Welcome to my blog. I hope you will join me for a cup of tea!
All tagged ripe Pu Ehr
Happy first day of fall, tea lovers! How are you celebrating this wonderful season? I can’t say it looks or feels like fall here in LA (yet?), but I can celebrate nonetheless, right? Luckily, I have some tea-infused recipes up my sleeve. Right this way for some cozy tea goodness.
I love infusing tea in savory dishes and the flavor combination of ripe puerh and mushrooms is a no-brainer. Earthy, woodsy and deep, bold, savory notes work perfectly together. Does this remind you of fall? While the rest of the northern hemisphere is enjoying the last weeks of summer, here in San Francisco we can’t wait for Fogust (fog+August) and its gray skies and chilly temperatures to be over. The good news is, from September on, we will have our fair share of summer too! Yay! So let me snuggle up with these delicious Korean steamed eggs while I bid adieu to Fogust and get ready for San Francisco summer!
With the holiday season officially in full swing, I look forward to holiday parties! I will attend an Alice in Wonderland themed party in December and I hope there will be plenty of tea. I will very likely host some holiday dinner parties too and I’m making a point of introducing everybody to the magic of tea and food pairings. If you, like me, want tea to be the star of your holiday celebrations, I have tried and tested some combinations that will sweep everyone off their feet, from appetizer to dessert.
If you haven’t already, it’s time to hop on the Negroni bandwagon. Negroni, now ubiquitous, is an iconic Italian cocktail. Legend has it that Count Camillo Negroni invented it in 1919 in Florence. Why is it so popular? For one thing, it’s Italian, need I say more? (just kidding, of course). Well, it’s a simple recipe (just 3 ingredients in equal parts) and it doesn’t require any special bar tools. Nevertheless, it’s a very sophisticated cocktail. Its strong flavor, with bitter and sweet notes, might not be for everyone but palates have evolved to appreciate the bitter flavor in coffee and IPA beers, kale and dark chocolate, to name just a few examples. As it turns out, tea is perfect to create playful variations of Negroni, so without further ado, let me introduce you to the Tea-groni, two ways!
The first time I had pu erh was a long time ago and I didn't even know it. Back then, the only thing I knew about tea was that I liked it a lot. One day a relative gave me a round colorful cardboard box with black Chinese characters. Inside the box, wrapped in paper, there was tuocha, a dome-shaped compressed tea, made of pu erh. I cannot describe the fascination this little box exerted on me. It might have not been very high quality tea but to me it was like a treasure. You had to grate the dome-shaped cake to make a cup of tea and this process alone had something magical to it. The tea was strong, intense.What is pu erh?
