Monthly Archives: December 2009

best of 2009: Tea!!!

December 16, 2009

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

Today’s topic might have been written for me: December 16 — Tea of the year. I can taste my favorite tea right now. What’s yours?

I’m a tea person, meaning I drink tea, lots and lots of tea. I drink it daily, all day long, mostly blacks, but there are times for greens, whites, and oolongs, too. I steep pots of tea for the office. Others share in, and when I’m out, some of the crew doesn’t even try to steep their own. My twitter bio includes the phrase “crazy cat and tea lady”. When I host gatherings at home, everyone knows that there will be freshly steeped pots of tea ready. I have shelves set up in my living room to hold most (but not all) of my tea paraphernalia:

I’m not an expert about tea but I know more than the average joe.

But thinking of the best tea of the year? Hmm, I almost want to say: All of them! But no, that’s not right. There have definitely been some pots I’d call sub-par. Still, the rest were just dandy. So my best tea is: yunnan and keemun which I’ve loved since college and a lovely sencha I steep on weekends and the old, nearly empty tin of Kashmiri chai that’s full of cardamom and the Earl Grey I made a few days ago that reminded me that sometimes I still like Earl Grey and the vanilla tea I brew for my friend on weekends, plus the Ceylon OPA that I buy in bulk at a local Indian market. Oh, also the Turkish tea I bought at the same market that my friend doesn’t like at all, but I do, more and more. And though they’re, strictly speaking, not real tea, there’s also the lavender I brew late at night sometimes and the barley tea that my favorite Japanese restaurant serves as house tea.

Ummm, tea!

Posted in: miscellany, online connections, tea – Comments Off on best of 2009: Tea!!!

best of 2009: simple and yummy

December 12, 2009

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

A delectable suggestion for today: December 11 — New food. You’re now in love with Lebanese food and you didn’t even know what it was in January of this year.

Okay, so I haven’t tried new cuisines this year. That would be wonderful, but new ones are hard to come by around these parts. I went on a gastronomic splurge in my college and just-after years and tried every cuisine that I came by and there aren’t so many options where I live now. It’s a shame, too; I love ethnic foods. I have my preferences, but I’m willing to try almost any new food. I’ll also eat foods I don’t like all that much, not all the time, mind you, but I don’t have to all the time and sometimes it’s easier in group situations.  I was the non-picky eater growing up: I even ate liver while my siblings refused (I’m a middle child and I’ve read that trying to please is one of the traits I get from that).  And sometimes it’s good to revisit foods you don’t care for; your tastes might have changed and you will find a new fave. It’s true, though I still don’t like liver.

So my best food discovery of 2009 is a recipe idea, one that I heard on the radio during the Christmas-New Year holiday break last year or maybe New Year’s Day of this year. I think it was a food critic or a famous chef on a show I had playing in the background. The conversation was about things to offer when hosting holiday parties, dinners, and brunches. And this caught my attention: the chef said one thing he often serves that goes over wonderfully but is very easy to do is use eggs as the “sauce” for pasta.

The idea is simple: cook up some good pasta, and make a few eggs over easy. Put the eggs on the pasta before the yolks fully set. Cut into the eggs and voilà, they become the sauce and embellishment for your pasta. The chef mentioned using fresh garlic cooked in olive oil and then cooking the eggs using that, not butter. Healthier and makes a better pasta sauce. I think he also might have suggested a bit of fresh parmesan cheese and herbs sprinkled on top, too. And that’s what I remember from the show.

I’m not much of a cook. I make simple things that don’t require a lot of fuss or a lot of pots and pans. I love pasta, preferably without tomato sauce, and it’s easy to make. I also like eggs.  I’ve been practicing creating this dish all year and added in one enhancement: walnuts. Wouldn’t have thought of this myself, but walnuts cooked in garlic and olive oil are wonderful. I saw it as part of a recipe on a box of whole grain pasta a few years ago. I was supposed to be switching to whole grain pasta (wasn’t hard: it tastes just fine to me) and adding walnuts to my diet, so I tried it.  Delish!

Anyway, my basic version of my best food of the year is:

    start some pasta cooking
    mince up a few cloves of garlic
    sauté garlic in olive oil.
    add walnut pieces and cook a bit more then push to the side
    cook eggs over easy in the oil
    and finally serve the eggs and walnuts and garlic over pasta

I’ve added other things from time to time: onions go well with walnuts and garlic and sometimes vegetables end up in the mixture, too. The only tricking part is not overcooking the eggs, including timing it all so the pasta is ready and waiting when the eggs are done, or the yolks will set too much. It’s still a fine dish that way, so even the failed attempts have been yummy.

