Of Life and Tea

Christmas Traditions, New and Old

2011-12-25T15:30:00.000-05:00

As I sit here and sip a cup of one of our Christmasy-spiced teas, I reflect on the importance of Christmas traditions: of keeping long-time traditions, and of establishing new ones. This season has been a study in the mingling of both, for us, in many respects, dear Giraffe.

The joy of experiencing our first granddaughter's Christmas has enhanced our anticipation of this year's Christmas, to be sure. Certainly a time for New Traditions. Still, Giraffe, we found ourselves overwhelmed by all the hustle and bustle of Life In General as well as of The Holidays, and suddenly we found ourselves embarking on our journey to our daughter's and son-in-law's and 7-month-old first grandchild's house (instead of "To Grandmother's house we go!", Grandma & Grandpa went to grandbaby's house!) without having engaged in a single long-time tradition of our own. We didn't send out a single Christmas card, we didn't decorate house or yard, we didn't bake and deliver baked goods . . . nothing. Our Christmas Spirit was not diminished in the least, but we did miss the old traditions.

Of course, Christmas is more than the outer trappings. We have basked in our daughter's and son-in-law's celebration of their little family's first Christmas with their first child. Somehow the mix of circumstances comingling to produce this year's Christmas season made it all the more fitting that one long-time tradition we engaged in today was watching the 1966 animated "How the Grinch Stole Christmas". Wherein the Grinch, while he may not have learned the religious origin of Christmas, learned the True Meaning of Christmas when:

[Christmas] *came*! Somehow or other, it came just the same. ... He puzzled and puzzed 'til his puzzler was sore. And then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more. What happened then? Well in Whoville they say that the Grinch's small heart grew THREE sizes that day. The true meaning of Christmas came through, and the Grinch found the strength of *ten* Grinches, plus two! . . . Welcome Christmas, bring your cheer. Cheer to all Whos both far and near. Christmas Day is in our grasp as long as we have hands to clasp. Christmas Day will always be, just as long as we have we. Welcome Christmas while we stand heart to heart and hand to hand.

Meanwhile, as we watched this special program, we sat near the French doors with windows looking out to their back yard, with dense forest stretching beyond view. This made me think wistfully of a wouldn't-it-be-nice tradtion:

Last year I discovered Jennifer Chiaverini's Elm Creek Quilt books. I came in on the series well into it when I checked out from the library the audiobook of one titled The Christmas Quilt. The story was in large part flashbacks to the chief character Sylvia's youth and early adult-hood. One Christmas in this past, Sylvia, her sister, and her sister-in-law were alone in the huge Elm Creek manor house with their widowed father because all the men had enlisted to go fight in World War II. They tried to carry out as many of The Family's long-tme traditions as they could, including finding the perfect Christmas tree in the huge forest on their property. The ladies did indeed find the perfect tree, but it was most likely too big for them to cut down and transport back to the house, plus a nest visible high up made them fear some wildlife might still use the tree. The tree was visible from the house, so the ladies decided to decorate the tree in situ:

They went back to the house for the apples, popcorn garlands, and strings of cranberries and nuts, which they wrapped around the Frazier fir by tossing one end of the strings into the highest branches they could reach and unwinding as they walked around the tree. With bits of twine, they tied apples by their stems to the ends of branches, ... Sylvia sent Agnes back to the house for cookie cutters, which they used to carve stars and circles from packed snow, frosted shapes they arranged on the boughs like ornaments. . . .

Then on Christmas Day, after church and presents and reading aloud letters from the men away at war, Sylvia's father called her to the window to "look at this":

As she watched, she detected movement, and suddenly a doe and fawn emerged from the woods and carefully picked their way through the crust that had fored on top of the snow. They approached the Christmas tree, and the doe stretched out her head to nibble a popcorn garland. Her fawn cautiously bit into an apple. Sylvia's smile broadened as a flurry of motion heralded the arrival of a flock of chickadees. Soon other birds joined in the feast, and squirrels as well, busily harvesting the popcorn, fruits, and nuts from the Christmas tree.

Thus, a new tradition was born for that family that would continue across many generations.

(I am composing this on my new Toshiba Thrive tablet with wireless keyboard. Not exactly a new tradition, per se, but definitely something I'm trying to get used to. I bring this up mostly because of difficulty navigating through text w/o amouse to correct typos spotted lines ago and to highlight text to set off as quotes {couldn't get that to work!}, and so on, especially with directional keys occasionally just freezing up on me and I have yet to figure out what finally gets them working again when they do so! So as I'm composing, I am fervently hoping this post will look okay and be readable! Hoping you, my dear Giraffe, and the rest of our readers, will bear with me in this Transition to New Technology!)

I recall that last year, when I read that, I longed to live somewhere that we could institute just such a tradition. But no forests in our back yard! Today, however, I suddenly recalled when I came here to help out the new parents when their first child, our first grandchild, was born: the first morning I was here, having let the parents and newborn sleep in, I moved a chair by the French doors so I could read in the sunlight & not turn on lights in the living room, set the book on the chair and went to the kitchen to get my tea. When I returned to the chair---I froze in place, transfixed by the sight of two deer nibbling on vegetation at the edge of the woods, nearly into the grass of their backyard! I stood still for fear of movement spooking them and watched until they ambled away into the woods. Now that I remember the tradition in The Christmas Quilt, I wonder if our granddaughter might come to have a similar Christmas Tradition as she grows up.

Whatever anyone else's Christmas Traditions are, old and new, ---and to me the sentiment includes whatever holidays & accompanying traditions anyone observes this time of year, whether Christmas or Hannukah or Solstice or Kwanzaa, or any other Observance that I'm not aware of--- I hope that All experience Peace and Joy today.

Moderately Crunchy . . . Who Knew?

2011-09-08T20:00:00.001-04:00

It must have been the combination of today's luscious Fresh From the Farms delivery and our recent visit to our daughter and her husband and our grand-daughter!, that reminded me of learning the phrase and of how delighted I was to realize that it applies to us--both to us personally and to KTeas!

Our daughter and her husband proclaimed themselves "moderately crunchy". We had to have the term "crunchy", in this context, explained to us. ::sheepishly shrugs::

I also looked it up on The Online Slang Dictionary and was fascinated to see the first two definitions given as "exhausted" and "embarrassed ... 'having put one's foot in one's mouth'." ... In addition to the fact that we've never heard the term used in those contexts, it's ironic, considering the current usage appears to be the much more positive, healthy meaning.

The Online Slang Dictionary precedes its third definition of "crunchy" as "hippie-esque" before presenting the definition:

"all-natural" Refers to the crunch of granola, which (as goes the stereotype) hippies are likely to eat.

A certain amount of embarrassed amusement results, because I'm pretty sure, dear Giraffe, that it's our generation, maybe more our parents' but including ours, being referred to by the whole "hippie-esque" label, yet we had to learn what the term meant from our kids, the next generation.

