Living What I Love

Yes: tea.

A fall wind whipped in Seattle today, and I spent a few hours with my friend Eva at an absolutely lovely tea shop called Remedy Teas in Captiol Hill, sipping a pot full of chai pu-erh (delicious and so seasonally appropriate) and nibbling on a piece of harvest squash bread with butter. We went there with the express purpose of 'doing work', and work did get done, but I also found myself luxuriating a bit in the place itself, and watching Seattleites go about their day, and enjoying being inside looking out of large windows while rain poured for a bit outside. The tea pots they serve there are kept hot by an ever-burning tealight underneath this little metal stand, and the minimalist in me loves the Bodum double-wall glass teacups they use, too.

Remedy prides itself on being a bit of an herbalist of sorts, catgorizing their teas by type and also listing not only the ingredients but the benefits of each concoction. I really do kind of believe tea can often cure what ails ya. Drinking any kind of tea, even the caffienated stuff, always relaxes me in a way that drinking coffee never can. I loved the mix I tried today, and here at home I have a bag of looseleaf leaves of #128 mind body soul that is just the thing to unwind after a long day at work. If you're in Seattle, the shop is amazing and I highly recommend spending a rainy or blustery Sunday there in the company of friends or your laptop. =)

Zingerman's Creamery

I remembered hearing from a friend that Zingerman's Creamery, where they make a few select soft cheeses from local milk, gives tours on the weekends. Since Chad and I are both kind of nerds about cheese (the cheese counter at Whole Foods is one of our favorite places, ever)... which is perfectly excuseable considering our dual Wisconsin heritage... we decided to make a reservation for a tour on Sunday. It's only $5 and you get a $5 coupon for each person to use in the shop after the tour, which makes it basically free. The girl who gave us the tour was really knowledgable about cheese and cheesemaking, and while she talked she made fresh mozarella from a starter rennet. It was kind of awesome to watch it go from a block of rennet, to a taffy-like product after hot water was poured over it, and then to those perfect half-pound size balls that you see in the store (she did this by hand). We got to try it fresh out of the salt bath and OMG, so delicious! Having skipped lunch, Chad and I promptly bought ourselves a ball after the tour, a fresh French bagette at the bakery next door, and some salami and scarfed all of the above at a little cafe table next door to the creamery. They also made vanilla bean gelato which we got to sample; it was tasty too but we were there for the fromage, yo. Overall a fun activity for a Sunday afternoon - I'd definitely recommend!

 

Can't stop eating: avocado toast

The great Maddie G turned me on to this incredibly delicious snack/meal and I can't stop eating it. Once a week I troll the aisles at Kroger for perfectly ripe avocados so I can make this and eat it immediately. If they only have unripe avocados, I get really cranky. Try it, I promise you'll love it. I make 2 slices and it's dinner.

Avocado Toast

need:

2 pieces bread (fresh bread is awesome but if you just have your regular sandwich loaf that's okay too)

1 ripe avocado, mashed up (like you're going to make guacamole)

extra virgin olive oil

sea salt + fresh ground pepper

crushed red pepper flakes

Toast the bread. Slather on the mashed-up avocado. Drizzle with a little olive oil, sprinke a few dashes of sea salt and pepper, and dust liberally with crushed red pepper. Stuff in face. Enjoy.

I want it again!

a whole new level

a few posts ago, i wrote about tea: how much i love it, what kinds i drink when, and how my cabinet is overflowing with tins and boxes of it. thanks to the magical powers of the internet, a representative from pg tips tea contacted me and thanked me for mentioning their brand in my post, and would i like to try some of their new green tea? SURE i would! free stuff to try, all from blogging? i could get used to this.

needless to say it was only a few days until a fedex package arrived at my office with my name on it, complete with the tea as promised and a nice note from the woman who contacted me. so fun! and the tea *is* very good - a nice, clean green tea that comes in pg tips signature triangle tea bag that i understand helps the tea breathe better while it's brewing. makes sense.

i certainly don't plan on name-dropping brands or products in the future just to try to weasel my way into more packages at my door, but it was an interesting lesson in how my seemingly inconsequential posts reach all sorts of people and places. to blogging!

....so....

...i went to get something out of the cupboard last night and suddenly realized i have a little bit of a tea 'thing':

yeah. looks bad, i know. however, i bring a thermos of tea every single morning to work, and often have something decaffeinated at night, so i do drink it all, and often! still, this is bordering on obscene.

there is just something about a cup of tea, though. i've never liked coffee much; there are the occasional times when an iced caramel macchiato from starbuck's tastes really good, but usually the caffeine in coffee leaves me feeling weird. a nice cup of green tea in the morning makes me feel both alert and healthy, and i like the tradition of tea drinking that goes back so far in history and crosses so many cultures.

my favorite out of all those tins and boxes? anything by the republic of tea, especially their green teas. i'm really into the matcha green tea right now. when i'm sick, there is nothing better than a mug of throat coat by traditional medicinals (thanks, katie stub! she taught me that freshman year of college). the super cute white tin with the ice cream cone is a homemade tea i bought at the diy fair last fall called frosty almond by herb + ginger , which is awesome for fall and winter. and the far left one, pg tips, is apparently the uk's #1 tea. so if the queen of england should stop by, i'm able to serve her a proper british tea! though admittedly i'd be more excited to serve a cuppa to helen mirren as the q.e. instead, love her. 

so, obscene or not, this is what hides in my cupboard. any other tea addicts out there?

Dinner with Dave

Last week, I was asked by 826Michigan to take photos of a benefit dinner they were having. 826, in case you don't know, is a fabulous writing and tutoring center for kids ages 8-18 that has 7 different locations across the US. There happens to be one here in Ann Arbor, and I volunteer tutor for them once a week. Anyway, they knew that I shoot photos so they asked me to do this for them. It was a fundraising benefit dinner at Zingerman's Roadhouse with lots of wine, good food, and nice people who would hopefully donate lots of $ to 826. Oh, and Dave Eggers, Pulitzer-prize nominated writer, McSweeney's head, screenplay writer, and founder of 826 was also going to be there. AWESOME. Here are a few shots from the night. The food, by the way, was also outstanding. Definitely going back to the Roadhouse again!

Dave with two high school students who read amazing pieces they'd written.

 

getting so excited for....

SUMMER:

....the farmer's market....

...huge fluffy clouds (preferably over Lake Mendota in Madison, WI)...

 

..driving out to the beach in South Haven on Lake Michigan for long, lazy days...

...when all you want to do is stuff your face with fresh fruit and vegetables because there are so many of them available in the summertime...

...and finally - bikes! I want a bike SO BAD. I used to have the coolest Trek mountain bike, but it has since moved on to another owner and I'm cursing myself for selling it. So I'm on the hunt for a bike I can both ride seriously and ride to work/the farmers market/through town, etc. There's just something about that freedom: get on a bike and the world is yours. You can go anywhere. Ten years old all over again. =)

happy birthday to me!

a delicioso cake baked by a friend for my 27th birthday.