Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged tea
Exploration of Food And Drink
Oct 15th
As the title suggests, this post is going to be about two things…food and drinks.
So starting with the food, I just wanted to give a little update on my cooking attempts. I've tried two new recipes this week. First up was some garlic chicken. This one turned out REALLY well and I'm definitely going to do it again. The best part is that it's pretty quick to do, about 30 minutes or so, so it's easy enough to do during the week. It's not terribly sophisticated, but it's very tasty. I think I used a little bit too much of the seasoned salt in this one though…it was a tad too salty, but I'll adjust that for next time.
The next recipe was for baked halibut. I had another halibut steak from last weeks seafood experiments and I wanted to try out this one. I didn't like it quite as much as the garlic chicken, but I thought it was servicable. I think It was a little too tangy, so I might need to reduce the mustard powder and dill weed a bit.
It's a little difficult to do some of these because I'm trying to reduce everything from feeding a family of 4 to one person. Not exactly easy sometimes. Later this week I'm probably going to try out a recipe for baked scallops, and potentially chicken quesadillas. We'll see what I feel like.
As far as the liquid consumption goes, I've been exploring different types of tea and I've arrived at Rooibos, or Red Tea. And man, I wish I would have gotten here sooner. It's now my current favorite tea. I tried it Monday night just straight with no flavoring and though it was pretty good. A little sweet, very smooth and very tasty. Then last night I tried the earl grey version, which is your standard rooibos tea with bergamot added. And it was simply awesome. I forsee myself going through the sample tin I have of this VERY quickly.
Apples, Tea and Metal
Sep 18th
Er…I guess those three things don't go terribly well together. Anyway, this post is about apples and an update on my work Tea situation. Also about music.
First the apples. It's fall, which means apple season! Since my friends live closer to the orchard than I do, I've had an agreement in place with them that when the apples come in, they grab me a bag of Honeycrisp apples because they're darn good and they go so fast. So the apples came in and I got my bag and…mmm…apple-y goodness. I am enjoying my apples very much and will work as an alternative to unhealthy snacking that I have a habit of doing. At least for as long as the bag lasts.
Back to the tea situation. It seems that my grandmother ended up with the eventual solution. It's not quite an electric kettle (as was suggested by maura) but close enough. I didn't want to get a cheap electric kettle because I keep hearing things about the water tasting plasticy these days after using them with the cheaper plastics in use these days. But my mom mentioned that when my grandmother goes away on trips, she doesn't want to use the in room coffee maker for hot water and instead brings her own little Sunbeam Hot Shot Hot Water Dispenser. It heats up 16oz of water to boiling in about 30seconds-1 minute, and then dispenses it. The heating chamber is metal too, which avoids heating the water in direct contact with the plastic. So I'm going to try that out today.
And finally, tomorrow is the day when I'm going to drive out to Woodstock, NY with Wassy to go see 3 in concert. It'll be the first time we see them headlining which is going to be really cool. And I get to leave work a 3 because we have to drive out to woodstock, so double bonus! I think it'll be a really good show.
Tea At Work
Sep 16th
I've started on a quest to make tea at work. Usually, in the afternoons I get a craving for something that's a little bit sweet that isn't water. And since we really don't have anything of the sort easily available, I usually end up hitting up the vending machine, which is bad.
So I've decided that I'm going to start bringing some supplies in order to make tea. First up, I'm going to get a little mug/infuser combination so I can keep doing the lose leaf thing. I figured I'd bring bottled water or use what's down there…not using tap water, especially not the tap water we have at work. And that I'd use the communal tea kettle in the break room to heat the water.
That is until I took a look at the tea kettle that was down there. It appears to be…rusting or something. It's got some black gunk on the bottom and it doesn't really look all that safe for use…so I think I'm going to have to find an alternate method of heating water.
I was thinking of getting a smallish tea kettle for me to bring in and use that instead, but I would rather not have it be used by other people (lest it look like the one that's already down there) which brings up the question of where the heck would I put it so that nobody else contaminates my hot water source?
Sigh…things are never as easy as they start off sounding.
The Irish Are OK In My Book
Sep 10th
As I mentioned in my last post, I have actually discovered a black tea that I enjoy drinking. Historically, I didn't really like the taste. It was a little too much on the bitter side for me and I'm really sensitive to stuff that tastes bitter.
But last weekend when I was over at my friends, Wassy brewed me a cup of Irish Breakfast and it was awesome. So I ordered my own tin of it from my favorite tea supplier Adagio which arrived yesterday.
I must say, I think I will be changing my routine to include having a cup of tea when I wake up because it's just a perfect little way to kickstart the morning. I tried some last night but I used too much milk. The cup this morning though…mmmm…perfect.
I've also been considering getting some tea supplies for work so that I can have a cup in the afternoon instead of feeling tempted to hit up the vending machine or grab some soda. Darn my weak willpower!