At any rate, the reason they call themselves "moderately crunchy" is that they choose to cook and live "green-ish", meaning they are not radical about what they eat and how they live. They consider eating as well as they can and going all-natural to be a process, and a gradual one at that. They're not tossing everything out of their house and starting from scratch eating only 100% organic local foods and wearing only 100% organic clothing, and so on. That just wouldn't be practical, but they are moving in that direction, with an ongoing quest to use less plastic and frequenting the local Farmer's Market and getting locally-produced beef when they can, as well as using fewer chemically-laden cleaners and doing more cleaning with vinegar and baking soda and so on. Whether they ever reach the 100% mark down the line remains to be seen, but their small changes in the here-and-now are definitely making improvements in their lives.

We certainly understand the "moderately" outlook. It's the same we have always embraced: Baby Steps. The fact that it may not be practical or feasible for us to wipe clean the slate and start all over at the 100% mark does NOT mean that baby steps in the direction are of no value!

We realized, then, that we are Moderately Crunchy, ourselves, even though we didn't know it! In fact, we may have planted the seeds for this Moderately Crunchy mentality over the years, what with using real butter instead of the chemical brew that is margarine and using local honey in our tea when we could find it. I admit, we tended to avoid the Natural Food stores that began to crop up because they were so expensive and we just couldn't do it while the kids were still at home. Now, however, we are working at becoming (there's that gradual-process thinking, again) more of Locavores: we use locally-produced raw milk, I bake our scone and biscuit mixes with locally-produced raw buttermilk, and we were thrilled to discover the Fresh From the Farms delivery service so that we could reap the benefits of local farms around us and in turn help support them and the local economy.

But you know, we're not radical about it, even though we do wish to keep taking those baby steps and continuing the process. I seek Real Food recipes like those found on Nourished Kitchen and in Tosca Reno's Eat-Clean Diet. I was tickled pink to be reminded of cooking meat and veggies in foil pouches, a method I

once used quite frequently with excellent results but for some reason fell away from, in a newly-discovered blog: Mrs. Skinny Fat. However, when I prepared the "real" Salisbury Steak recipe I found on Nourished Kitchen this week, well, it required grass-fed beef and homemade beefstock. We don't yet know where to get grass-fed beef locally and I don't have homemade beef stock. But I didn't let that stop me from making the recipe. I just used ground beef and beef stock I could buy at the nearby grocery store. It was still a whole-food meal, traditionally cooked, not store-bought packaged and processed. Albeit . . . with taking about twice as long to prepare the dish as the recipe told me it would take (so I'm not all that accomplished, as much as I always loved to cook; life got hectic and I got out of practice; I'm trying to remedy that now: baby steps), I steamed the veggies in the microwave. I know I read on Nourished Kitchen that she doesn't use a microwave, and I've heard much of late about the evils of microwaving our food, and I am moving more toward "real cooking" again, but sometimes I'll heat up leftovers or prepare sidedishes in the microwave because it allows me to multi-task and do other things in my still-far-too-hectic life.

What's more, using Fresh From the Farms does help us be more locavores and more "crunchy", as in all-natural, but it doesn't mean we've gone all organic. That's not because we're against Organic, quite the contrary. But as Fresh From the Farms states on their website: their emphasis is on using local farms, not necessarily organic, though they may use organic practices.

And therein lies the connection of "moderately crunchy" to KTeas as well as to us, personally. For one thing, we don't limit ourselves to only 100% Certified Organic teas. We do have some, even though we cannot yet say that on our private label, as I explained in the earlier sip-and-speak "Organic or Not Organic, That Is the Question ... well, Not Entirely". However, not being 100% Certified Organic does not automatically make a tea or tisane poor-quality or not worthwhile.

In addition, we were already familiar with the whole distinction between Certified Organic and Using Organic Practices from learning about the Sourcing of our teas. As I also explained in the Organic or Not Organic post, we learned that not only in the tea industry but also in others such as the wine industry, often the growers use organic practices but are a small operation and don't have the manpower or the time, or the money for fees, for that matter, to go through the Organic Certification process. Or, as one of our local honey suppliers explained to us, sometimes the strict letter of the FDA requirements to be able to say your product is Organic do not allow smaller companies to say they're Organic on their label even though they are, because, in the apiary's case, their property is not big enough to guarantee that their bees may not go into a field where organic practices are not followed, so some portion of the honey produced may not be 100% Organic in origin. These honey producers emphasize the benefits of Raw Honey, which means that the footprint of the honey is from comb, through a filtering system, straight to the bottle, unlike the larger honey distributors which gather honey from a large number of beekeepers--and that can mean both domestic and foreign--and combine those honeys, then pasteurize/boil them in order to keep a consistent color and flavor. Sounds nice, and all of the honey may have originated organically, but bear in mind that boiling removes the enzymes, microscopic particles of pollen and propolis and essentially renders the honey different in flavor and not as beneficial as raw, local honey. None of this is to say that Organic is undesirable, only that it is perhaps not the be-all and end-all.

Likewise, some of the plantations where the teas we carry are grown may not be Certified Organic, by U.S. standards, at least--in some cases they meet European requirements to be Certified Organic, but the U.S. does not simply accept that and stamp it Organic, and sometimes those operations don't see the need to pay extra to be Certified by U.S.standards as well. For the most part, they engage in organic practices even if they are not Certified Organic. Or, they may be practicing Sustainable Agriculture and be reclaiming land that was not cultivated organically for a long time. Both the Morawaka Estate in Sri Lanka and the Glenburn Estates in India

(--::chuckling at myself: I actually typed "our Morawaka Estate" and "our Glenburn Estates" because we've developed such a strong relationship with the folks from each at the World Tea Expo and through correspondence between Expos, and when we talk about their teas we say "our Glenburn tea" or "our Morawaka Ceylons"---but while they may consider us and their distributors to be "part of the family" and vice versa, I mustn't sound like I'm claiming any ownership of the estates themselves!!--)

produce teas under such circumstances. For example, Glenburn is not third-party Certified Organic, but their production process is part of the HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points) program and their tea factories undergo regular annual audits by BSI.

So it turns out that we, ourselves, and KTeas are all Moderately Crunchy. Who knew?

Shoulda Taken a Picture!

2011-08-21T22:45:00.005-04:00

I see so many tweets and blogs and statuses (statusi?) in which folks share a wonderful eating experience, whether their focus is the food itself, the venue, the companionship, the occasion, or some combination thereof, often accompanied by photographs of the repast. Why didn't I, aka The Photo Fairy, think of taking a picture of the birthday dinner prepared for my husband this evening? (Today is not his Bday, but this was the best day closest to the-day-of to do something celebratory.)

I cannot claim to be a Foodie, my dear Giraffe, but in the course of speaking of many things, speaking Of Life and Tea, I find myself wanting to share about this very simple yet rather special meal, and I do wish I had a photo of it to post.

Sundays have become Pasta Night for us, for no discernible reason. Recently, we began making our own sauce using the tomatoes we get in our weekly delivery from Fresh From the Farms. Due to this day's proximity to hubby's birthday, I wanted to make this pasta sauce a little more ... well, just More than previous sauces. And in that regard, it may have been a simple meal but it wasn't entirely easy or quick, because a lot of chopping & prepping went into it. (Perhaps I should take this as a cue to finally join the modern age of kitchenry and get a Food Processor!)

