Tea Project
MEM Russian Caravan (pot, $2.50)
Cafenation, Brighton, Massachusetts

I thought it might be fun to create a list of different types of tea to try – the basis of my tea curriculum. So, I came up with one – that little flow chart in the picture above. Included are green teas, white teas, black tea, oolong, pu-erh, rooibos, mate and other herbal infusions. Some are true teas, others are not.

There is a lot of tea out there to drink. How do you narrow it down? Most grocery stores have a good half aisle devoted to tea. I actually snapped a few illicit tea photos in Whole Foods to see if I was missing anything obvious. It’s always shocking to me how many types of tea each brand carries! One possibility for this project is making it simpler for myself – working through all the teas imported by MEM Tea Imports and Samovar, but that still won’t get me to 500. (Although if either were to sponsor me, I’d be one happy tea drinker! Please??)

So, my goal, I think, is for quality rather than quantity, and making sure to get a good representation of different families of tea. I plan on working methodically, and going on the hunt for some really special experiences.

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Another aspect of this project is the excuse to acquire tea paraphernalia. Even though I most commonly drink hot tea out of a glass (just like Michael Pollan, apparently), I’m fascinated with all sorts of tea cups, pots, kettles and brewing contraptions.

I love this wonderful infographic by Wendy Chan on the taxonomy of teas. It includes several tea drinking countries around the world, represented both by type of tea drunk, and the cups used. I love it!

And a close-up of the center of the tea wheel:

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And finally, a few notes about my experience. Cafenation is in Brighton on Washington Street. It’s sort of an odd location, but the window ledge is a nice place to read a book and sip a pot of tea.

To drink, I went with the Russian Caravan, and added cream to complement the smokiness. I oversteeped it as I drew my little flow chart, but I never mind a little bitterness in my tea.

Russian Caravan is a blend of Chinese black teas, named after the caravans that used to import teas from China to Europe. It’s deep and smoky, and reminds me of old men arguing and playing backgammon. 

There were three notable occurrences this trip, which reminded me how fascinating humanity can be:

1. I sat behind a fellow wearing big headphones who took out about 25 pens and put them on the ledge, and proceeded to organize them and stick them in some sort of putty like he was making a Christmas Pomander (an orange studded with cloves).

2. A Russian gentleman, who actually ordered Russian Caravan tea and asked for “room”, proceeded to pour what must have been more than 1/4 cup of honey in his cup.

3. Two people sat next to me one table over, hugging. Yes, hugging, in full embrace, for at least five minutes until their order was ready.

And that was it. I spent several hours there, unconnected, computer-less, writing lists and thinking about tea. I’m looking forward to seeing where this project goes.

What type of tea are you drinking? 

Tea Project #1
MEM Organic Earl Grey (pot, $2.95)
South End Buttery, South End, Boston

Here’s the thing. Sometimes, when you have a grand idea for a project that will make you happier, and you haven’t quite figured out all the details, you just start. And see what happens. You shouldn’t wait on the things that will make your heart soar. I have this plan, to taste 500 different types of tea – and to share the experience, the tea, the moment, the people, the places, and what I’m reading – and this is the start of the project.

I was at Lekker, in the South End, buying a tea pot, naturally, and solicited advice for where I could find a good cup of tea. Mara, the kind shopkeep, recommended South End Buttery. I had not been there, so I headed off for my first “official” cup of tea.

I took notes that looked like this:

South End Buttery. MEM Tea Imports. Organic Earl Grey, served in a metal tea pot, on a marble bar. Paired with turkey chili (which ended up being a very good hearty vegetarian chili, a fortuitous error), even on such an un-seasonally warm day at the end of November. Soundtrack: Lena Horne. Wait, make that Lena Horne, and then what can only be described as music that sounds similar to the Queer as Folk soundtrack. Glam pop? Crowd: Young, old, mostly hip South End crowd. I don’t think I’ve ever been more jealous of the variety of fall jackets. Dog friendly! They have dog treats at the door.

