Jolimont Expresso

Last Sunday we ended up at Federation Square after a walk along the Yarra, and found this cafe, next to the NGV Shop, called Jolimont Expresso. I was very impressed with the terrific display of teapots and things that they had in one window.

Some were new, some quite obviously vintage. Loved the shape of the large white pear-ish-shaped teapot!

And the vintage Weet-Bix tin!

Their tea selection was entirely brought to you by T2, but since they had a much larger range than the usual run of the mill offerings, I was quite happy. There were quite a few teas you dont see at cafes very often including Girlie Grey, French Earl Grey (yum), rooiibos... I opted for a pot of Red Fancy Fruit, one of my favorite flavored rooibos blends.

The biscuit my husband had with his affogato was a bit mediocre and I didn't try any of the other food, so cant speak to that, but as a place to go and have a pot of tea, not a bad option for when I'm out and about in the city.

Tuesday's Tea of the Week: Vanilla Rooibos

If you like vanilla, and tea, but you fear caffeine and weep because you can't drink Vanilla Basic Black, you really should give Vanilla Rooibos a go. It is absolutely just as nice. Pure organic rooibos and finely chopped vanilla beans... nothing more, nothing less.

Rooibos is a great complement to vanilla (or perhaps the other way round?) because it has a kind of vanilla-y taste all to itself (at least I think so). This combination is a beautiful tea-party tea - fragrant, sweet, takes milk and sugar well if you are so inclined. I often am...

I also like this one after dinner, with or instead of dessert. Yum!

Next week: Lemon Myrtle Basic Black.

Tuesday's Tea of the Week: Paintbox

I'm still sick, and I think what I'l be drinking to brighten up my mood this evening is Paintbox.

I wanted to go full-on with a really flowery, and, okay, girly blend, and this is what I came up with. Don't you just adore all the colours? Pink rosebuds, golden chamomile and calendula, green passionflower leaves and lavender... well, lavender... all mixed up with yummy rooibos.

This tea is actually a little similar to the Relax herbal tea from Tea Leaves that my husband and I drank on our wedding night after we arrived at the Candlelight Cottages (gee I'd like to go back there sometime) where we were staying for a couple of days... so it's a bit special to me from that point of view too!

Paintbox is best without any milk and should be sweet enough not to need any honey or sugar. My favourite thing about this tea is the way the delicate floral tastes linger in your mouth after you've finished it. It's caffeine free and extremely relaxing, and definitely one for the sophisticated afternoon tea table.

Next week: Peppermint Soother.

Tuesday's Tea of the Week: Lemon Breeze.

I just love my Lemon Breeze blend. It's a bit summery for me to drink much of it at the moment now that the weather is cooling down, but it makes me happy just to think about it... and I'm really quite proud of the lemony photos I took as well:

There's a triple shot of lemon goodness in this tea; the rooibos base is blended with lemon myrtle, lemongrass, and lemon balm. All the ingredients are organic. It's citrussy and refreshing and makes a great pick-me-up, but being caffeine free it can be drunk any time of the day without affecting your sleep.

As I mentioned above I think of this a bit more as a summer tea, but drunk hot on a cold day, perhaps with a spot of lemon juice and honey, this would also be a great tonic for a sore throat and to ward off the winter blues.

Next week: Chamomile Sunburst.

Quest for summer sanity, via iced tea, continues

It's a relatively cool evening, thanks to the delightful breeze that's wafting through the open windows (it doesn't seem to be wafting too many mosquitoes through the tatty flywire at the moment, an added bonus). 

It's been a relatively lazy weekend which saw me and my husband and our cat piled on the couch for a post-lunch snooze this afternoon... although I did get up early to do some baking: inspired at the prospect of having blackberry-basil iced tea at breakfast, I decided to make some blackberry muffins to accompany it. They were very good; and the tea was fantastic.

The recipe for the blackberry-basil syrup is courtesy of the delightfully whimsical TeaSpot NYC blog and I knew I just had to try it as soon as I read about it. It's a beautiful balance of sweet and tart and the colour is amazing - I should've taken photos, but was too busy enjoying my breakfast to bother. (There is some blackberry-basil syrup left, though, so I still have the option - maybe tomorrow.)