Early in the day I diced several tomatoes and put them in a huge pot. We really need an intermediate-sized pot. The largest saucepan we have, I believe it's 3 quarts, is perfect for making just-the-right amount of pasta for the two of us, so I didn't want to use that for the pasta sauce. The next size we have is the huge stockpot which I believe is 8 quarts, with a pasta insert to automatically drain when the pasta is done by removing from the boiling water, and a steamer basket insert for the pasta insert . . . but we simply don't need that much pasta. Certainly we could still use that pot for the quantity pasta we would use, but we wouldn't want to use that much water to prepare our quantity of pasta. So instead I use that pot for the homemade pasta sauce even though it's overkill. At least I need fill it only as far as the sauce requires, and not have to put excess water in to reach the pasta basket. I am still rather new to this homemade pasta-sauce making, so I'm not good at judging how much sauce I'll get from dicing up how many tomatoes. So I just chop and dice and cut and scrape the cutting board into the pot, and see what comes of it. Today I think I have enough sauce left over to serve over newly-cooked pasta for lunch for the entire week!

I set the tomatoes to cooking on a very low setting on the stove this morning, and went on about laundry and working on Sipping Notes newsletter and so on. Went to the store in the afternoon to pick up some ground beef, having decided that would make a nice change of pace. Even though we had a can of tomato paste at home to add to the sauce for thickening, I also picked up at the store a can of paste with basil, garlic, and oregano to help spice up the sauce.

Back home, I browned the ground beef, rinsed it even though I got 96% lean, and added it to the sauce with the spiced tomato paste. I chopped and diced and sliced and cut some more, to cut up green peppers, some for the sauce and some for salad, and a yellow squash, both from Fresh From the Farms. I then sauteed the yellow squash, adding various seasonings such as thyme and rosemary, a pinch--just a pinch--of chipotle chili powder, and ground some black pepper onto it before adding the skillet-full to the sauce. Next I sauteed the green peppers, and then---how's this for strange?: I put about a teaspoon-and-a-half of Dove Chocolate Discoveries' Aztec-Spice Sipping Chocolate into the skillet and sauteed that for a moment or two, then added that to the sauce!

The sauce was then left alone to continue simmering while I worked on the salad. The base of the salad was the bibb lettuce from our Fresh From the Farms delivery. I added the green bell pepper I mentioned above. I diced up a cucumber from FFtF as well. I normally add tomato, but did not today. What I did add was weirdly inspired by hubby's remark earlier in the day that he was craving fruit, as he worked his way through some cherries from the grocery store and a Honey Crisp apple from FFtF . . .: I sliced and diced an Asian Pear from FFtF and added it to the mix in our salad bowls! Finished off by topping with shredded carrots and some shredded cheddar cheese. Dove Chocolate Discoveries' Chocolate Fig Balsamic Vinaigrette dressed my salad ::big smile::.

When we were ready to eat dinner, I boiled up some water and cooked some Farfalle pasta, because that just seemed the best choice for this Pasta Night. Again, no discernible reason. And that was it, our dinner: Farfalle topped with the homemade pasta sauce with a tossed salad including Asian pears.

Oh, and the wine. That in itself might be the crowning reason to have a photo, to prove to friends who know me well and know that I just don't drink, because I don't like the taste of alcohol, that I truly did have a glass of red wine with my husband's birthday dinner. Uh huh.

A special set of circumstances. And in fact, dear Giraffe, I do have some photos I can include with this post, tho not of the meal itself. I visited a friend, yesterday, to take copies of both Traveling Tea Ladies books that her visiting mother had requested, after she had been visiting her old home town for the past week. This friend has a gift-basket business, and she was very excited to show me something new that she discovered back home, that she was going to research how she could bring into her business. She and her mother had gone to a wine tasting at Still Pond Vineyard & Winery in Arlington, GA, and my basket lady friend discovered that she wanted to be able to offer their wine in our state as part of her baskets, and she had purchased a number of their wines for herself, she was so enamored! I had to laugh when her mother reported that she doesn't like the taste of alcohol, either (I'm not the only one!), but her doctor actually has her drinking a small quantity of the muscadine wine, specifically, because of the abundance of a helpful compound in the muscadine grape, in particular, for fighting cholesterol. That started us to talking about all the buzz about the health benefits of red wine and dark chocolate . . . and my friend decided to gift Ed and me with a bottle of the Notchaway Red Georgia Muscadine Wine so we could tell her what we think of it---well, chiefly what Ed thinks of it since I'm not a wine fan.

That was when I remembered that I had intended to ask her to create a birthday gift basket for DH before I discovered she was out of town all this past week. She decided to build him a basket around that gifted bottle of red wine along with some dark chocolate, on the spot, and that's just what we did! As if it was Meant To Be that I couldn't request the gift basket be made until after she had discovered the wine. Which is why he & I had the wine for dinner tonight.

Furthermore, I was surprised to discover that I didn't find my first sip of the Still Pond Muscadine Wine as distasteful as I had anticipated based on past experience! That sounds awful: "as distasteful as I had anticipated"! I'm sorry, I do tend to find wine unpleasant. I've had wines whose fruity taste was quite appealing--until the alcohol burn or aftertaste hit, which is so unpleasant for me that it completely obliviates any enjoyment I'd previously had of the taste. Which is why I have tended to stick with non-alcoholic sparkling fruit juices. However, I didn't experience that unpleasantness on my first sip of this Still Pond wine, and I was duly impressed! I could taste a fruityness (that's about as distinctive as I can get) that was not cancelled out by a lesser-than-usual alcohol aftertaste.

I specified "first sip" for a reason. We talked and ate for several minutes before I took another sip. It must've been longer than just a few minutes, because the wine in my glass had warmed by the time I took my second sip---and that wholly distasteful burning aftertaste was back. In truth, I didn't notice that the wine had warmed until after that disconcerting experience, when I tried to figure out why the first sip had been nearly pleasant and the second sip so entirely unpleasant. I think the first sip had been on the verge of enjoyable because the wine was chilled, and that somehow quelled the worst of the alcohol afterburn and allowed the fruity taste to the fore. Heavens, had I always had wine too warm, before, is that why I have never liked it even on a first sip, before this?

This raises memories of attending a Wine & Chocolate Pairing as part of the Biltmore Experience and learning there that when one hears of wine being best served at room temperature, that refers to Castle Room Temperature, which is considerably chillier than what most of us in our modern age consider room temperature!

I did finish my wine, over the course of the entire evening. At hubby's suggestion, I added ice to the glass to re-chill the poured wine. I still had not finished it, though, when done with dinner, so I put my glass in the fridge to chill while doing the dishes and so on. Then later I had my last few sips with a few bites of dark chocolate! ---All for my health, for the cholesterol-fighting properties, you see. ::winks::

---I do cook with wine quite often, even though I don't like to drink it. I frequently keep those little 4-packs of individual serving bottles of white and of red wines with screw-on caps on-hand to add 1/4-cup here or a 1/2-cup there. Have found it works great in place of butter on veggies. Plus, because we don't drink as a rule, we tend to accumulate partial bottles of wine brought by visitors and left behind when they depart, which I also use for cooking because I'm sure they're no good for drinking anymore after sitting here for months on end. I did add some wine to the pasta sauce while making it. By the time I reached that point in the narrative, however, I had recalled the wine for dinner and decided to include it and the departure from the norm of my drinking some, and I didn't want to steal the thunder of the announcement by having already mentioned using wine in preparation of the meal.