A remarkably small amount of Apple Macintosh Computers. As in, yes, I do believe I was the only one.

What I like about Earl Grey: It’s my favorite type of tea. Black tea, flavoured with bergamot oil (a type of citrus fruit). Maybe it was a mistake starting out with my favorite type of tea, so early in my project. But, I’m going to go ahead and say that I can drink different brands of the same tea. You wouldn’t limit yourself to one bottle of Riesling, why do the same with tea?

{What I was reading:}

Design*Sponge. They have this really great series of “Sneak Peeks“, where they showcase the homes of creative people of all disciplines.

My notes from TEDxCambridge. Still working on getting those typed up.

This article about how Twitter helps a small business thrive. (I’d like to think I had a small hand in that one – it’s all about Celia using Twitter at Omnivore!)

Thanks to this lovely post about breakfast at bigBang studio – re-discovering the WGBH Streaming Classical Radio Player. (Warning, it starts playing nearly immediately if you click).

Food in Jars.  Just what it sounds like. This happens to be one of my favorite topics. See : Strawberry Cheesecake in a Jar. I’m also happy to say that my back-ordered shipment of Weck Jars from Heath came in the mail last week, and I’m in love.

The websites of two small bakeries in the Bay Area making me hungry from afar: Marge Bakery and Starter Bakery. Both are wonderful choices for holiday treats.

Well, that’s it for now. We’ll see how this all shapes up. 

I’ve been concentrating these last few weeks on moving in and getting myself situated. This mostly means that I’ve been taking long walks while procrastinating on real work, and identifying my “key snack locations“. Key snack locations are the places I go back to again and again, can have a drink or a very small meal, sit down with a book, or treat myself after suitable exercise. Usually they are noted in miles or minutes from my house, a particular small bite of food that is satisfying, and by appropriate mood. In San Francisco I had several of these: Peasant Pies, (1 mile, Basque Beef hand-pie, standing room for when you just want to grab and go), Samovar (1.5, Masala Chai and Egg Bowl, to stay the afternoon cozily with a book), Tartine (1.5 miles, Almond Rocher and coffee, people watching) or Hapa Ramen (4.5 miles, Fried Chicken Bowl, there is never a bad time for this stuff and you walked far you damn well deserve it).

In addition to the pursuit of gastronomic pleasure, the other reason to identify these places is to give myself somewhere to go when I’m feeling tired or sullen or lonely – which can happen when you don’t work daily in a traditional office. Finding these new places gives me a kick out the door, a good reason to get out of bed in the morning, and a purpose.

So here I am now living in Newton – the ‘burbs of Boston. After staking out the local Starbucks (.3 miles, very large iced tea, reading/re-charging), I’ve been going progressively farther in my exploits, and have even managed to walk to Cambridge and back. I’ve re-visited a few favorites: Sevan Bakery (2.3 miles, cold sour cherry juice and stuffed grape leaves, when in need for Middle Eastern groceries), Formaggio Kitchen (4 miles, cheese samples, good house coffee + poverty inducing groceries, suitable for all moods), L.A. Burdicks (5 miles, single origin hot chocolate, when I’m feeling nostalgic).

And I’ve found a new one: Clover HSQ (5.5, breakfast sandwich, meeting with friends/getting work done). I’m going to tell you about it, because I’ve gone twice in the past week.

Clover Food Lab is one of those entrepreneurship success stories that made me happy before I even got a chance to try the food. The owner, Ayr Muir, did a great job of documenting the growth of his idea from concept to reality, and I’ve been reading it for a while now. He’s been blogging since the idea was just a seed, and there are hundreds of posts about his successes and failures: branding, licensing, developing each menu item, building the trucks, hiring (and firing) staff, developing a corporate culture, you name it.

