Turning the Wheel Again

Alright, so last year’s attempt at cooking 23 new recipes in 2023 challenge turned out to be a tiny bit overly ambitious, but you know what else it was? Lots of fun. I only cooked 10 of the recipes from my list, but unlike some other challenges of that ilk, I found it more inspiring than restrictive. It definitely led to me cooking a whole bunch of new recipes that weren’t on my list. I ended up making a whole bunch of interesting and different recipes because I’d opened some ingredient for one of the list recipes, enjoyed it and sought out other new recipes to cook with it. (The variety of recipes I cooked to use up the rest of the jar of gochujang paste spring to mind, which has now become enough of a staple of my cooking that it has it’s own tag on here.) And then there’s the recipes I cooked from this list that I enjoyed so much I ended up making them on multiple occasions. All in all it’s been enough of a success that not only have I decided to do it again this year with a new list, two of the recipe books featured in last years list, which were basically sitting in the last chance saloon for their positions on the cook book shelf, gleaned recipes successful that they both got stays of execution.

I haven’t finalised my list yet, because I still have to do my usual January ingredients cupboard clear out – I appreciate that this makes it sound like I only do it once a year, which isn’t true it happens at irregular intervals throughout the year, but usually only a shelf at a time, generally when I’m either looking for something specific that’s got buried or something has burst or spilled and I need to clean, I just intentionally take everything out once a year and prioritise accordingly – and I’ll want to pick some recipes to use up things that are nearing expiry. However I do have a decent list already compiled already.

One thing that I’d planned to do last year which didn’t happen at all was tea reviews. I can’t say that it particularly felt like I wasn’t drinking much tea last year, but I think I ended up mostly drinking the same few teas. Which was nice in some ways, as I’ve clearly found some nice teas that I enjoy drinking so I was able to just re-order those when I ran out, but it meant I felt I wasn’t really drinking anything worthy of it’s own post. And in the meantime, my backlog of teas, has just kept accumulating so having been attacked by rogue tea packets of several occasions lately, I think I definitely need to give the tea shelf a good clear out and make a concerted effort to drink my way through that backlog and get it back under control. Such a hardship, I know. And of course there’s no better motivator for me to actually get round to drinking those teas than writing them up. So I’m going to make a corresponding effort to write about the teas I drink!

Having got this far in this post I thought, I should probably check on my current tea situation, and bring the teas that are currently open or expiring soon to the front. (Not that use by dates are strict with teas, as long as they’re kept sealed or in an airtight container, they tend to just get a bit weaker rather than going ‘off’. It really is a ‘best before’ situation, they’ll taste their best before that date, but they’re not going to give you food poisoning unless damp gets in and if that’s an issue the date on the packet is irrelevant.) I currently have four loose leaf teas ‘on the go’ at the moment. Two from a local tea blending company Unravel tea, Jin Jun Mei – a teapot tea reviewed here – and Phoenix Ember Oolong which is my current tea ball tea, a go to when I want ‘nice tea’ but not a whole pot. They are teas in the above category, ones I discovered in my last proper go at this challenge, and liked so much I bought again. I also have a Clipper green tea, that I found at the back of a kitchen cupboard when clearing it out, a couple of months ago, I fully expected this to have lost all flavour as it’s been there long enough to be forgotten, but it’s proved to be a pleasantly mellow green tea. And finally there’s a tin full of tea that I clearly decanted from a larger packet bought at the Chinese supermarket so I presume is Pai Mu Tan tea.

There are another three teas I picked up at a Christmas craft fair that I can safely put to the back of the queue. There’s also, a box of Twinings Earl Grey, Sainsbury’s Darjeeling, a nice little tin of mysterious green tea from T2, two different boxes of Jasmine tea bags and a packet of matcha latte sachets. Not to mention an actual tin of matcha tea, but I’m not counting that as it like the Earl Grey tea bags are part of my regular rotation of hot drink supplies that don’t require particular thought to use up and replace.

Still. That is a lot of tea. Better put the kettle on in that case.

This Year’s Victories

It’s the end of December which means it’s high time for a cooking challenges of the year review post. I started the year with, a ‘cooking the book’ challenge with ‘East’ by Meera Sodha, and I wanted to bake more often. Alongside that, spurred on by having treated myself to some lovely new teas in the January sales, I wanted to get back into drinking loose leaf teas and I thought writing about them might help.