My choice to explore this wine experience in this seemingly unrelated blog topic is because I realized, even as I recalled the wine as part of the simple yet special dinner I started out writing about, that I have been feeling a coalescing of the myriad tumbles of words and thoughts around terroir, which I once thought was a blog topic splitting into two directions which has since evolved into a series of blog entries, and around the oh-so-many similarities between Tea and Wine (and even Coffee! Yes. I said that.) regarding cultivating, growing, selecting, the art and the science of Making, and of Tasting, and while I don't wish to jinx it, I think I just may begin composing some of those Mental Blogs for less nebulous publication. And so it seems appropriate to mention this timely sampling of a wine that I did not find entirely distasteful and in which I could discern fruity-ness!

Until we sip and speak, again . . .

Tea: the Universal Problem-Solver --- & Vinyl Making a Comeback?!

2011-03-11T12:27:00.000-05:00

Currently, the book I'm "reading" by listening to an audiobook in the car whilst running about taking care of business (very nearly the only way I manage to read at all anymore; very hard on a lifelong bookaholic!) is the BBC Audiobooks America version of Deborah Crombie's All Shall Be Well (a Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James novel). As I set out on this morning's errands, I was thoroughly enchanted to read/hear:

Instead of answering, Vi ran some water in the electric kettle and pulled two mugs off the shelf. "Sit down. We'll have another cup."

Gemma almost laughed. Tea: the universal problem-solver. Her mother never dealt with anything unless fortified by strong sweet tea.

I laughed out loud at that point, and right then and there, this blog entry was born. I simply had to share that passage as well as another delightful passage from the first Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James novel I'd read/listened to: A Share In Death:

"It's the shock." Kincaid held out a hand to her. "It does strange things to the system sometimes. What you need is a cup of the good old British restorative--hot, sweet tea."

::sighs contentedly:: Ah yes, "a spot of tea and I'll be right as rain." Of course, ever since seeing the animated flick "Treasure Planet", in my mind I hear that phrase spoken by Emma Thompson as Captain Amelia! I have spoken upon occasion about how I share the sentiments of a friend who has told me that her own children insist that when the time comes, her gravestone will read: "Come on in. Sit down. I'll make some tea and everything will be better." or words to that effect. Warms the cockles of my heart. . . .

(An aside: If you want to look into these and any other books by Deborah Crombie, do stop by Amazon's Deborah Crombie Page and read her bio. Positively delightful, with remarks like: ". . . she lived in both Chester, England, and Edinburgh, Scotland, where she failed to make as good a use of being cold and poor as JK Rowling." Did she write that herself? Who thinks this stuff up?!)

But wait---What does that have to do with Vinyl making a comeback?, you ask. At first blush, nothing. This morning, however, I was already regretting that I'd set off in such a hurry, I'd not made myself more tea to bring along in my travel mug before I dashed out the door. That passage from All Shall Be Well and the ensuing wash of remembered tea references in literature or at least storytelling simply cinched it: I had to have tea.

And so I went into a Starbucks ( ::gasps!!:: ) that I had literally just come upon. The lady in front of me at the counter had just told the cashier "That's all," but a moment later said, "No, can I still add this to my bill?" And she pushed across the counter the audio CD: 21 by Adele. The woman said she had been looking for that CD, and the cashier gushed about how fantastic it is, and the woman said, "I've been meaning to download it from iTunes, but I'm old-school, I really prefer to have my hard-copy!"

I couldn't help joining the conversation: "I'm the same way." The woman turned to me with obvious delight to have found someone else who felt that way about hardcopy, and we began conversing. In a moment, she said something about how she even still has her hard-copy vinyl. She said, "I listen to my vinyl about once a year, but I can, you know?!" Yes, I know. I have boxes of vinyl and I miss very much listening to it all. Especially at Christmas-time: my all-time favorite Christmas music is interspersed throughout albums my father brought home each year when Goodyear gave their employees these Christmas albums as a gift.

Then the woman said, "Vinyl is making a comeback, you know. Yes. The sound is different. Young audiophiles are discovering vinyl." In wonder, I mused aloud, "I might be able to get a new turntable after all!" The woman said, "Oh, I kept mine." I informed: "Mine unfortunately bit the dust some time back. I've kept saying that I must get another turntable and replacement styluses before they stop making them, but I never have." The woman assured me: "Oh, now you can buy a turntable again."

What a felicitous chance encounter! And all because I was driven into that Starbuck's for tea by that passage in my audiobook!

Perhaps Tea is, indeed, the universal problem-solver!

Until we have another cup . . .

Tea and Lace

2011-03-04T22:56:00.000-05:00

What is it about lace and linen that seems so quintessentially Tea? That is not entirely a rhetorical question. I love a good Authentic, Traditional Afternoon Tea with all the trimmings, including lace tablecloths and gloves on the ladies' hands, but as I've stated elsewhere, my love of Enjoying Tea is not limited to the Proper setting of a Tea Party. I'm just as partial to a cozy, comfy, casual Tea Environment. And yet, I just love the look and feel--both literal touch and "feel" as in ambiance--of lace and linen as part of Tea Trappings.

Tea and Lace is on my mind today because I said goodbye to a fellow vendor at The Shoppes @ River's Edge whose business is linen and lace. Due to various factors, she made the decision to close down her shop within The Shoppes and I got to visit with her briefly today as she moved out.

I have had my eye on the contents of her booth since KTeas moved in at The Shoppes. I immediately felt that her products were such a great fit with ours, and I wished to "dress" our booth with various of her wares. Sadly, I never quite figured out a way to incorporate her products in our original booth. It wasn't until just about a month ago that we had the opportunity to move into a different spot at The Shoppes which lent itself to arrangement that would accommodate elements which could include linen and lace products.

Just for starters, the Lavish tablecloth on our little tea table, as shown on the left. And the matching Lavish runner on our tea cart, as shown below.

These truly were intended to be just for starters, but I had no sooner picked those out, than I found out when I contacted the owner to arrange to purchase them that she was going to have to leave The Shoppes.

I'm also a consultant with Willow House (tealady.willowhouse.com), and I can't help but envision wonderful settings for KTeas as well as for my own home, combining the Willow House decor with the refined linens and lace of Butkins.

So, I will avidly be keeping up with her website: Butkins Linen and Lace in order to grow my collection of lovely lace and linen to dress up whatever tea environment I may wish to enhance.

You may find her at various shows and expos, yourself. I know she has traveled to distant locales (distant from our home base of South Carolina), at least as far as Texas, to hock her wares in holiday shopping shows and women's expos and all sorts of festivals. Be on the lookout for her to visit your area. She'll be posting her 2011 Calendar of Events on the website soon. In addition, we are hoping to join forces at various times so that Butkins and KTeas may exhibit together at some of these shows.

In the meantime, peruse her website. Read the delightful story of how she got into this business to start with:

"How Butkins Linen and Lace came to be....Our story begins back in the ancient days of 1991 when my husband was stationed with the USAF at RAF Woodbridge, Suffolk, England. . . ."

Dabble amidst the photos of her products and feel as if you're running your fingers over the exquisite workmanship.