What started out as a humble food truck, has since scaled up to several mobile locations and a brick and mortar restaurant. The food is vegetarian (but not boring!), local, and organic when possible. There is a focus on sustainability (everything is compostable), and they care about coffee. I finally made my way out there last week with my good friend Amanda – we were swayed by Clover’s promise of free cider donuts.

“HSQ” as they call the Harvard location is a nice place to sit and stay a while, one of my strongest criteria for a key snack location. The space is bright and airy, and the architecture admirable. In my two trips, I’ve noticed that folks at HSQ are generally in a good mood. When you walk in, things are a little overwhelming, but not uncomfortably so. The open kitchen is on your left, and you see people making real food.

The menu is on your right, on these neat dynamic LCD boards that they custom built, with the menu and approx. time it will take for each item to be made. You order directly from the folks at the front door on their iPhone.

Let’s talk about their coffee, shall we? It’s another one of those important things in my life. I typically only drink a cup a day, so it has to be a good one. At Clover, you get your choice of ordering from one of the different local roasters they have on rotation (I went on a Speedwell day), or a well-regarded national brand that Caf-icionados (did I really just use that word?) will appreciate. This week was Stumptown, but since I’ve had my share of Stumptown already, I opted for the local brew. I got the Guatemalan ($2). My partner-in-crime Amanda got herself the Kenyan* ($2).

After ordering, we grabbed our free donuts, and headed over to the coffee bar to wait for Lucia to make our pour-overs. It’s been hard for me to get used to non-SF-style coffee pouring, but Clover actually makes a good case for not weighing/no bloom/no spiral pouring on their blog. Despite having read this short manifesto in advance, I had to ward off the anxiety that comes from shattering my San Francisco-coffee-indoctrination ideals. The fellow standing next Lucia (and grinding the beans to order) was actually from the local roaster and calmed me with his coffee knowledge, and despite desperately missing the calming concentric spiral pouring I’m used to – the coffee was fantastic. You can’t argue with good tasting results.

{*A brief note about this Kenyan. Maybe it was some sort of interaction with the cider donut, but I swear smelled and tasted like weed. Yes, a cup of coffee with the aroma of marijuana. It might have been some crazy olfactory thing going on and was truly bizarre.}

We headed upstairs to sit in their little alcove area and people watch. It’s a little unusual for me to be in an establishment like this without my laptop, but I’ve been learning to wean myself off of it and actually meet up with people again. Upstairs, they grow fresh herbs in a planter that they built themselves.

We inhaled the free donuts (more about that in a second), and after my sweet fix, I started craving real breakfast. The curse of treating yourself to wholesome morning food on a regular basis?

As we were there before 10:30 am, it was too early for the chickpea fritter (their version of falafel) and the barbecue seitan – although they make their seitan themselves, from scratch. I may have offended one of the staff by saying that the marinating seitan looked an awful lot like tripe. But they were totally nice about it.

I opted for the breakfast sandwich ($3). Soft whole wheat pita, a slice of ripe tomato which they season, cheddar cheese, and a soft cooked egg. I’ve been burned lately on one two many spongy egg breakfast sandwiches, but in this sandwich I found the antidote. The way this egg was cooked and the yoke oozed into the pita made me swoon. This egg was the key snack location clincher.

But back to the donuts. These aren’t every day fare at Clover, they are treats, and that’s part of the deal – they don’t have daily desserts because you shouldn’t be eating the sweet stuff at every meal. Instead, on certain occasions like this one, they have special things – free cupcakes for a staff member’s birthday, or Whoopie Fridays. (Apparently, customers have complained, but I think the idea awesome.)

Cider donuts are a New England staple, and I grew up inhaling the ones from Applecrest farm. These, I’m a little ashamed to admit, were better than Applecrest. {May the hometown gods not smite me.}

The batter was not too sweet, a little spicy, and the donuts had a generously sugared exterior. The texture was soft but cake-like on the inside, and a little crispy on the outside. The best part of these donuts? Salt. Enough to cut through the sugar and make for a really well balanced and satisfying bite. I went back for another one before heading out the door, because there were no guilt-trip signs telling me to limit my consumption to one.