As indicated in my last baking round up post, the ‘bake more often’ challenge has been a resounding success this year. I’ve made and shared a lot of brownies, muffins and pastry swirls this year. I’ve found new recipes that I love – new favourite brownie recipe acquired! – and resurrected old favourites to my own and other people’s delight. Sharing baking is most definitely a vital part of the joy of baking for me.

On a secondary note, last year one of my more general new year’s resolutions was to eat less cheap and nasty supermarket bread and make more of my own. (I’m not making a value judgement on it more generally, personally I really like it, my digestive system, however, does not.) I did manage to cut back on my supermarket bread last year, but I think I made like two loaves of bread all year. However, it turns out that the bread machine is indeed my friend, I really enjoy the bread I get out of it, and because I make it intentionally – when I know I have soup or I’m on shifts where I’ll need sandwiches – I waste much less bread too. (I suspect bread wrapped in paper towels rather than plastic sweats less, so is a less encouraging environment for mould too.) So, a round of applause for the breadmaker, it’s been this year’s greatest kitchen success.

The tea drinking resolution was also a great success. Although I didn’t manage to either try or taste a new tea each month – mostly because I was trying to drink my way through the entire packet before forming a review worthy opinion – but more importantly I established a new habit. Apparently part of my problem was that I was a bit scunnered with the options I’d previously had to hand, so some new teas really helped mix things up and got me drinking loose leaf tea again more regularly. Hilariously my ‘silly’ purchase of a tea ball has been a champion of this challenge. Some of this year’s new teas have been very much ‘cup’ teas rather than ‘pot’ teas, being able to have an individual cup of loose leaf tea, instead of needing to be in the mood for a pot has been a revelation. Being able to curl up of a winter evening with a mug of nice tea, not having to faff around getting everything out of the cupboard – a pot of tea is definitely a bit of a ritual for me – means that while I’m drinking less tea at each sitting, I do it far more often than I would otherwise, so that overall I drink more loose leaf tea. Success!

(And sneaking in one last tea review for the year, I’m currently working my way through a wee packet of Jin Jun Mei tea – from Unravel Teas – a black tea from Fujian Province, and very nice it is too. I bought this tea, having loved a sample of it that I tried at a craft fair at the end of November. Any tea, I thought, that tastes this good from a tiny paper cup will taste good in any circumstances. However it took me several attempts to get the hang of brewing it, playing around with brewing times and amount of tea stuffed into the little tea ball, as I tried to figure out where I was going wrong. What I’d forgotten, was that the stall holder had poured my sample from a flask, it had been sitting keeping warm for some time by the time I drank it. It needed that to give it the quality that I’d so enjoyed about it. Thus, I’ve concluded it is a tea best drunk from a pot, because it’s a tea that really benefits from time sitting. The second cup will always be better than the first. I just caught a stand alone cup of it just on the cusp, where it was still warm enough to be an enjoyable drink but it had been sitting long enough to settle, and was much improved by it.)

Surprisingly, my cooking the book challenge was the least sucessful of this year’s challenges, I did cook a fair number of recipes from this recipe book, but a lot of them were repeats, either from last year or a couple of new recipes that I just really liked and became part of my wider cooking repertoire. The salted miso brownies have had several outings this year, the paneer and kale saag has had a couple of outings, including one where I swapped spinach back in for the kale and the black rice congee has made me more adventurous with different types of rice more generally – I’ve been working through a bag of red cargo rice lately and I may never go back to standard brown rice again. Various daals and pilaus that I already knew I loved were made, but mostly I’ve been using the recipe book as inspiration, flicking through the recipe while pulling things out of the fridge, thinking ‘well if I used this, and this, and added some tamarind/coconut milk/miso paste, that would make a nice dinner’. I’ve made a lot of hodge podges, is what I’m saying, I use this book less for strictly following a recipe more as jumping off point, mixing and matching recipes, using techniques from one recipe or the spicing from another. I feel like I’ve learned a lot about cooking from this book, so I suppose it has actually been a successful challenge, just not by the metric I expected to be judging it by!