And see what answers spring to mind for you to the question:

What is it about lace and linen that just goes with Tea? Or vice versa? Is it something about Tea that causes it to be such a grand fit with lace and linen?

Organic or Not Organic, That Is the Question ... well, Not Entirely

2011-01-09T16:32:00.000-05:00

As consumers, ourselves, we seek to “go green”, including being conscious of our diet to make it increasingly consist of all-natural and organic, etc., as much as we can without having the control of living on a farm/ranch where we grow all of our own food. So it seemed only natural when we formed KTeas that we would seek to have most, if not all, of our teas be Organic. . . . Easier said than done, it turns out. We are sure that many of you have already traveled farther along this road to knowledge than we have. Nonetheless, we thought we’d share some of our own journey along this particular path and relate its own Intersection of Life and Tea.

The murkiness or lack of clarity on the matter of Organic, and of Labeling and Marketing your product as Organic, is not limited to tea. As I said, we strive to “go organic” in our personal lives, so when we recently met a local honey producer, we asked if their honey is organic? The answer we got was quite an education in itself. The main points of the answer are as follows:

“The reason is that bees fly up to 2 miles to collect nectar so, while a beekeeper’s home/farm/orchard may adhere to organic guidelines, our neighbors may not . . . Since there are very, very few places in the world that can raise organic honey (you'd need a plot of land at least 4 miles in diameter and your bees would need to be in the center)--they are certified organic - and the rest of us are not permitted to use the word organic in marketing. . . . "Organic" is good but rare so you should always look for RAW honey - that means the footprint of the honey is from comb, through a filtering system and straight into the bottle. Most (if not all) large honey distributors - like Sue Bee - gather honey from a large number of beekeepers (both domestic and foreign), combine the honeys then pasteurize/boil the honeys in order to maintain a consistent color and flavor over their stock. Boiling removes the enzymes, microscopic particles of pollen and propolis and basically renders the honey a different flavor and not as beneficial as raw, local honey.”

Suddenly, after reading that explanation, I began to understand better why I’d been recently seeing so much fuss about local stores carrying raw milk.

You may think that whether honey can be marketed as organic has nothing to do with whether tea is organic. Recall that the purpose of the regulations and certifications and seals in the U.S. is to protect the consumer from unscrupulous businesses using the word “organic” willy-nilly so that they may cash in on the buzzword even if the products are not entirely, or perhaps not at all, organic.

The idea is to allow the consumer to simply look at a label and by seeing that USDA Organic stamp of approval through the NOP (National Organic Program), be able to trust that the integrity of the tea leaf (or any ingredient used in the tisane) has been protected all the way from growth in the plantation without pesticides and chemical fertilizers that compromise the natural state of the plant and leave toxins in our bodies, grown by farmers emphasizing the use of renewable resources and conservation of soil and water, right through the processing as tea and shipment to facilities where it’s packaged under organic conditions. That’s a good thing.

But the impact on small businesses goes a lot farther than local honey companies not being able to market their honey as organic because they cannot afford to have a plot of land large enough to ensure that the plants their bees pollinate have all been grown with organic practices.

We have read, for example, that some small wineries, like family-owned-and-run, may have similar problems. Even if they may be Organic in practice, they may have not yet managed to get Certified Organic, so they cannot market themselves as Organic.

What’s more, returning to the topic of tea, consider that camellia sinensis is almost exclusively grown and processed into tea elsewhere, not in the United States. Sometimes, the problem with labeling and marketing organic may be a matter of: the U.S. end of the operation has not been able to get the entire operation certified to USA stipulations. In order to display that USDA NOP certification, every step along the way, each link in the chain must be certified, at Source as well as the processing plant or warehouse here in the States. At present, the USDA does not simply accept that if something is EEC Certified Organic or Japan certified, for example, then it is certified organic and they can put their stamp of approval on it.

One European-based tea business from whom we’ve purchased tea as consumers has this to say on their site:
“Teas with the “Bio” or EEC Organic symbol are certified Organic in Europe. Teas with the USDA Organic symbol are certified Organic in the United States. Selections marked ‘made with organic tea’ have a USDA Organic tea base with added ingredients that have not been certified organic, but do meet [our] strict standards. It should be noted that EEC standards are actually stricter
than USDA standards.”

That company is still somewhat unusual for having gone for the USDA Organic certification for some of their teas. Most likely because they do have U.S. operations, they decided it was worthwhile to get U.S. Certification for the most popular teas in the U.S. Many of the European-owned and Asian-owned tea gardens & processors, however, are certified organic to European and/or Asian standards, and since the bulk of their market is Europe and/or Asia, they don’t see the need to pay for USA organic certification. There may be debate about that assertion in the above quote, but most European and Asian entities do feel that their Organic Certification is more exacting than the USA’s, thus they don’t see the need to undergo the expense and procedure and time required to gain USDA NOP certification in addition to the certification they already have.

(We suspect that this attitude is in the process of changing as the U.S. market for quality loose tea grows and the average tea consumer in the U.S. is growing increasingly better-informed, but that’s just our opinion, and at the moment we have to deal with the prevailing state of affairs.)

Okay, that’s all well and good, but let’s get down to the impact of all of that on KTeas.

KTeas is private label, meaning we are our own brand. We made that choice because from the very beginning, we intended that one day we would be creating our own blends to sell. In fact, as referenced on our Facebook Page on New Year’s Day, we already have a “signature blend” that we cannot yet package and sell to you because the blend was created out of teas we bought retail before KTeas even existed, and we have not yet found just the right wholesale teas to use in re-creating our signature blend!

What’s more, even if we had found “the right teas”, we have not yet found a facility in which we could do the blending and packaging. It was recommended to us, because we are such a small business, that we locate a commercial kitchen, such as a caterer’s, which is not in use all of the time and whose owner would be willing to rent out the use of the kitchen during their own non-use hours. Because: one of our goals is to eventually work with local grocery stores and markets and restaurants who like to carry/use the products of local businesses, and such establishments must meet Health Dept. standards. Hence, we would need a Health-Dept.-approved facility in which to do the blending and the packaging of our products which would go to those establishments. However, though one might think in these economic times that catering businesses or restaurants or other enterprises with commercial-grade kitchens would be looking for an opportunity to bring in some extra money, we have not yet located such a facility of which we can rent the use.

What this has to do with the organic question is: Another reason we would need a commercial-grade kitchen is that when we do make our own blends, if we use organic ingredients and want to be able to label the resulting blends as “organic”, we would have to have a facility that has been Certified Organic. We’d probably have better luck with a commercial-grade kitchen that is already Health-Dept.-approved either turning out to also be certified organic or easily getting certified organic, than with our own kitchen, right?

Thus, as we researched tea wholesalers and found suppliers who do private label, whom we had determined we could trust as far as (a) the quality of their teas, (b) the fact that the workers on the plantations and in the factories are paid and treated fairly (Fair Trade, Direct Trade, Ethical Tea Partnership, etc.), and (c) the teas and tisanes they make available to us being as much as possible organic . . . we tried many of their teas and tisanes to determine which ones we wanted to carry our name, KTeas.

Then, we narrowed down the list to those suppliers who also offered the private label service whereby they package those teas and tisanes which we selected, and they put our private label on the packages for us, in their own facilities before shipping to us.