And three days later? I was back for the Chickpea Fritter ($5).

When I see things like this on a menu, I don’t expect much – as a Jewish and Middle Eastern girl I’ve had my share of superior falafel, and have impossibly high standards. But my friend Amanda recommended it, and I trust her judgment. And after sinking my teeth into it? It’s good. Really good. More of the soft pita, fried chickpea balls that taste like chickpeas and aren’t oily have a crunchy exterior and a soft center, and plenty of pickled onions, shredded carrots and cabbage, cucumber and tomato salad, all topped with a good dousing of both hummus and tahine. Oo! And some cucumber pickles too – a nice touch.

Plus, the thing is less than 500 calories (they post nutritionals every so often on the site), and enough food to keep you full for a good long time.

In short? This place is definitely going to go into heavy rotation.

What about you? What are your Key Snack Locations? Snack Criteria? And Boston Folks, where should I go next?

Clover
7 Holyoke St
Cambridge, MA
02138

On the way back from our strenuous shopping trip to Ikea, Devon jokingly said he needed $50 dollars worth of Chinese food. Immediately. Preferably two orders of egg rolls. And by jokingly, well, he wasn’t. I’ve been feeding him too many cruciferous vegetables. After five healthy home cooked dinners this week, take-out Chinese food was the appropriate antidote.

The conundrum: where do we get Chinese food in our new city? 

Finding good Chinese food is a crucial task for any relocation, and not one I take lightly. When we moved to San Francisco, well-researched Chinese take-out was the first meal we ate – on the floor of our apartment the day we moved in, New Years Eve. My thought process was that if we were going to kill each other building Ikea furniture and unpacking boxes, our last meal had damn well be a good one.

San Francisco has long been a good city for Chinese food, because it became a stopping point for many immigrants from diverse regions of China. In New England, the iterations of Chinese food are less regional, and skew towards a “Chinese-American” that has little to do with native cuisines. And they are often significantly altered for a more… Puritan palate. (For a fascinating book on the topic, I highly recommend Jenny 8. Lee’s book ‘The Fortune Cookie Chronicles’.)

This is not to say the Boston area takes this type of food lightly. I grew up with classic landmarks of Chinese-American food that rivaled anything in the country. The 1200 seat Kowloon Restaurant was opened in the 1950′s, and is still popular to this day. In the late 1980′s, Rick Chang built a 51,000 square foot copy of Beijing’s Imperial Palace, and opened a restaurant that served 5000 meals a day, and even had a separate Kosher catering kitchen for the 40% Jewish clientele. Alas, the restaurant closed a decade later due to bad management, a recession, and tax evasion, among other things. These are the nostalgic spots with the pu-pu platters, tropical drinks with umbrellas and deep fried egg rolls the size of a small burrito. I’ve never been above this type of dining, but they fulfill a different category of culinary desire.

You then have restaurants that serve food with a semblance of what you can actually find in China, which is typically what I’m looking for. Most restaurants have something in between these two. They can still have General Gao’s Chicken on the menu, but as long as they have some decent native-style dishes, I’m a happy camper. (You know, the ones that your Asian grandmother would semi-approve of, or at least recognize the components of the plate. We all know that she can make it better.)

From my preliminary findings, Chung Shin Yuan seemed like a good idea, but after further research, it was noted that the place is really only good for it’s Taiwanese Dim Sum on weekends. (I’ll jump on that soon). Next on my list? Golden Garden, in nearby Belmont.

We were too far for their 3 mile delivery radius, but after reading scores of reviews recommending their dumplings, we drove over to Belmont at 6:30. The restaurant is located on the corner of an unassuming neighborhood block. There were no cars around. Indeed, we were the only ones seated in the restaurant – although many people stopped by to pick up take-out as we ate. This was a relaxing experience after an afternoon with new-college-parents in Ikea. Devon actually got deliberately rammed by a mother with a cart.