Time for Tea

Some time ago, realistically the best part of a decade ago, I was in a fancy tea shop in Glasgow looking for a nice Gunpowder Green tea as part of a wedding present for a friend, and it turned out that tea shop was doing a tea tasting. (Why do I think of Whittards as fundamentally fancier than T2? It’s not as though their price points are appreciably different?) There were an array of glass teapots sitting out with tempting concoctions brewing away, so I gleefully allowed myself to be persuaded to join the tasting. They were all white teas – maybe an oolong mixed in for variety – and they were all very nice, but one of them blew me away. It was an unusual one, a white tea from Darjeeling, combining, the assistant assured me and I definitely agreed, the best of both kinds of tea. (Back when I was first exploring loose leaf teas, I worked my way through the classics of Indian teas as drunk in the UK – Assam, Ceylon, Darjeeling, Earl Grey – and settled happily on Darjeeling as my favourite – I love an Earl Grey, but it’s a tea for a particular mood, though it has the advantage of being hard to mess up, so even most coffee shops will stock it. But if I’m out for afternoon tea and they have Darjeeling, that’s what I’m having.) A rare, limited run of tea they said, and it’s certainly not on their website these days. It was also hideously expensive. I don’t now remember the price but, something like twice the price for half the amount, of the fancy gunpowder green tea I was buying my friend. I absolutely couldn’t justify it, but I’ve thought of it fondly ever since.

These days I know rather more about tea, and handily have rather more disposable income than I used to, so when I come across something different and/or special I can justify treating myself. A few months ago, I was at an outdoor craft market and came across a local tea blending company with an assortment of interesting blends along with simple interesting teas they imported themselves. (How to get a tea sellers undivided attention at an event like that, ask about oolongs apparently.) We had a delightful chat about oolongs we have known and enjoyed and I came away with a couple of interesting oolongs to try, chief excitement of which was one labelled Darjoolong. A combination of my two favourite kinds of tea, and as close to that fabled tea as I’m likely to find again, how could I resist? It was definitely not as gasp inducingly expensive as I remember the other one being, though it certainly was in the category of a ‘special occasion tea’ rather than everyday tea.

The tasting notes speak of caramel and cookies, but I didn’t notice that, what I noticed was that it tasted like a Darjeeling but softer, more like a white tea than the light but complex oolongs that I have come to love. Fundamentally it tasted of tea, pleasant mellow tea that doesn’t need milk because its just perfect by itself. I’ve made it in a cup with my little tea ball, I’ve made it in my pot and drunk cup after cup without quite realising it. It’s tea to be drunk while doing other things, tea that doesn’t draw attention to itself, or demand you drink up or abandon it. Tea that was absolutely worth the wait to find; tea that the only worry about using it up will be – when will I be able to get more of it again!

June Tea(se)

The month of June seemed to disappear on me in a blur of work and July has caught me unawares, however I did enjoy a new tea last month so it’s high time that I wrote it up. My latest tea is a Milky Oolong from T2. This was one of the teas I treated myself to back in January when I bought my tea ball and has been tempting/taunting me to try ever since. I’m always seduced by their cute packages – little cardboard cubes and cylinders – though the use of little plastic inner bags is a subject of small annoyances, they’re just so much more awkward to handle than the more common foil packages – perhaps it’s just their small size but they seem to have an inbuilt tendency to catapult tea leaves everywhere at the least convenient moment. And because the outer packaging is so cute – but not remotely air tight enough to keep the leaves fresh – I can’t bring myself to decant them into a more practical container, aesthetics over practicality I feel, annoying me all the more for knowing that I’m buying into it regardless!

Something that interests me about my recent adventures in tea drinking is what makes one tea the kind that I will make a pot of and happily drink cup after cup of it as I work on something else, and what makes other teas single cup teas. My little tea ball has proved to be an excellent investment, ideal for experimenting with new teas as I figure out how to best enjoy it – brewing time versus how many spoonfuls of tea per cup, but while some teas move quickly into tea pot territory, others remain tea cup only endeavours.