We thought this would enable those products which are organic to be labeled organic under our private label, since they would have been sealed up in an organic facility and the seal not broken once they reached us because they’re already in their resale packaging.

Not so. We have learned it’s a lot more complicated than that. At least if we want the trustworthiness of the USDA Organic seal of approval on the label.

While there are a lot of loopholes, for lack of a better word, concerning whether the word “organic” appears on the front of the label or only in the ingredients list, and based on percentages of a business’s product that is organic being below a certain % of that business’s total products, blah, blah, blah . . . if you want to have that USDA NOP stamp of approval on your product label in the United States so that people can look at your label and trust that your product is 100% organic (or whatever organic claim you are making), then you have to have passed inspections to be Certified Organic by a USDA-approved Certifying Agency and be able to pass annual renewals of certification.

We thought that by selecting teas from suppliers who are Certified plus receiving our private label teas in sealed packaging from those Certified facilities, we could then have Certified Organic KTeas teas. Not that cut-and-dried. At least as far as having the NOP certification appearing on the labels, one supplier has informed us that our private label KTeas labels must be approved by the same certifying agency that certified our supplier, even though the teas have already been certified before they’re packaged for us! Which, if you stop to think about it, is a good thing: remember the remarks earlier about the assurances that are supposed to be inherent in the stamp or seal seen on the label? Going through the approval process is no doubt to ensure that nothing broke the organic chain by the time the tea is sealed up in private label KTeas packaging.

We are paying the fees and going through the process of having the labels of those teas approved. In the meantime, there are teas that we are getting from that supplier that are organic but do not yet say organic on the label. (We had proceded to identify those teas as organic in the website listings, but it turns out that we were doing so prematurely. We are waffling on whether to remove the word “organic” until we have completed the approval process, or leave the word because we are going to have that approval, we just don’t know yet when the process will be completed and we’ll start getting those teas shipped to us with the certified-organic labels.) We do have a few teas from another supplier who does go ahead and put the word “organic” on our private label when the product is indeed organic, but you’ll notice those labels do not display USDA NOP seals.

So: be vigilant, to be sure---“caveat emptor”! But also be aware that the whole organic labeling practice is (relatively) new and complicated and the wrinkles are still being ironed out of it.

Try to get to know the sources of the organic products you’re looking at buying. Having some kind of relationship with them might be the best way of knowing what you’re getting, since the question is not entirely whether a product is organic or not, but sometimes the question is whether a product qualifies to be labeled organic even when it is organic. Perhaps if the products in question are not local and can’t be produced locally, “getting to know” the supplier might be more a case of doing your due diligence, researching the company. And hey, if it all makes your head hurt, how about enjoying a soothing cup of tea while you’re doing the research?

When it comes to produce and meat that is organic, if you have local farms and providers that you can literally, personally get to know, that may be the easiest way of determining the quality of what you’re getting. Perhaps you could literally build a relationship with those folks over a cup of tea!

And please do develop a relationship with KTeas. We at KTeas believe that Relationships are an integral part of what Tea is all about, and we want to share a cuppa with you, literally or figuratively, at the Intersection of Life and Tea.

(This blog entry was inspired when completing the questionnaire for the KTeas interview on Now Serving Tea.)

Tea Dances Need To Make a Comeback!

2011-01-03T21:58:00.000-05:00

Don't you think? Admittedly, we kind of have Dance on the brain just now: the dance studio where we take lessons has been closed for the holidays and we've missed it terribly; we're quite jubilant that it re-opens this week. I've wanted to write this blog since August or September, though.

We had discovered a delightful little book called A Time for Tea: Then and Now, Tea Activity Book by Catherine A. Macaro. Very close to the time that we participated in our dance school's competition The Cosmopolitan Classic, while browsing through the book, we found a page about Tea Dances.

We felt sort of like "There, you see!" (not saying "you see" to anyone in particular, mind you) "Our simultaneous passions for Tea and for Dance are not so disparate after all! Once upon a time, not so very long ago*, and right here in this country, Tea and Dance went together hand-in-hand!" *Well, a century ago, looks like:

"During the 1910s and the 1920s many fashionable hotels

featured tea dances. These afternoon gatherings were considered a proper place for young ladies to meet young men. The tango was a popular dance. It even affected dress styles because the ladies' skirts had to be slit so the dancers could glide around the floor better."

The Tea Dances page also came to mind when we participated in our dance school's holiday party and Showcase: Dancing In a Winter Wonderland, which had a theme this year: "A Century of Dance", moving through the decades of the last century.

Personally, we have often longed for establishments still to be common where we could go for dinner and dancing nearly any night of the week. The idea of Tea Dances beautifully dovetailed with our wistful nostalgia for an era we didn't even know, ourselves; know only through movies and the stories of our elders. On New Year's Eve, we were assailed by thoughts of Dancing In the New Year; gosh, the Tea Dances page spoke of fashionable hotels featuring tea dances, are any establishments hosting NYE parties where we could ballroom- (and Latin- ) dance right through midnight? I was strongly tempted to post on our school's Facebook Page to tell all our instructors that they should "just give up having your own lives over New Year's and put on a big Dancing New Year's Eve bash for all of us students---KIDDING!! You know that right?" ... Well, kidding about them giving up their own lives in order to throw a party for all of us; not kidding about wishing we'd known of a place where we could've waltzed, fox trotted, tangoed, rumbaed, cha-chaed, mamboed into the new year.

Imagine our delight on New Year's Day when we were out getting some decorations for next Christmas and we came across the book: Shall We Dance?, Brian Lanker, photographer.
It fed right into our Dance-on-the-brain state of mind as paged through the book, utterly awestruck. It helped somewhat to alleviate our ache to be dancing. Once again, visions of a ballroom filled with swells of music danced through my head as I sighed over my next cup of tea.

And knowing that this week the studio reopens and our first private lesson of 2011 is only about 48 hours away, has the image of Tea Dances gliding through my head, again. Tea Dances really do need to make a comeback, don't you think?

Life Is What Happens While You're Making a Cup of Tea ... or Other Plans

2010-12-31T17:51:00.000-05:00

With a nod to John Lennon for the quote I adapted for my title, I shake my head in amazement and exhale: Whew! What a year! Or, more to the point, what a half-year!

I find myself scrambling about on this last day of 2010, trying to complete so many things before that fateful midnight ball-drop and chime. I was working on an Archive Home Page for our e-newsletter, Sipping Notes, as well as trying to finally compose another Sipping Notes so that there would be something to archive--when I truly realized how long it had been since KTeas last put out a Sipping Notes or posted on this blog.

It's like the roller-coaster of life suddenly changed course in July, embarking on a series of wild turns and inclines and mad plunges, and while I adore roller-coasters, this one was proving difficult just to hang onto!  In an odd way, the roller-coaster seemed to slow down, or at least the ride smoothed out a bit, just as The Holidays began. I thought that meant we'd get a chance to play catch-up on things like Sipping Notes, the blog, running some specials for the holidays on the website and at our two outlets. But not so: I got sick---nothing life-threatening, don't worry; just the flu, but stubborn, persistent, knock-me-on-my-fanny & then after I thought I was "better" and could resume both personal holiday activities and KTeas business activities, knock-me-back-on-my-fanny-and-laugh-at-me-for-thinking-I-could-resume-my-life kind of flu.  Since KTeas consists presently of just two people and one of them has a "day job", having the other person out of commission for numerous weeks kind of puts the kibosh on doing anything extra!