We sat right next to the window. Our waiter was new, maybe a college student, but on top of things. Tea arrived immediately, and we were entertained by the “authentic Chinese-American restaurant zodiac placemats”. I had forgotten about these which seemingly were too kitschy for Chinese restaurants in San Francisco, and I feel nostalgic about every time I see them. Devon is a Pig (zodiacally speaking),  and I am a Tiger. We don’t technically clash, according to the chart.

I wish we ordered more adventurously, but I tend to be cautious on my first experience. The menu had Szechuan cuisine, so I went that route. (Although, later I found out the chefs are from Dongbei, in Northern China, which would explain the lamb on the menu.)

After some deliberation, we ended up with a cup of egg drop soup for Devon, an order of pork and leek dumplings to share, ma po tofu, and rice noodles with pork.

Aside from the egg drop soup, which was slightly bland but serviceable, the food was a success. The dumplings – which you can purchase frozen in bags of 50 – were moist, succulent, and really flavorful. The dumpling wrappers were thin but didn’t break, and they were also boiled, rather than steamed or fried, which really makes a difference in texture.

Devon’s noodles, which I had successfully recommended he get rather than sweet and sour pork, came to the table looking unassuming, with small strips of pork and chopped scallions,  and was surprisingly well seasoned. The next morning they also made a shockingly good stir fry with cubes of zucchini and bitter greens.

My ma po tofu was soft and jiggly – Devon has “textural issues” with food, and hated it. I found it outstanding. The tofu was soft and fresh, the dish had a great ratio of tofu to meat sauce, and it was spicy enough that I had to order an extra bowl of rice. On my next visit, I plan on ordering more of the house specialties: the cucumber with garlic from the “cold delicacies”, the cumin-scented lamb, and a few of the offal dishes.

Have you been in a convenience store lately? It used to be that you could only find sad packages of stale sunflower seeds, Slim Jims, or half smushed Hostess snack packs, but not much else. You may have been able to buy your late night desperation pint of ice cream, but usually it wasn’t the good flavor. For decades, convenience stores weren’t filled with what one wanted, but rather what one, in a moment of irrationality, believed they needed.

Now I have certainly been grateful at times for the salvation of convenience stores: that Snickers bar in Fort Bragg after driving unintentionally three hours up the Pacific Coast Highway without having eaten all day, and the air conditioning in a Buttonwillow gas station when it was 120°F come to mind. But these experiences have been few and far between. It used to be that I wouldn’t stop in one unless I was truly desperate.

I am here to share that times are ‘a changing. In New England, a curious thing seems to be happening. This region has hopes and dreams for convenience stores, and is pushing for a small revolution. Taking it a new level. The ultra-convenience. Superlative convenience. Or more to the point, actually convenient. In New England, our convenience stores are marvelous and full of happy surprises. We have affectionate names for them too. Cumby’s anyone? Ours come with or without gas. And, some of them house restaurants.

Take, for instance, my latest experience: Turkish Kebab’s, located in Jay’s Newmarket Convenience.

Jay’s Convenience Store is actually a converted house. You can get your gas and your cigarettes and your six-packs, but what you really want to come for is the food. Real Turkish food. I’m not really sure which I would have found more unlikely a decade ago – having great food in a convenience store, or finding Turkish food in Newmarket, New Hampshire.

Turkish food is my comfort food, the food I crave. I grew up spending summers in Istanbul. We would visit the city where my grandmother lived, and then spend weeks on Büyükada, the biggest of the Princes’ Islands. The setting was idyllic: a beautiful island in the Bosphorus, with centuries old houses, no cars, and horse drawn carriages. You’d take your tea in the afternoon on the waterfront, watching the ferry boats come in from the city, their passengers visibly relaxing as they got off the boats. We’d swim, and bike, and walk through the neighborhoods. But mostly, we’d eat.