Unlike a few other new teas I’ve tried this year, this month’s adventure did not take many experiments to get ‘right’ for me. (Two little spoonfuls in the ball, brewed for 5 minutes, water just off the boil.) I wouldn’t normally make an oolong for anything like as strong as that, as it would acquire a bitter aftertaste that for me undermines it’s natural softness that is a big part of why I favour oolongs. However this one retains a mellowness, and in fact the buttery creaminess increases with brewing time, it’s not as refreshing a drink as many other oolongs I’ve enjoyed but nonetheless it’s been a definite summer beverage. I’ve been happily drinking it all month, yet it’s never occurred to me to make the leap from a cup to a pot. I’ll often finish a cup and go and make another cup, but two cups seems to be the limit. It is also, I note, a tea to be drunk with snacks or biscuits rather than with a meal. It’s a lovely post-meal pleasure in it’s own right, like a dessert when you’re not hungry enough for an actual dessert, a drink for curling up on the sofa with a book for a bit, or to sip between rows of knitting or paragraphs of writing. A tea that satisfies rather than leaves me wanting more.

May the Tea Be With You

Back in January, I blithely declared I was going to write monthly tea reviews. And then I just…didn’t.

I had good intentions in March, when I was at an outdoor craft market and discovered a tea stall, selling a variety of unusual blends. So often when I come across these kind of things, they’re properly tisanes or black tea plus additions rather than interesting blends of teas. However, joy of joys there amongst the usual suspects were a small selection of interesting sounding oolongs! I got to be decidedly nerdy about teas with the proprietor who shares my love for oolong teas, and came away with two lovely sounding new teas to try! Perfect for trying and reviewing for this project! Except that I opened my tea cupboard and was confronted by the numerous open and half-used packets and tins, and couldn’t in good conscious start a new one. I had good intentions to finish one of them, write it up for here, and try to trade off drinking and reviewing old favourites and new acquisitions, but unfortunately life happened and after some initial success using up some interesting tea bags that had lurked too long, other things took precedence.

This month, however, I decided to make a serious attempt at reclaiming my weekend ritual of pots of loose leaf tea and radio listening. This has been nicely encouraged along by the factor of the tea I fancied the first morning I attempted to restart the habit, was perilously close to it’s expiry date, so needing a concerted effort to be used up. Given how much I enjoy the tea, this was not a hardship. The tea in question is an Oolong, Tikuanyin – transliterations vary, I’m using the one from the packet, which came from a local Chinese supermarket here – which I first got a taste for from a delightful little sample set of Chinese teas that I got as a gift years ago. I liked it so much that I tracked it down and now buy it in more substantial packets. I recommend brewing it strong – in my case three generous tea spoons for a four-cup teapot, brewed for 5 minutes – though I have one of those tea pots with the filter baskets that can be removed so if you are a strain as you pour person then you may need to be a little more cautious on that front. I especially appreciate it as a tea that does not become bitter if it gets cold and that a forgotten last cup in the pot can be reheated with only minimal damage to the flavour. The flavour itself is a mellow, slightly smoky one, with a pleasant mouth feel and aroma that I can’t describe as anything other than comforting. It’s pretty much the platonic ideal of oolong tea for me, the gold(en) standard against which all others are compared.

New Year, New Teas

Over the course of the pandemic, I somehow fell out of the habit of drinking loose leaf tea. Actually it’s been going on for longer than that, since I moved house in early 2019. Prior to that I had a routine around loose leaf tea drinking. On a Sunday morning, I would have a long lie, then get up, make a nice cooked breakfast/brunch and a pot of loose leaf tea, then I’d put 6Music on the radio and settle in with a book. Depending on the weather or my other plans for the day, it would sometimes be just the one pot, other times I’d make another pot and carry on that way for the rest of the afternoon. It was a nice routine and picking out the particular tea I fancied that Sunday was it’s own routine. It also meant I made steady progress through my collections of tea and whenever I saw a fancy tea on sale somewhere that I wanted to indulge myself in, I was limited by budget not whether I’d get round to drinking it.

When I moved house I carefully arranged all my lovely loose leaf teas in one place so they were all neatly organised. Unfortunately that place is the top shelf of one of my cupboards so while I can access them easily because they live somewhere different to my everyday tea, they have become ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and increasingly fallen out of regular use. I hadn’t realised how much until I was in Glasgow over the recent holidays and treated myself to a visit to one of it’s specialist tea shops. I stood in the shop contemplating the teas and realised that I was internally talking myself out of buying anything because I wouldn’t drink them. Which brought me up short. When had that happened? How had that happened? I hadn’t really considered being a tea lover as a major part of my identity, but I certainly didn’t like the idea that I wasn’t one any more.