Upon my realization this afternoon on New Year's Eve, allow me to use this blog as an End-of-Year Letter to fill you in on what's been happening while we've always had a cuppa at hand to see us through . . .:

Perhaps the most dizzying happening was when KTeas was informed that one of our suppliers had changed their business strategy and would no longer focus on wholesale clients. We gather that they wish to concentrate on and expand their retail and franchise activities. While they have not cut all ties with their existing wholesale clients, they have instituted some new policies and procedures to help them manage the wholesale side of things with less focus while they divert their energies to their new business strategies, and several of those new policies essentially make it too difficult for small businesses like KTeas to continue working with them. That may be intentional, to eliminate their wholesale client base through attrition, or it may not.

At any rate, that development has caused KTeas to create a new category on our website for Limited Quantity, While Supplies Last teas. All of the teas we get from that supplier will not be restocked when quantities on hand are exhausted. So check it out, see if any favorites are there and get them "while supplies last".

We have adopted the outlook with this development that we are simply retiring a few old products to make room for some of the exciting new products we have coming in! We have already begun to receive Hawaii-grown teas, mentioned in the July 2010 Sipping Notes. (As soon as we get the archive home page operational, we'll make sure Of Life and Tea includes a link to it so that you can see earlier Sipping Notes to catch references like that one.) We will soon be receiving single-estate teas directly from Ceylon (Sri Lanka, but the former colonial name has "stuck" with its teas) and from India: both the Assam region and the Darjeeling region. We cannot wait to share these wonderful new teas with you, especially the Drinking Tea In Harmony With the Seasons program that the estate in India, comprising both the Assam and the Darjeeling estates mentioned, has instituted which will allow us to pre-order teas from upcoming harvests so that those teas will be shipped to us within 3 weeks of being on the bush. Talk about fresh!

We also mentioned in the last Sipping Notes that Ed and Kathryn achieved the 1st Level of Certification by the Specialty Tea Institute, in June, immediately following the World Tea Expo. In August, Kathryn was able to attend and successfully complete Level 2 Certification.

Readers of Sipping Notes have noticed that KTeas partnered with Simply Elegant Gift Baskets to provide tea-inclusive gift baskets for all your gift-giving needs. Another happening threw us for a loop when the owner of Simply Elegant Gift Baskets found out she had to move elsewhere when her husband had the good fortune to get a new job in a different city. Happy for them both, to be sure, we floundered for a bit. To our rescue bounded a new company, formed by mutual friends of the owner of Simply Elegant! B.J. and Dee have each been involved in the making of gift baskets in their own businesses, and they rallied to provide the Simply Elegant owner with reliable referrals for her local customers: Southern Charm Gift Baskets. Southern Charm has already produced some striking gift baskets which include or consist entirely of KTeas products, some of which you can see on the KTeas Facebook Page.

KTeas has been involved in numerous activities over these last months, such as doing Tea Samplings at The Shoppes @ River's Edge, giving presentations to groups like the Silver Sneakers Lunch-n-Learn at the Baxter YMCA, being present at vendor blenders & festivals at Celebration Cottage, the Baxter Village Fall Festival, the Decadent Dreams Chocolate Festival to benefit Keystone Substance Abuse Services (where our chocolate flavored rooibos and mate proved very popular in the sampling tent!), donating iced tea and scone samples to the Twelve Days of Christmas Charity Benefit, recording a couple of radio spots to sponser holiday programming on WRHI AM 1340 & FM 94.3 and Interstate 107FM . . . just to name a few.

One of the matters we want to cover in the upcoming Sipping News is to get the word out that after much deliberation, we have finally devised a customer loyalty program for our website. We tried so hard to come up with something unique and original, but we finally realized we were making it far too complicated. We recognized that as consumers ourselves, our favorite customer appreciation programs all did basically the same thing: for every retail dollar we spend at the company, be it an online business, a movie theater, a chocolate shop, what-have-you, we are earning a reward or a thank-you, whether they simply track the $ or give us points for the $, and when we reach a certain level, usually $100 spent, we get some kind of discount, often simply a gift certificate for $10, or 10% of what we spent. So we decided the KISS principle worked best: Keep It Simple to Savor the Tea, or KISS the Tea. Look for that to be implemented in 2011.

Not exactly tea related, but something else that occupied us a great deal in these last months is our dancing. We finally, after 2+ years of taking lessons and loving it at DanceSport Carolina, we participated in a competition that our school put on: the Cosmopolitan Classic, on September 26. A great deal of preparation went into that incredible experience. No sooner was that out of the way, than we began preparing for our "recital" in our dance school's Christmas Party Showcase "Dancing In a Winter Wonderland" on Dec. 4, this year with the theme "A Century of Dance". We are dancing into the new year as well as ushering in 2011 to a raised cup of cheer/tea!

All of the above gives you a good "taste" of what has been occupying our attention in this last half of 2010.

Now I'll sign off for 2010. See you next year!

Black Currant, the Forbidden Fruit (well, shrub, anyway)

2010-07-19T11:30:00.000-04:00

Black Currant was not scheduled to be my second blog entry. I am working on an entry about "taste of place" which was intended to be next, have simply run into some slow-downs in getting the composition out of my "mental blog" and into print. (At first I experienced tightening tendrils of panic: oh no! I just started this blog. Not Writer's Block already! But then I realized that the topic was trying to go into two different directions so I need to split it into two entries, hence the delay in posting again.)

When I saw Troy's Teaviews review of KTeas' Black Tea with Black Currant, however, in which Troy imparts fascinating background on this luscious berry, I just had to share, regardless of any interruption to planned postings! This blog is about Life, after all. Life Happens when it happens, so I must go with the flow.

Troy is correct: I don't know that I've ever tasted currants themselves. Hence, I lack a personal vocabulary for describing the flavor of our black currant tea. Therefore, I had to rely upon descriptions offered by our suppliers and on packaging for black currant teas I've tried over time.

The timing of the appearance of Troy's review is a little bizarre, considering I recently mentioned in my first blog entry "The Spirit of Tea" our search for a loose leaf black-currant-flavored black tea that matched the taste sensation---or at least the remembered taste sensation---we experienced the first time we drank black currant tea, made from teabags. . . .

I knew only that the black currant black tea I first drank had an elegance about it, somehow surpassing in sheer pleasure any other fruit-flavored tea which I may have had up to that point, and indeed since. Somehow each sip of that liquor in the cup ("liquor" in the case of tea being the liquid that results from steeping the tea leaves, or the beverage that you drink) trumpeted Quintessential Tea-ness. And I would love to talk to an herbalist or someone versed in the medicinal properties of plants and fruits, to find out if black currant truly is medicinal. As we drank it more often after discovering it, we found that if we had sinus headaches during allergy season or the like, the black currant tea actually soothed the headache. Which widened our search when I could no longer find the decaffeinated variety of the bag black currant tea that we first experienced, to enjoy in the evening when I've had a headache all day.