The tea itself was a Ceylon single estate tea, Nandana Orange Pekoe, which I bought in NZ from T Leaf Tea, cold brewed overnight. Cold-brewing this tea yields a beautifully pale amber liquor, very mild (it's redder and stronger tasting when hot) and combined with the syrup it was truly a taste sensation. The basil added such a striking spicy, aromatic note. I think it would also go well with strawberries if blackberries aren't available (mind you I used frozen ones).

Then this afternoon I made myself a pot of spearmint and hibiscus (a teaspoon of each herb per cup), hot-brewed, steeped strong and then poured over ice. Minty and sour, 100% refreshing.

And now I'm finishing off the day with a few glasses of iced Haru-Poro-Poro (cold-brewed over the course of the day). This is a combination of sencha, green rooibos and raspberry flavouring - it's astringent (in a good way), sweet and the raspberry flavour is not overpowering. It really is delicious iced. It's from Lupicia - a wonderful shop in Melbourne which I visited at Christmas time.  They have loads of beautiful oolongs and greens that I would love to try; I'll have to see if I can schedule another trip when I'm next in Melbourne.

Another couple of random tea notes...

Oh dear – another couple of weeks have crept by with no blog update… things have been so frantically busy both inside and outside of work that it’s been difficult to find the time to sit down and write calmly… in fact a couple of days have gone by when I have not even had the time to make a pot of tea at work! Dark times indeed. Possibly the Apocalypse approaches.

I discovered last night that Teas.com.au has gone live with a new, updated version of their website – check it out here. It looks lovely and I just adore the little row of teapots at the top… hover your mouse over them and the lid tilts up and bubbles move up through the pot! To celebrate the release of the new site they are offering some specials on orders for the next little while… I’m feeling very tempted to get one of their Wulong (oolong) samplers and some Lung Ching Dragonswell also… but I’ll do another stocktake of my tea cupboard first. I really am trying not to have too many open packets of tea on hand at one time…

I have had some marvellous teas from Teas.com.au, actually – their bouquet teas are lovely, particularly the ‘Spring blossom’, which has white tea, lily and osmanthus – it’s sweet and has a taste rather like cinnamon, though there’s no cinnamon in it. I also really love some of their herbal blends – the ‘Cherish’ blend is particularly tasty and beautiful to look at too, with the rose petals and rooibos and chamomile.

I was also excited to discover last night, when I opened up Gmail, that you can now set a ‘theme’ to customise the background and colours of your email inbox, etc. Fantastic – even more so when I found out that one of the themes was ‘teahouse’… a little Japanesey tea house set in a garden of blossom trees. Too cute! Needless to say that was the one that I chose…

What’s in my cup today? So far this morning I have had some rooibos tea (at breakfast time with my lovely husband) and a pot of genmaicha (Japanese green tea with roasted rice). Who knows what else the day will hold?

Returned from New Tealand!

Well, New Zealand, technically, but I had so many very pleasant experiences with tea while I was over there that it almost did count as New Tealand, really.

While there were many highlights of our trip, most of them either nerdy (full day LOTR tours, anyone? Bliss!) or foodie (full day tasting tour in Martinborough and surrounds, plus many delicious restaurant meals) I will restrict myself to the tea highlights (tea lights? Hmmm) because those are what this blog is all about, after all.

It proved not very difficult at all to get decent loose-leaf tea in restaurants, particularly in Wellington where most places seemed to stock T Leaf Tea. The branding of this tea is very similar to T2 (black and orange) and they provide a similar range of products but also some that I hadn’t seen before, including quite a good range of single estate black teas and the best variety of beehouse (now known as ‘zero’) teapots I’ve seen – lots of different colours, so pretty! I would particularly like one in pumpkin orange…

One night in Wellington we went to Sweet Mother’s Kitchen, a place that serves really good deep-South of America type food, for dessert and tea. I was delighted to find that the tea itself (a raspberry and vanilla flavoured rooibos, very sweet and pleasant, not overpowering at all) was served in a beautiful blue-flowered Royal Albert tea cup, with matching plate. I am pretty sure that this picture depicts the pattern (it’s from an unnamed set matched with the pattern ‘Marguerite’, which I found thanks to this site.

Now I was also conscious of the need to sample some NZ biscuits, along with my tea, and on the matching plate which came with my tea at Sweet Mother’s Kitchen I tried out an afghan biscuit. These chocolate biscuits with chocolate icing on top seem to be very popular in NZ (there are also supermarket versions, though I skipped those in favour of trying out some Toffeepops, which were yummy). The one I had that evening was absolutely sublime. It had crunchy bits in it (which, after looking at some recipes online, I have deduced to be cornflakes or weeties), it was crumbly and buttery and chocolatey, and the icing was fantastic. Yet overall it wasn’t too sweet either. I am going to have a go at making some of these - here is one recipe, and here is another.

