by Sam Tackeff | Apr 9, 2012 | Tea
Just a few thoughts today.
Tea In: Recently I’ve been brewing a lot of tea in the fantastic tea maker that Breville sent me. {Review forthcoming}. It’s an ingenious contraption that does the work for you and keeps your tea warm for an hour after brewing without over-steeping. You can set it to brew your tea in the morning as you would a coffee maker, which believe me, feels like magic.
While I’m completely enamored by the Breville, some occasions call for a different experience entirely: a slower, more intentional experience. When I’m sad, anxious, or frustrated, tea becomes my savior. In these moments, I’ll simply heat up the hot water and gently place a flowering tea bulb in my glass tea pot. I have a stash of these teas from Numi, as well as some that my brother brought home for me from Vietnam. They look like little round bricks, and remind me fondly of the pellets we’d make in the Geo lab for element analysis. {Nerd!}
But back to the tea making: I pour in the water. And then I sit. And I stare at it bloom in front of me. Reality melts away. I find my sense of wonder. The moment is mine. It makes me smile every time.
* * *
Tea Out: Most mornings before heading in to the office, I leave my house early to park myself at a coffee shop to get work done. I get in line, order earl grey tea from Hassan, whose smile is infectious. I add a small amount of half and half, head to either the big wooden table or the soft chair in the back, and sit down to write my morning list. Once I have direction, I get started on the hardest task of my day.
I’m not sure when I started the habit, but getting whatever I’m dreading out of the way is always a relief, and frees up my mind to work on all the things that need to get done. I’m thankful to whoever tipped me off to this strategy.
In this hour, I manage to complete my work more efficiently than any other time of the day. It has become my super-charged hour. Some people work best in silence, but I love being surrounded by people in a public place. The best way I can explain it: there is something about the morning rush that helps me focus – the constant buzz in the background fills up one of the ever-chattering channels in my brain – thus allowing me to tune out this channel completely.
Tea making is an important ritual for me – I make several cups a day as a way to pause and be present. But in this early hour I’m grateful for someone else making my cup of tea. It provides a sense, of relief – a strong sense that I’m being taken care of. It makes me smile every time.
by Sam Tackeff | Dec 5, 2011 | Restaurants, Tea
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.
by Sam Tackeff | Dec 2, 2011 | Blogging, Tea
(Coveted Teapot via Heath Ceramics)
“The answer, I believe, is identifying the things you love (particularly the little things) and seeking to experience them each and every day.”
A friend of mine emailed me a few days ago to let me know that she really liked this quote I had written. I was completely flattered, but also a little bit surprised because I didn’t remember writing it – sometimes the words just end up on the page – but sure enough, there it was, and it was a nice thought to savor this week.
And so, here, I’d like to introduce to you a little project I’m embarking on. While working on my life list, of the big and small things I want to do and accomplish and learn, one of my happy topics was tea. I love tea, I drink a lot of it. I love the moments that surround tea drinking, and tea culture. With tea, I’m calm and peaceful, creative, and sometimes challenged. So I decided to add tea to my list, 500 unique moments with tea, and I’m going to try to share as many as I can here with you.
There is something so wonderful about starting a new passion project, and adding a new sense of purpose to your life, and finding a new lens through which to look at the world. I’ve been having fun shaping this adventure – and I think it’s going to take on a life of its own as it goes along.
In designing this project, I wrote out a series of questions, and I think I’d like to share them with you, in hopes that maybe this inspires you to take on a project of your own. For this part of the process I really wanted to put ideas out there, without any intention of answering them (yet). I find this is a good exercise to start any type of project.
- What is this project really about? Is it about tea? Is it about people? Places? Solitary moments? Shared moments? Moments where I feel alive?
- How do I best communicate this project? Public vs. Private?
- Do I want to take 500 pictures of tea? (Yes.) How can I make these pictures tell a story?
- What do I want to write about? How do I organize my thoughts to share? How much, or how little can I share?
- What type of consistency am I looking for? One cup a week? One cup a day? Should I have a schedule? Do tea tastings count?
- What books do I want to read about tea?
- What are the greater themes that relate to tea?
- How much depth do I want to give to this project?
- Does this stay on The Second Lunch? Do I dedicate a website to the project?
- How can I subsidize the project?
- What if I decide that I really want to have 500 cups of coffee? (This could have easily been five hundred types of cheese, another passion of mine, but that got nixed because 500 one ounce pieces of cheese could easily translate into 14 pounds in the long run. Tea is a little more up my alley.)
- How long will this take? Is five hundred unique cups of tea enough? Can I double up? 500 blends of tea? Am I going to have to drink 1000 different types of tea? (aka.. will this spiral out of control).
- What do I want to get out of this at the end? Is the visual record enough? Is there a book in the making?
- What type of expertise am I trying to gain? Is this about savoring the experience? Cataloguing data? Keeping score? How do I make sure that I keep this enjoyable?
- Am I allowed to quit?
And so here is where you come in: I’d love to solicit ideas to help me shape this project. Make it better. Make it more fulfilling for me (and for you). Do you have your own passion project? (Share a link here if you’d like!) I wholeheartedly welcome (and encourage) comments, or emails (sam at thesecondlunch.com) to help strategize. You will be thanked profusely, and who knows, maybe get something out of it in the long run.