However, I never gave a thought to why I had not experienced black currants before I discovered that tea. Nor since, really, except very occasionally in scones at a tea room or the like. Nor had I given a thought to why there wasn't a proliferation of black currant teas in the stores---and I certainly never thought in terms of "in the stores in the U.S.".

Troy lends insight in his review: "Its only been in the last ten years that growing BlackCurrants was legal in the united states, before then it was banned due to a disease they could transmit to pines. So due to an obscure law pushed through by the logging industry Many americans have no direct frame of reference for the berry they nonetheless use to describe the flavor of many red wines and black chocolates."

Fascinating! Who knew? And in the course of Googling for more such information now that Troy has apprised me that the information is out there to be had, I may have found something about the black currant tea's effect on our headaches in this article: Black Currant History, in the last paragraph. If this article is reliable, of course. Surely makes me desire all the more to find a decaffeinated black currant tea for the waning hours of a day spent with a headache!

(One may wonder why I refer to Troy's review, even considering the fascinating information he imparted, since he gave our black currant tea only an "It's OK" rating. You know, I just can't help it. The fascinating information outweighs the rating. And tea is so subjective, anyway. If the finer points of a person's reaction to a tea [or indeed, anything else] could be discerned and quantified, there would probably be as many different ratings of any tea as there are people who tasted it. I love the reviews regardless of how they rate the tea because I love hearing how different people perceive the same thing. I love knowing what words come to mind when someone tastes the tea, what feelings and memories are evoked by the aroma, the taste. The rating of the tea doesn't matter as much as Troy sharing his experience with the tea.)

So: what fun! You learn something new everyday. Thanks, Troy!

The Spirit of Tea

2010-07-10T20:36:00.000-04:00

"At the Intersection of Life and Tea" . . . "The Spirit of Tea" . . . one and the same. The longer phrase instantly became my motto as much as KTeas' motto when my husband first uttered it as the tagline appended to a proposed name for our someday tea business. I announced that whether we ultimately used the name he had just proposed or something else entirely, that phrase would be a our motto, because that expressed, for me, what Tea is all about, what it is I want to share and convey such that I even want us to have a tea business . . . The Spirit of Tea.

Naturally, we've been asked what brought us to become tea purveyors. The more immediate answer revolves around the cupboards full of teas that we always had. Some actual teas, some herbal tisanes, all tea bags---hey, everyone starts somewhere, right? We liked to offer tea to visitors. I was known as The Tealady for my Love of All Things Tea before having handles and usernames on the Internet became commonplace. Ironically, by the time I started using many of the apps and services that required a username, I discovered that "Tealady" was already taken, so I couldn't carry that title into the realm of the Internet.

Nonetheless, I have been Tealady. The Hospitality inherent in Tea appealed to me. The Ritual of Taking Tea called to me. My love of tea was not limited to the formal Afternoon Tea or Garden Party Tea, though I delighted in the concept. The Spirit of Tea seeped into The Everyday, and that, also, is part of what I love about tea. I would turn an afternoon of watching movies with the family into a tea party. (Shall I indicate how long ago this went on?: when we started doing this, those movies were on VHS!!!) I would take a tea party to family friends who had just had babies, whether or not their first, and couldn't get out of the house much in those first few weeks. I would have someone over for tea or take them tea if they were not well, whether with illness or sadness. And so on. I am Tealady.

Strangely, as I look back on my life to glean the origins of Tea's profound hold on my heart and soul . . . I find that I can only answer "I don't know." I don't know how or when it started or what started it. It just is. It simply seems as if it always has been.

True: my mother drank tea when I was a child. That is certainly how I was introduced to the beverage. My mother did not, however, have any special rituals or precious China tea sets that enchanted me as a child. She simply drank tea. That was the sum total of my exposure to tea, to begin with. Yet, tea grew to be more than simply a beverage to me, though the beverage can be special enough in itself when you have a really good cup of tea (whatever that may be for you). Somehow, sometime, to me, tea became Tea. The Currents of Life might have, upon occasion, caused me to drift away from the State of Being wherein Tea permeated my Life, but always, eventually, I drifted back to the Intersection of Life and Tea. Whether because I discovered a new friend had a tea set and loved to Take Tea, also, or when I experienced a little thrill the first time Captain Picard intoned, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."

When and where did it all start? I can't tell you. I can tell you, however, when I "got it". For all my love of All Things Tea throughout most of my Life---to the point that I can't remember when that love didn't exist though I know there must have been such a time---I still didn't fully grasp the power of Tea until one Sunday afternoon, oh, a decade-and-a-half-or-so ago, give or take a few years.

As I have said, "in the beginning" our teas were all grocery-store-bought tea bags. That is what we used for those afternoon movie-watching tea parties, and what I took in portable tea parties to others. At one point, a friend who knew we liked tea gave us a gift of a couple of Loose Teas from a special shop he'd run across in one specialized district or another where we lived at the time. Ooooooohh! We were entranced---and a bit overwhelmed, wary, intimidated. We weren't sure what to do with this odd, different form of tea. I think we already had a tea ball in our kitchen, acquired somewhere/when along the way, but we'd not had call to use it in who knew how long.

The exotic nature of this Loose Tea caused us to thank the gift-giver profusely and Put the Tea Away For a Special Occasion. We just didn't "get it" yet.

Time passed, as time does. We moved to another state. Movie rental became more common and as a family we frequently had afternoons or evenings devoted to watching a movie or two on VHS ::gasps::! The Sunday afternoons in particular lent themselves to those impromptu informal tea parties.

One Sunday---I cannot tell you the date and I cannot tell you why I thought of this on that particular Sunday---I suddenly recalled that Loose Tea we'd been given before we moved. I realized we had never had a special occasion that called for tea (or for which we had thought of the loose tea, at least) and so we still had not used that gifted tea. Bizarrely, I knew right where to find the tea and I knew precisely where the tea ball was. I decided that even though this was just an ordinary Sunday afternoon that we were going to spend watching movies, we would have that special Loose Tea, and I pulled down an old teapot of my mother's that was on display with our "good dishes".

What a wonderful tea party that turned out to be. It was the first time we had had black tea flavored with lychee. Delectable. Looking back, I cringe at the thought of how we packed far too much loose tea into that poor tiny tea ball. We probably didn't steep it the right amount of time. Nevertheless, we enjoyed that lychee black loose tea and we came away from that whole experience utterly delighted. It was as we cleaned up afterward and chattered about how special it had been that I "got it".

Despite my emphasis on Loose Tea, I'm not even saying it was the loose tea, itself, that worked the magic. After all, Ed and I are still searching for a loose black tea flavored with black currant that we like as much as the first black currant tea we ever had---in tea bags. This is not to say that we have not had any good black currant teas in our search. Indeed, we've had several very good ones and we carry a couple of them in our KTeas selection. But we still haven't found one that we like as much as that first, which we experienced in tea bags.

The Magic upon this occasion arose from the Approach. All that time, I had thought we needed to save that Loose Tea for A Special Occasion. On that Sunday, I realized that I had been looking at it Backwards, all that time. The Magic happened when we used the Loose Tea to make an Ordinary occasion, Extraordinary.

That was when I "got it". The Spirit of Tea . . . At the Intersection of Life and Tea.

'Til we raise our cuppas to each other again,