So I determined to do something about that. Handily the shop also had a teaball with a pretty little measuring spoon attached in the sale, mostly so I could drink some of the tea while staying with my parents – I was correct in thinking they would be entertained with the ridiculous seasonal tea that was one of my purchases – and maybe start a good habit. To my surprise, and doubtless helped by my silly tea being surprisingly nice, I did in fact form a habit over the rest of the holidays, revelling in the pleasure of figuring out just how much tea I needed to put in the ball and how long it needs to steep to get the best from it. Since returning home I haven’t been drinking it every day, but it’s a particularly nice to come home from work and make a post dinner cup of something warming and comforting so the habit seems to be bedding in. So having set myself the new year’s resolution of getting back into drinking loose leaf tea, I feel confident determining to motivate myself along the way by trying – or ‘re-discovering’ – a new tea each month, hopefully working my way through my shelf along the way and finding new tea loves along the way. And because I know what motivates me as a person, I thought I would post reviews of them here.

To that end, what of the tea itself? Well when I said silly seasonal tea I meant it, it’s called Bread & Butter Pudding tea: a loose leaf black tea with bits of caramel, cinnamon, amaranth, vanilla, carob and chicory root. Made as per the tub’s instructions I found it to be one of those ‘flavoured’ teas that I generally avoid as they smell amazing but taste of nothing much, though thankfully one that was much improved by adding a little milk. However, by being a bit heavier handed with the filling of my tea ball, and leaving it to brew for a bit longer – 5 minutes vs the advised 2-4 minutes – created a more robust result that tasted as good as it smelled and didn’t need any milk. An indulgent winter holiday drink.

Hopefully, I’ll get back into my habit of Sunday mornings with a pot of tea and a book, but in the meantime, my little tea ball is facilitating my loose leaf tea drinking and hopefully will make me keener to experiment with new teas again in the meantime.

Returning to an Old Friend

Many years ago, when I was first exploring the world of tea, I decided that I wanted to become the kind of person who drank green tea and set about exploring the world of green teas.

(I like to say that my twenties were all about working out who I wanted to be and figuring out how to achieve that, whereas my thirties have been about becoming and being that person.)

One of the problems of being known among your friends, relations and acquaintances as someone who likes green tea is that you get given a lot of green tea. By given a lot of green tea, I don’t mean that people see an unusual green tea somewhere and buy it for you as a present, or keep a box in their cupboard for when you visit – a few people do, in fact do this, and it’s lovely and much appreciated – but rather that you become designated drop of point for spare green tea. There was a while in the late 00s where green tea became the trendy health drink of choice. I’m not sure how or why, but lots of diets and general health improvement articles and advice seemed to involve drinking gallons of green tea. For a while it seemed as though everyone was trying to cut down on their caffeine and trading in their afternoon coffee or tea for a cup of the green stuff. I’m sure some of them found a deeply satisfying replacement or supplement to their hot beverage repertoire.

Now, for most people whose entire experience with tea drinking involves teabags of the kind purveyed by Tetley, PG Tips or Typhoo, served with milk and/or sugar, changing over to green tea requires a bit of getting used to. I would go so far as to call it an acquired taste. There are a lot of terrible green teas out there, that are, to me, the equivalent of those cheap generic tea bags that my dad calls ‘floor sweepings’ tea. Even with decent green tea, its fairly easy to make a terrible cup of tea with them, its very easy to make weak insipid tea and even easier to leave the bag in too long and end up with bitter stewed tea. Which should actually not be a surprise to the average tea drinker, as while most people who drink tea will claim a cup of tea is a cup of tea, given the option they will evince surprisingly specific requirements for their cuppa. (I’m a strong tea with lots of milk kind of person – leave the bag in if you’re not sure – or neart le torr bainne gorm at work.) Learning how other people take their tea is a gesture of friendship and affection. But rarely do people consider this when they try green tea. Therefore the fad for green tea mostly led to those people having a box of green tea lurking in their cupboard, for months, with half a dozen tea bags out of it and then gifting them to me when they discovered that I actually liked the stuff.