The street food culture in Turkey is diverse and enticing at every corner. There are Dönerci’s selling döner kebap – meat cooked on a rotating spit, and shaved thinly (similar to schwarma). You can get kebabs in sandwiches, or midye tava (fried mussels) with a nut sauce called tarator, or stuffed mussels taken straight from the Bosphorus and cooked on the sidewalk. Or you can get lahmacun, (lah-ma-joon) a thin Turkish flatbread with lamb, filled with lettuce and lemon, and wrapped up to eat on the go. There is Tost – which is the best grilled cheese you will ever eat, stuffed optionally with sucuk, a spicy sausage. Or if you need something sweet, there are pudding shops nearly everywhere, and more ice cream and waffle sellers than there are Starbucks in Manhattan.

I tend to feel sorry for myself that I live so far away from Turkey, especially in the summertime, so I was ecstatic to find Jay’s so close to home to fill myself up on the foods I was missing. I try to do a lot of Turkish cooking but you just can’t recreate döner without a large spit and a qualified chef. (It takes years of training to become a proper Dönerci).

Jay’s is filled with all sorts of treats that I crave. Kebabs – which loosely refers to almost any meat cooked on a stick – are their specialty. I’ve heard good things about their falafel, although I haven’t tried it. You can also get almost anything in sub form. They do Italian style subs as well, and some Italian home-style dishes.

They also have a large variety of Turkish salads, including Kısır, a bulgur wheat salad similar to Tabouli (they actually label it as Tabouli, but technically it is different), and hummus, and a very good eggplant salad. They have “popular” New England favorites including seafood salad, but why you would purchase that when you had Jay’s other options, I have no idea.

Turkish people also consume a lot of pastry and fried foods, and Jay’s carries many of these as well, including flaky Börek (turnovers) filled with white cheese and parsley, savory meat pies, zucchini fritters, and even some Italian arancini (rice balls) as big as your fist.

I was excited to hear the grocery section had a small collection of imported Turkish foods, because I always find myself missing things like Turkish honey, jams, and olive spreads. We typically travel over an hour to stock up on these things at Sevan in Watertown, Massachusetts, and I was looking forward to the.. erm.. close to home convenience.

Unfortunately, when we went, the entire Turkish grocery section in the back had been decimated. It turns out they had received a visit that week from a group of Turkish high-schoolers spending the month at Phillips Exeter Academy’s summer school. At least I can completely understand their impulse!

And apparently, students can also get a 15% discount on food if they show their ID. It’s probably better that they weren’t open when I was in highschool, otherwise I would have been in twice a week abusing their generosity.

This trip we all decided to order the same thing – thinly sliced döner in a Turkish lavash bread, rolled with lettuce, tomato, pickled onion, and yogurt sauce. While very tasty, I found myself finding the ratio a little off – there was actually too much meat for my preference, and I would have liked a little bit more sauce. Next time, I think I might actually get the tomato sauce their Italian cook makes rather than the more traditional yogurt. Nothing wrong with a little fusion!

We also took home some smoky Turkish eggplant salad, and some kisir, as well as some kadayif  – a crispy pastry similar to baklava, except with vermicelli-like dough filled with pistachio nuts. (At some point, I’ll write a 5000 word essay on my love of Turkish pastry… the stuff is glorious.)

The one flaw of Jay’s is the lack of seating: when you are hungry, you want to eat food right away! Some quick thinking led us to the benches at Stratham Hill Park. And here, I leave you with a shot of my mother, a real live Turkish person, enjoying her sandwich. Authenticity folks, I like it.

Turkish Kebab’s Subs & Grill (in Jay’s Newmarket Convenient Store and Gas)
35 North Main Street, Newmarket, New Hampshire
603 – 659- 1500