and hopefully this will all come through in the eclectic matter of a 1920s style bohemian tearoom.  (Where as pretty much everyone knows, not only tea was served in teacups.) 

Just by happenstance, the term mystical potations in the description above comes from James Whitcomb Riley's poem "A Cup of Tea", and today's posting date of October 9th would have been James Whitcomb Riley's 161st birthday.  Here's an excerpt from his tea-loving verse:

'Tis a mystical potation
That exceeds in warmth of glow
And divine exhilaration
All the drugs of long ago--
All of old magicians' potions--
Of Medea's filtered spells--
Or of fabled isles and oceans
Where the Lotos-eater dwells!

Though I've reveled o'er late lunches
With blase dramatic stars,
And absorbed their wit and punches
And the fumes of their cigars--
Drank in the latest story,
With a cock-tail either end,--
I have drained a deeper glory
In a cup of tea, my friend.

Green, Black, Moyune, Formosa,
Congou, Amboy, Pingsuey--
No odds the name it knows--ah!
Fill a cup of it for me!