When I started, I calculated how much tea was in a tea bag, and using 1 tea bag per cup, calculated the cost of a cup of tea, I found their price to be equal to or slightly less than the middle range; there are the outrageously expensive Empire of Panjandrum and Tea Gardens of the Hindu Kush type tea, which may or may not be worth the prices elevated as high as the mountainside terraces where the tea is grown; there are the cheap tea which are...well, they're very cheap.
Grace Tea is wonderful.
When you buy tea this way, and it takes a month or so to drink it, and you wonder whether it is going stale, you realize it is not going stale, it is as fresh as the day you bought it, and you realize just how incredibly long those other teas you have choked down must have been in the consumer pipeline: just remember how ghastly restaurant tea usually is - and served with 1 tea bag for 3 to 4 bloody cups of hot water!
In this world of tribulation, there is Grace.
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One of my only regrets in life is that I didn't purchase a painting when we lived in Istanbul. It was in a gallery and was larg, rectangular, of a wheat field in a downward angle - no sky in the frame. In the lower left corner three women with bags of tea on their back while they harvested. When we went back next day to buy it (it was only $300), it was gone - sold. I remember riding in a bus along the Black Sea seeing women dotting the hills, picking tea - but in that scene the bags of tea hung from their necks in front, like one large breast.
No wonder you speak Turkish. How long did you live is Istanbul ( not Constantinople! )?
Almost 3 years.
(Istanbul, not Constantinople - I found a webdings musical notes but it wouldn't copy as such.)
Someone had a CD out with it back in the 90s. Can't remember who it was.
I would love to visit Istanbul.
Is a switch from coffee to tea worth it? Somehow, I've always thought of tea as more civilized. A most learned colleague of mine used to drink it daily.
I switched entirely in 2007-2008. Then at the winter solstice of 2008, I switched back again.
And right now, I feel like my caffeine poles are getting ready to switch polarity yet again.
Of course, you cannot evaluate tea until you have had "good" tea, properly prepared...by yourself, not by some officious tea-know-it-all busybody.
Istanbul, Not Constantinople was one of the old 78 clay disks I got from my mum, sometime in the seventies. The disk was from the 50s, and I have linked to it here. I know it very, very well. Listening to it makes me feel like I'm ten again, smelling the dust heating on the old 50s portable record player I'd bought at a flea market (my dad was against me having a record player, so I had to do it the ridiculous way). I never became much of a record collector, although my (first) ex-husband had metres and metres of the damned things (he kept them, too, and good luck to him and them). Youtube is my record collection, I absolutely adore it.
As for tea and coffee...both have their place. I like my coffee French roast as cafe au lait (two sugars, please), and my tea as Earl Gray (brewed in a pot, thank you), milk no sugar. Although just occasionally, tea is v. good indeed served the Russian way (black, with a (small, beautiful, old, preferably Russian blue and ornately patterned) plate of home-made raspberry jam on the side, to be eaten with a (tiny, preferably ornate, silver) spoon, between sips. Try it. It will do things to you other drinks can't reach).
If I had to choose one and stay with it for as long as I live, no going back, it would most deffo definitely be coffee, though. Oh *coffee*.
Hello, sweet Montag, hello, my new friend Ruth, hello Baysage, too. (Baysage - may I ask you a question? How is your name pronounced? Is the -age at the end uttered like the -age in "baggage", or is it "bay" "sage", as in the two herbs? This has been troubling my mind. Fabulous photo of you, anyway.)
Time for an all-round
x
Do not publish comments before you are ready to respond to them.
I did so last night, and this morning I had the deuce of a time finding Anna's moist comment here...forgot where it was entirely.
I mean, it could have been anywhere, all the way back to the Woking Wet Spot Machine, a steampunk device of gargantuan proportions that I have never quite gotten over.
Whereas in the world of Montag, fussy and Fezziwiggian, Time is an tram or trolley and goes ever onward, Anna's Time is a Subway that has niceties and quirks that surprise - like making unannounced local stops and people having banquets in the middle of the aisle and riders with way too many ear pods for listening to any music I could conceive of!
I mean, once I got past the cuneiform of the "clay disks"...well, a vasty deep of time that is.
Zakaria Tamir has a short story about a guy and his record player...and sister, mom and dad, too, by the way. It's funny; he creates a similar atmosphere of youth and alienation with that victrola.
Oh, thanks for the link to the music.
"The 4 Lads"! Amazing.
I never heard their version before. I think the most recent was They Might Be Giants.
