27 December 2007

I’ve a Little Teapot

I've never been a coffee person. Tea, I've found, tastes as good as it smells, and goes much better with cookies, smelly cheese, itty-bitty sandwiches, sushi, and curried eggplant. There are at least ten boxes of the usual tea bag suspects in the pantry here at home - from lemon zinger to Irish Breakfast. At school, I wouldn't even want to guess the number. There's maple sugar, chai, and Prince of Wales for sure, plus a delicate Australian tea squirreled away behind the baked beans. I suppose, in my warm and fuzzy love of tea, I'm a pretty typical English major.

For Christmas, among other, non-food related, things, I got this pretty little teapot that will fit perfectly on the crowded workspace of my desk. It came with a packet of black tea (with banana, pineapple, passion fruit, and mango), which lasted for two cups (well, one and a half, because my tea cup was actually a little bigger than the tea pot). Full-bodied and lingeringly sweet, tasting more like flowers than fruit, really. In color, it was a perfect complement to the evergreen I cut from the yard, but it tasted of a tropical summer.

Sometime over break, while I have a full oven and stovetop, I want to try some recipes out of my new cookbooks – The Best Ever Three & Four Ingredient Cookbook and To the Queen's Taste: Elizabethan feasts and recipes. For now, it's off to sushi with my high school friends and time for that second cup of tea.

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