Cuppa Tea?

I am obsessed with tea.  Pretty much ever since I can remember, I've been drinking it in large quantities on a daily basis.  Every single morning, I start my day off with a cup of PG Tips, and I spend the majority of my work day sipping various green teas, chais, whatever I can find around.

My family is well aware of my obsession (in fact, I think it was instilled in me by them) so I occasionally receive lovely tea-related gifts for the holidays and my birthday.  For instance, a few years back my mom bought me the cutest mini-teapot from the Tao of Tea on a trip my parents took up to Portland, which I brew my PG Tips in every morning.

This Christmas was no different...except this time it was my sister who bequeathed to me the requisite tea and tea paraphernalia.  "How much of this stuff is out there?" you may ask.  Well there is quite a range of options.  But it is my firm belief that Robin scoured the globe, looked at all of it, and gave me only the very best.

Christmas Gift, Part One:  Glass tea cup/brewing vessel.  Now these things are tricky.  I've had them before, and have always loved them (certain tea leaves unfurling in the hot water are sort of beautiful I think, so I like being able to see them), but the functionality hasn't always been great.  Either the handle gets too hot to touch or the strainer piece is too delicate and ends up cracking.  It can be quite disappointing.

But as if she had read my mind, Robin found me the perfect glass cup (with strainer and lid!).  The handle does not get even remotely warm, the construction is sturdy, and I kind of love that weird, whimsical, Alice in Wonderland-esque handle.

And she also supplied me with the most magical tea to brew in the cup...Ghost tea from a British website called Nothing But Tea.  The tea leaves are tied together with a bit of twine, and then dried into balls like these:

When these balls steep, the tea leaves open up like a flower, and the most beautiful string of jasmine flowers floats out of the middle to rest placidly on the surface of your tea water.  It is truly stunning, a nice bit of subtle beauty to behold when sitting in a somewhat aesthetically uninspiring office setting.  And I don't think the price is outrageous in the least, especially considering that I can use one ball per day, refreshing it up to seven times without seeing any diminishment in the strength or quality of the tea.  And the shipping to the United States is only about 3.50 pounds.

So go nuts, order your little heart out.  

Jasmine Phoenix Eyes tea:

Jade Bamboo Tea:

Red Lychee Balls:

Apparently this one has a red lychee flower that "blooms" during steeping.  I think this might have to be the next one that I try, once I run out of ghost balls. 

Pardon me...

...but what in the hell is this?!!!

At Last

I love a good tailor, but for many a month, I was without one.  It was a trying time, I was wandering, lost, through a sea of mediocre dry cleaner alternations.

But finally, once my black coat's lining had become truly shredded (and I totally mortified myself by handing it inside out to the coat check woman at a beautiful gala dinner at the University Club a few weeks back), I decided the time had come to rectify the situation.

I was looking for a small proprietor, preferably foreign (I'm sorry, I know this is obnoxious, with vague tones of racism, but in my experience American tailors just aren't that great), who charged reasonable prices (and obviously, did good work).  After a bit of research on Yelp, I settled on Ardian's Tailor.  He is Albanian and has no employees other than himself.  Perfect.

After wandering around aimlessly on the southeast corner of Eighth Avenue and Horatio Street for a good ten minutes searching for 5 Horatio Street, a kindly doorman directed me to the northwest corner and told me to look for the barber shop, then head around the corner.  Oh, joy!  Not only was it a one man (foreign) shop, but it was also hard to find!  I could hardly contain my excitement.  I had a good feeling about this guy.

I rounded the corner and found a door marked "Ardian's".  But the gate was closed.  Boo.  I called, he said he was closed but would open the store for me, and to come in through the barber shop.  Loving this guy even more.

Now I know that people throw around the term "hole in a wall" a bit loosely, but this place literally is a hole in a wall.  It is possibly the tiniest store I've ever seen.  And clothes cover virtually every surface.  Sort of like a bratty teenager's bedroom. 

Anyway, I came, coat (and a cool but ill fitting dress I had picked up at the Yigal Azrouel sample sale a couple of weeks before) in hand.  He took my coat, and directed me to put on the dress.  After a minute or two of pinning, I handed the dress over to him, said a little prayer, and left him to work some magic.