For years I never had to buy the stuff, just keeping on top of the forsaken boxes of tea kept me in more green tea than I could face. To the point that I was completely scunnered of the stuff. I had some beautiful Jasmine tea that I’d picked up at one of the Chinese supermarkets in Glasgow and I couldn’t face it. For years. Even when I liked green tea, it wasn’t an everyday drink. It was something I had to be in the mood for, something I drank after some excellent Asian cuisine or as an accompaniment to a good book. I’ve spent most of the last five years refusing green tea anywhere that wasn’t a Japanese restaurant – for some reason, even the complimentary cups they do at Wagamama’s are reliably great – and exploring other teas. I’ve discovered lots of teas I love along the way, but every time I came across some nice looking green tea, I’d feel wistful that I knew I wouldn’t enjoy it the way I once had and so would pass it over.

A few months ago, I was visiting my parents and discovered a small stash of Jasmine tea bags. Out of curiosity I made a cup and a beautiful aroma rose out of the cup, it was a truly gorgeous cup of tea. I gathered up the remaining bags and rationed them out over the following months. Slowly, carefully I’ve been experimenting with green teas again. Mostly Jasmine teas, but with more generic green teas, a flavoured green tea here, an iced tea there, the surprisingly pleasing matcha latte when I’m in the mood. (Why are matcha lattes so good? I’ve accidentally put milk in green tea on several occasions and its vile. It shouldn’t work – and admittedly depending where you get them, it sometimes doesn’t – but somehow, a good matcha latte is divine.) At work the other day, I unearthed a box of green tea, which a Malaysian colleague had brought back for the office from a recent holiday to Korea. It is one of the mildest, loveliest green teas I’ve ever drunk. The box is massive and now lives on my desk, because I’m the only one who drinks it. It’s amazing. I’ve rediscovered my love of green tea.

But I’ll be keeping that to myself most places, in fact lets just keep it between ourselves, because we’re about due for another cycle of ‘green tea is good for you’ and if people find out I’ll start to receive boxes of unloved green tea once more. And I’d really like, to just keep on, enjoying my green tea.

Tea Musings

I came to tea drinking later in life than most, despite coming from a family of tea drinkers – my gran in particular would feed you tea until you burst if you were too polite to tell her to stop.

Over the last few years I’ve developed a thing for loose leaf teas, culminating in my getting a tea pot – with filter – for my birthday a couple of years ago. Until I had a teapot of my own, I’d never really understood the whole tea-making-drinking as ritual thing, with steepings and timings and the rest. I had plenty of experience of the ‘tea as cure-all’ thing, though honestly even then there’s only one friend of mine who defaults to feeding me tea when I’m distressed and she makes the best tea in the world as far as I’m concerned – only from her will I always take a cuppa unquestioningly whenever offered. (Oddly enough she’s the only other person I know who owns a teapot – who owned one when we were students! – even if she makes it with tea bags and milk) But here I am as an adult, discovering the process of tea making as meditation. Of time spent in contemplation of the process, focused but unfocused, forgetting the rest of the world and its stresses and strains, to take a little time for oneself. Soothing and necessary. Time to rest and unwind, refocus on the things that matter.

I’m drinking Yunnan tea today, out of a little set of mini-tins of Chinese teas I got as a present. (Proper, curling dried leaves, that look like plant when they’ve been brewing for a while, none of this dust nonsense you get some places. Leaves you could read a fortune in if you were so inclined.) It’s rather pleasant.

One of the most useful craft projects I’ve ever undertaken was to make myself a tea cosy. Years ago, I came across a book of tea cosy patterns, a delightful blend of kitsch and charming, and fully expected it to spend its life much admired and un-used. With the arrival of my own teapot, the necessity of a tea cosy became apparent. It was fine if I made a pot of tea to share, but if I was making tea just for me, by the time I went for a second cup it was cold. Also, frankly, I didn’t particularly like any of the cosies in my mum’s collection and so it was make my own or be mildly irritated every time I made a pot of tea. My tea cosy is blue. Well, actually, its turquoise cable-work with a dark blue – with sparkles – trim at the top and bottom. Largely because the turquoise was left over from another project and I feared I might run out and the dark blue is an almost perfect match for the teapot. It looks cute and quaint wrapped in its cosy, and more importantly, the cosy keeps the tea at perfect drinking temperature for me. So I can spend an afternoon working away – on college work, crafting, writing articles or just curled up with a good book – and never need to move further than to reach over and pour another cup of tea.