Posted in: food, online connections – 1 Comment

best of 2009: music

December 10, 2009

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

Today we come to December 10 — Album of the year. What’s rocking your world?

There’s an implication that I should be writing about music that was released this year or failing that, music I discovered this year. Trouble is, I haven’t been listening to new music that I can name. Sure, I’ve heard new songs this year, and some have been great, but I have very poor memory for music and artists and I can’t name them now.

Recently though, I rediscovered and renewed just playing music and that is rocking my world.  Last month, I finally installed an MP3 package (aka Amarok) on my work system and I’ve started putting my CD collection on the machine.  And I’m playing it.  I’ve also started listening to more albums in the car.  This might all seem like nothing to you, but it’s a change in my world and it’s a good one.

The music is mostly old.  But if  you must know, the albums I’ve started with are: True Stories by Talking Heads, Life’s Hard and Then You Die by It’s Immaterial, The First Songs by Laura Nyro, Everything’s Different Now by Til Tuesday, The Bobby Darin Story, and a lot more.  I have a lot of CDs to convert to MP3.  But no worries…getting there is more than half the fun.

Posted in: miscellany, movies, tv, music, books, ..., online connections – Comments Off on best of 2009: music

best of 2009: moment of wonder

December 8, 2009

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

Today’s prompt is December 8 — Moment of peace. An hour or a day or a week of solitude…The state of your mind? How did you get there?

There are a few deer who frequent my backyard off and on during the year. They live in the woods that are around the houses here. One is a lame doe (she manages very nicely on her three good legs, thank you). who brings her offspring around each year. I Iike to watch from the kitchen window, and sometimes I try to photograph them, though I generally can’t get very close or they run off. They seem more tolerant of Juliet-kitty, so I also have to watch out that she doesn’t wander too close. Juliet is getting very brave with the visitors and has started moving slowly towards them a few times, especially when there is only one in the yard.

One afternoon in October, a young deer was in the yard along with Juliet and I was watching from the side stoop, trying not to startle it. But Juliet was curious about the visitor and edging closer. I moved out slowly and spoke softly, trying to entice Juliet to come back to me and also hoping not to run off the deer. Juliet ignored me, but the deer looked up and watched me. And it remained in place. I never got right up to it, but I did get fairly close. Then afraid to spook it, I stopped and we looked at each other for a few seconds. My moment of wonder…this was not a tame tenant of a petting zoo, but an animal of the wild. And I’m a city-raised kid and kind of clunky and clutzy…I never get near to the wildlife in my yard. I felt a bit of awe getting closer to its sphere. Then I retreated carefully, slowly, gently so that it would stay, which it did a while more, before it moved off back to the woods and wandered on.


This is Juliet and one of the deer, not that day. I was nearer to the deer for our encounter, probably as close as Juliet is here.

Posted in: cats, miscellany, online connections – Comments Off on best of 2009: moment of wonder

best of 2009: best of 2009

December 6, 2009

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

December 7 – Blog find of the year. That gem of a blog you can’t believe you didn’t know about until this year.

I modified this prompt a bit to be about just one blog post, the one that started all this:

Gwen’s post is truly a gem for me, because it’s pushing me to write. I put up a post a couple of weeks ago about wanting to write more and not coming up with posts I was happy with. Along with a review of the year to find the good that was there, entering this challenge has helped me write, just write. I have topics to get me started and as I push myself to write these entries, I’m learning that each one doesn’t have to be the perfect post to have merit. I’m not saying I want to be lazy in my writing, and I’m not being that. I work on these notes for hours just to put up a few paragraphs. But I used to start writing and then junk it, or just not start at all. Now, at least I’ve put up a few entries and will keep going all month. I won’t post every day: I skipped the previous two days because I had nothing to fit the topics. But I will continue this challenge. And I’m writing publicly, too. I’m shy, and before this challenge, I never announced my posts to anyone but a couple of friends. I hadn’t even told my family about the blog, except mentioning one post to one brother. Now I tell the world (well, the world on Twitter) about these entries. That might be the norm for everyone else, but it’s a big step for me.

Something else is happening here, too; the challenge is working for me in another way. By thinking in terms of finding the good things from the past year, I find I’m relaxing and getting a little cheerier about life in general and more optimistic about the coming days.

Thanks, Gwen!

Posted in: miscellany, online connections – Comments Off on best of 2009: best of 2009
« Older posts
Newer posts »