Things got busy, the holidays happened, I didn't get back to pick my clothes up until Saturday.  But the minute I walked in, he knew exactly who I was and what I had come to pick up.  He handed me my totally relined coat (loving not getting my arm stuck in the lining anymore) and asked if I wanted to try on the dress.  I did, and the fit was great.  Maybe one little wrinkle in the back that could be fixed, but was certainly something I could live with.

But Ardian took one look, zeroed in on exactly the wrinkle I had been mulling over, pinned it, and told me to come back on Monday to pick it up.  I am looking forward to picking up the most perfect dress ever.

And the best part?  The relined coat cost $65 (the cheapest I found anywhere else was $80, and the prices at the higher end went up to $120) and the dress alterations cost $35 (and I should add that the alterations were pretty extensive).

So the moral of the story?  I have found my tailor, and I'm sticking with him.

Weekend Reading, Part III

I'm a little late to the Chelsea Handler party.  Marissa turned me on to her late night talk show on E! while we were lazing about in a hotel room in Santo Domingo last spring, and I've been a fan ever since.

So how excited was I when I saw that she had written a book!  (It turns out it is her second, as I said, I'm late to the party).  And how excited was I (again) when it came in for me at the library!

In order to chase away the post-holiday blehs, I decided to treat myself to a romp with Are You There Vodka, It's Me, Chelsea.  Luckily, it's everything I hoped it would be.  Namely, hilarious.  I literally was laughing out loud, nearly to the point of tears, while reading it.  Paul repeatedly gave me quizzical (at first), then vaguely annoyed (the longer it went on) looks, and then finally went out to a movie to get away from my hyena-like peals of laughter.

I am tempted to quote funny passages in order to pique your interest, but I started and found that I was essentially transcribing the whole book.     

But instead I'll give you this advice (which hopefully will pique your interest as well as provide some valuable information):  do NOT skip the essay about her time in prison.  I do not mean jail, I mean prison.  Women's prison.  In L.A.  Granted it was only 24 hours, and was largely a mistake brought on by her stupid sister's petty vindictiveness, but it was quite an eventful 24 hours (and frankly is an excellent prison deterrent...if you need one, other than, you know, the whole incarceration thing).  Lesbian action, body cavity searches, the whole deal.  And by the way I love that her major concern during the cavity search was the unkempt state of her bikini line.  And I love even more how quickly that concern was neutralized once she saw what kind of forests her fellow inmates were cultivating.

OK, I'll stop.  I'm verging intro transcription territory.  All I can say is that if you need a little wicked levity in your life, look no further.

Weekend Reading Part II

I have a tendency to check out way more books from the library than I can ever possibly read.  It is one of my New Year's resolutions to get my piles of books under control, so yesterday morning, with an eye to my mounting late fines, I sat down to thumb through a couple of seriously overdue items.

One of them was the Olsens twins' latest effort, Influence.

For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past few months, the book is a collection of interviews with and images from various people that Ashley and Mary-Kate feel have been major influences in their lives, mostly from the worlds of art, fashion, and design.

And you know what the interesting thing for me about the book was?  I had only heard of maybe 40% of the people profiled, so it was not only entertaining, but actually fairly educational (I now feel much more arty and edgy than I did prior to reading the book).  Diane Von Furstenberg was obviously a fun interview, as was Karl Lagerfeld (although he did step out of his crazy fashion designer personality to impart some actual wisdom which was sort of unexpected), but I favored the interview with writer Bob Colacello over all of the others.    

Anyway, a great effort by the mini-moguls, and certainly worth at least a gander in the bookstore.    

Weekend Reading Part I

There is a lot of attention focused on America's eating disorder in the media these days.  And while we do, as a nation, most certainly have some very serious issues with eating habits, agricultural practices and practices in the meat and poultry industry, there is a lot of good in this country when it comes to food.  And frankly, although I maintain that it is absolutely crucial to understand the bad in order to be an informed eater and informed citizen, I always enjoy learning a bit more about the good.

It is for this reason that I so thoroughly enjoyed David Kamp's The United States of Arugula.

This book was published in 2006, so if you are both an avid reader and an avid follower of food, I'm sure you've already read it.  But if, like me, your reading list tends towards the overly optimistic at various points, it may have passed you by.

The book is essentially a history of cuisine, restaurants, cooks, chefs and food personalities over the past fifty years.  It tends to bounce back and forth between New York, the Bay Area and Los Angeles (sorry midwest, I guess Chicago's extraordinary contribution to American cuisine and restaurants came a bit late to be included), which is probably one of the reasons I found the whole thing so fascinating.