Limbo
Aug 28th
Nothing much is happening around these parts that's of note. It's kinda like I'm in limbo, just waiting for it to hit this weekend so I can head out to the state fair and give summer the proper goodbye. However there's a couple of random things that are worth mentioning.
First up, I got an extra GB of memory for my laptop. I was having some problems in City of Heroes with my existing 1GB and checked to see how much memory various things were using and it totalled up to something like 1.8GB. Which explains why I was having so many performance issues… So I went over to crucial and picked up a 2GB kit for $40. I got it last night and installed it. Everything is running MUCH smoother now, so that worked out.
Another thing was an expansion in my world of tea. I've been drinking green tea for a while now and I've been happy with that, however, I decided to branch out a bit. So In my latest tea order I picked up a sample of Earl Grey (for Wassy as I don't really enjoy black tea) and some Oolong to try out, as well as a wild strawberry herbal tea that I had last night. The strawberry herbal tea was quite nice. And it seems I can brew a good cup of black tea too as that went over REALLY well.
And a quick one: I tried Sushi for the first time last night. Very tasty although it took me a few bites to get used to it. I think there will be more Sushi in the future.
Is it the weekend yet?
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Mid Week Update: Tea Bitch Edition
Feb 21st
Last night Wassy came over for the usual mid-week stuff. This time around we went out to dinner at Applebee's. I had shrimp for the first time. They were fairly tasty, but there was a little too much there on the plate for my taste. After that we went back to my place to hang out and watch some Slayers (more anime…she's totally corrupted me).
She's started calling me her "Tea Bitch" because whenever she's over I make her a cup of green tea since she seems to like my tea prep techniques and the resulting tea. I don't mind doing it because I can finally make something for somebody that they actually enjoy eating/drinking. I do like my green tea…glad other people do as well. So much healthier than the cup of hot coco I'd probably be drinking otherwise. I made her some White Monkey and I made myself some Casablanca Twist.
We also talked about about the total lack of a ticket sale date for the Progressive Nation show that we're planning on going to in May. It's one of the few shows on the tour that haven't gone up yet, which figures since that's the one we wanted to see. I'm getting a little antsy to just get tickets so I no longer need to worry about checking ticketmaster every 30 seconds.
An Exploration Of Tea
Jan 18th
The past couple weeks I've been on a tea discovery journey of sorts. First some history. I've never really been all that crazy about tea since I'm really sensitive to bitterness (coffee falls into this same category too) and straight black tea is a little too much for me to take. But eventually I stumbled onto white tea via Snapple and found that tea didn't have to be overwhelmingly strong (for me anyway). From there I experimented a bit and found that I also enjoy green tea as well. It's a little stronger than white, but not anything like black tea. All of this was bottled, prebrewed iced teas. I still was not a fan of hot tea.
A couple weeks ago, some comments from a friend (Wassy if you want to be specific about it) gave me the idea to get myself an automatic iced tea maker. I had been drinking a lot of iced tea (bottled) and realized that I could probably spend a lot less on tea than I was if I made it myself and store bought teas have a lot of gunk in there other than the actual tea. The automatic way was good because of the convenience factor. So I decided to give it a try and bought myself a Hamilton Beach iced tea maker.
At first I tried a bunch of the green teas that I purchased from the supermarket in there, trying to find something that I would like. They all came out tasting sorta strange to me and not like something I'd drink regularly. Eventually I decided that I'd try loose leaf teas and found my way over to Adagio Teas which seemed to be highly recommended around the internet. I purchased their green tea sampler, as well as a sample tin of Vanilla Green to try out. When they arrived the next day (fast shipping) I went to work.
I tried the vanilla green tea first, which produced some very nice results…at first. I thought I had finally found a tea that I could enjoy iced, however the next day my pitcher of tea became very…not so good. After checking around on the internet, it seems that this kind of thing is common when trying to ice green teas and since I'm sensitive to the taste, it wasn't going to work out real well for me. I gave up on that and decided to try white tea, as well as trying to drink the green teas I bought warm.
Back to Adagio I went and bought myself some Silver Needle white tea and an IngenuiTEA Teapot so I could actually use my loose leaf tea warm. When that arrived I realized I had found my solution. The vanilla green tea was really good hot, and now I'm drinking that as an alternative to my hot chocolate addiction. And, as it turns out, the white tea is perfect iced. So now I have the best of both worlds and my conversion to a tea drinker is complete.
My tea obsession has lead me to wonder: who figured out that if you pour boiling water over these leaves, you get something that's pretty tasty? That must have been one crazy guy.
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QotD: One Lump or Two?
Dec 21st
How do you take your tea or coffee?
Submitted by Vasquez.
I don’t.
I enjoy how coffee smells but I don’t like the taste. And I’ve never been a big tea drinker.
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