In Auckland, we went shopping to get my husband something nice at a men’s clothing shop called ‘Marvel’ (he bought a very nice striped top) – and I came away with, of all things, a teapot (the owners of the store appear to be collectors of vintage china, particularly Crown Lynn NZ made stuff). It’s a lovely deep sky blue glaze, cream coloured inside, and the most perfect pouring teapot I’ve had – not a drip! I will post a photo of it when I have a chance. So that absolutely made my trip, that’s for sure.

Another tea highlight was when we went out for dinner in Rotorua – we went to an Indian restaurant recommended by Lonely Planet, where we had the best Indian food I’ve eaten since leaving Melbourne last year (seriously). I ordered a cup of their chai masala tea, which was delicious – I think it had quite a bit of black pepper in it, it had quite a kick. I do like my chai with pepper, it always seems more exciting somehow than just with cinnamon and so on. I am going to have a go at blending some of my own at some point.

That’s all the tall tea tales I have time for today folks, but I will return. I have been having great success with iced tea, for example, and I have photos to post, and new teas to try, and many more things to rant about.

In my cup today

Today is a festival of rooibos (yesterday was too), which is one of the teas which my friend so very kindly brought up for me from Melbourne when she came to visit on the weekend.

I haven’t had any rooibos (pronounced roy-boss) for ages, due to the difficulty of getting any at a reasonable price in Canberra, and had nearly forgotten how nice it is. It’s fragrant and sweet-smelling and brews up to a really lovely deep red-brown colour, but because it has little or no tannins it is not astringent or bitter at all, even if you forget about it and leave it to steep for too long. Which I do, fairly regularly.

Here is a handy Wikipedia article about rooibos, including a little bit of information about its health benefits which are helping to make it so popular these days. It’s meant to be frightfully good for you because it contains antioxidants (no one wants to hear about boring plain old minerals, amino acids or vitamins any more, apparently, it’s superfoods or nothing). This means that it will help to prevent damage to organs like the brain and the heart and will help to boost your immune system. If you are herbally or chemical-analysisly minded (ok, I made that last word up) have a look here at page 3 of the Rooibos Story on www.rooibos.com – if you scroll down a bit you will find an analysis of the metabolites of rooibos and their potential effects.

The list is fairly impressive, and includes anti-allergic, antibacterial & anti-fungal, hypotensive (reduces blood pressure), expectorant (gets rid of mucus from your lungs) and anti-hepatotoxic (which means it helps stop bad things happening to your liver). Now apparently these results came from the water soluble metabolites so it seems like you should be fairly sure of getting at least some of these in your cup of rooibos tea, which is good news. Of course these are not the only reasons to drink it – it actually tastes nice as well and blends beautifully with other flavours, particularly floral ones like rose petals.

Ha, I recall that I would haplessly recommend rooibos as a substitute for caffeinated tea at the health food store where I used to work, which led to me being vilified by tea-drinking customers as an ivory-tower herbal nut who didn’t know what I was talking about (‘It doesn’t taste anything like tea, it’s disgusting’). Well, ok, no it doesn’t taste that much like regular tea, although the colour is pretty good (like a nice robust Assam) and it does have a nice round flavour and can take some milk as well if you want it to. I suppose when you’re a grumpy customer who’s just been told you can’t have anything that you like any more because it’s bad for your health at the moment you are not in the best position to appreciate the plusses of something like rooibos.

So if that’s the good news, then what’s the bad? Not much, it would seem, although I did come across this article from August 2006 (through a link at The Simple Leaf blog) which raises concerns about the impact which intensive rooibos cultivation is having on parts of the South African eco-system. This is because with the increasing demand for rooibos, more farmers are beginning to grow it and they have been (sometimes illegally) ploughing up previously uncultivated land to do so, thus potentially further endangering already endangered species of plants in those areas.

This is a bit depressing (although it’s not just rooibos to blame, other types of farming are involved too), not to mention concerning. What to do? I’m not sure. It may be possible to purchase certified sustainably farmed rooibos from responsible growers, but as we are all becoming more and more aware, certification is just another minefield for consumers to get taken advantage of in. I will still continue to drink rooibos, in the meantime… just not too much.