I'm from the Bay Area, have lots of family in Los Angeles and currently live in New York, so I am intimately familiar with the places and personalities that Kamp discusses.  

I grew up listening to my parents talk about Chez Panisse when it was just a neighborhood restaurant, to my mom talk about how underrated a guy named Jeremiah Tower was (thanks to this book I now know who he is and kind of agree with her), and what a revelation Julia Child was to America when she burst on the scene in the 60s (although I imagine somewhat less of a revelation to my mom than to most American women, as she was living in France at about the time Julia was and thus was exposed to some of the same influences).

I recall when seminal New York restaurants such as La Cote Basque, La Caravelle and Lutece closed.  Now I know what they were and why they were a big deal.  And I also know how the extraordinary network of greenmarkets that we now have started (in midtown east by the way, by the father of our current Parks Commissioner!).

And perhaps most exciting, I got a burning question about Jacques Pepin answered.  I remember watching a cooking show of his, I had to have been about fourteen, and seeing him making a lobster roll, and hearing him remark that this was the way they did it when he worked at Howard Johnson.  Hold the phone, Jacques Poupou (as my sister and I used to refer to him as) worked at a HoJo's?!!  Turns out he was a corporate consultant for the company in the 60s.  It was apparently sort of the done thing at the time.  Who knew?

I'll admit, the book ended on a little bit of a mixed note emotionally, as the last topic was the modern "celebrity chef" and the conflict between purists who think a chef should be behind a stove and those who think they should be allowed to make some cash off of an empire.  But overall, a very uplifting, fascinating book if this is your bag.

Do You Have A Hanky?

If you will indulge me for a moment, I would like to complain briefly about the beastly cold I have had for the past few days.  My head is dreadfully stuffed up, and I feel that I have been spending the vast majority of my time blowing my, by now, very tender nose.

Puffy tissues, tissues with lotion, they all rub my poor proboscis raw.  And there is nothing more depressing when you already feel like death warmed over than channeling the look of Rudolph... or rather, an eczema-ridden Rudolph.

Is there anything to be done?  It turns out there is, but to find the solution, you must delve deep into the past, to the days when commonly accepted practices demanded that a man always have a clean, white handkerchief on hand to offer a lady should she find herself in need.

I was first introduced to the wonders of the soft, cotton handkerchief by Paul, who I must say does have exceptionally good manners, so I suppose I should not be surprised that it was he who first offered me one.  But he opened my eyes to a whole new world.  A world in which I could blow my nose without wincing in pain, a world in which my nose remained closer to white than red throughout the course of a cold.  And as a plus, it is a far more environmentally responsible option than going through an entire box of Kleenex.

Now I have heard some concerns regarding hygiene (and I suppose, the general gross-out factor) when it comes to cloth handkerchiefs.  Look, the reality is that when you have a terrible cold, you are completely gross, whether you are using paper tissues or cotton handkerchiefs.  

In terms of hygiene, I have found that handkerchiefs tend to be quite large, and quite, shall we say, absorbent.  Which basically means that during the course of a day, you can use an area, fold the area over on itself, leaving the rest of the cloth clean and ready for your use.  It is possible to do this several times over.  And at the end of the day, just drop it in the laundry hamper to be washed with the rest of your laundry.  And if you're feeling very proper, go ahead and iron them after they are laundered, but it is most certainly not necessary in my opinion.  I feel that ironing your handkerchiefs is right up there with ironing your sheets...lovely if you have a household staff at your disposal, but not mandatory if you don't.

So far my favorite handkerchiefs have been those that I've bought on the first floor of the Barney's men's store (I believe that they cost something like $30 for 3 about three years ago), but you also can find good ones at Thomas Pink (and they will embroider your initials on them for a nominal fee, which I really love), and at Turnbull & Asser.

Your budget is your own business, but I would not advise going to crazy with respect to prices.  I have seen plain white handkerchiefs for $60 for one (please tell me I'm not the only one who thinks this is absolutely insane).  I personally find it hard to distinguish the $15 ones from the $60 ones so I don't see the point of going to the high end.  But if your tastes are finer than mine, by all means, go for it.  

My only other pieces of advice is this:  go with cotton over linen.  As beautiful and crisp as linen is (I love it for napkins for just this reason), it is rough on the delicate skin of your face, thus negating the entire point of the cloth handkerchief!