So I'm thinking about the name Istanbul, and have always believed it was derived from the Greek eis ten polin "towards the city".
A better translation for today would be "downtown", as in "I'm going downtown", where downtown was the center of the Roman EMpire.
Sorry, Liquid Anna, I'm just now getting around to responding to your post of Tuesday. To answer your question: the pronunciation is as in "age" like 66, which is my age, or as in sage, as in not seasoning but rather wise one. Indeed, I called myself Baysage when I lived in Tampa and needed a nickname for some site or other.
So now you know: it's just a silly little kiss that I blew myself.
You lived in Tampa?
Do you go to St. Pete Beach to the Swigwam?
Did you eat grits at the Seahorse in Pass-a-grille?
I never went to the Swigwam. But I did indeed watch the sunset at the Seahorse at Pass-a-Grille. May or may not have eaten the grits, probably not, but my wife makes much better grits than anybody else, so that probably wasn't that great a loss.
Really. I love good grits. We used to go the Seahorse twice a day, and I'd have grits for breakfast, and for lunch - or dinner.
I eat them with butter, salt, and pepper.
I went to the Swigwam a lot, but mostly to find my nephews. I'm not sure I ever had a drink there way back when.
Lord, the warm "dolce far niente" days on the gulf...
Garlic grits: cup o' grits, a stick of butter, a goodly portion of cheddar (sharp is best), Worcestershire sauce, salt, and three or four toes of finely chopped garlic
It's a staple at birthday and special occasion dinners in my family. Has been for years and years.
I'm going to try it.
I love garlic.
I hope my daughter is reading this. She loves garlic, also. I'll copy the recipe and send it to her.
My wife likes grits, too, but her devotion isn't nearly as extreme as mine is.
Cook the grits first and then add all the ingredients. Stir till everything is melted and blended. Do you want me to get precise amounts? Susan is a seat-of-the-pants cook.
Susan!?
I'm sorry, but in conjunction with a comment left at your place about names of pets, I am a bit startled.
Of course, the initial surprise of your having almost the exact same name as my wife's nephew should have indicated the direction this story was heading.......
( My post about it will be titled North Korean Dreams...or something like that...the Korean connection will become clear in time.)
Back to basics, yes, precise amounts of Worchester and butter - if "stick" or 8 tablespoons was an approximation - would be a good idea.
And if the grits vary from the recommendations of the container...you might be so nice as to define a "toe" of garlic before I commit the crime of writing an inappropriate and hasty note about stereotypes...
....
I like a coarser grind grit myself. I think Quaker is a bit too fine...
and it has a hint of "bottom" to it.
(note: "bottom" is what gritologists refer to as the complex taste of corn which grows in flood plain fields where the rivers overflow in spring.
A trained gritologist can distinguish between corn grown near the Tennessee and that from the Chattahochee by the "bottom".)
OK.
Now we now the direction part of my newly found interest in the South - particularly cuisine of the South - is headed.
Two ideas newly found right here - the Korea thing and gritology - and a recipe for grits: a Two'fer or Three'fer...
I don't think I ever really had any understanding of the uses of language and communication until this year, 2009.
1 cup grits
4 cups water
1 tbsp salt
1 stick (1/4 pound) butter
1/2 pound sharp cheddar
2 tbsp Worcestershire
4 (or more) toes finely chopped garlic (A toe is the same as a clove of garlic, one section of a garlic bulb)
You can substitute a roll of garlic cheese for the garlic, if you can find it--we rarely can.
Amount of garlic and cheese in this recipe can increased depending on your taste.
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I'm from New Orleans; Susan's from Baton Rouge. We cook and eat Cajun, and we've never found any better cuisine than South Louisiana's.
Thank you.
I never heard of a garlic cheese roll.
However.......when I am preparing foods that have garlic in them, some times I make a garlic sandwich, which is a large piece of garlic - not a "toe" however - sandwiched between two pieces of cheese, which I then eat.
This probably approximates the garlic cheese roll.
South Louisiana's food sounds like heaven. I have never found a good cuisine, so you are probably correct about its being the best.
I have found only a few restaurants that should be allowed to feed human beings -
I don't know what it is about food preparation that leads its practioners into a spiral of declining quality.
I remember once I went to a Greek restaurant that was pretty good, so I went on a Greek food binge;
ended up in a cold taverna eating rubbery calamata - chewy as saltwater taffy - with big suckers in a tasteless tomato sauce...I went on the wagon right then.
...in the prev. comment, I meant "eating rubbery calamari"...not calamata.
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