They Might Be Leafy
Man, I love tea. I love TeaSource. I love that sometimes, when we walk into TeaSource, we see a flyer for a "Cooking with Tea" class, and leorathesane says, "Hey! That sounds awesome. Let's do that." So we do.
"Cooking with Tea," taught by Song Li Hua of Taiwan and St. Anthony (except that she consistently referred to Taiwan as Formosa, which for some reason amused the heck out of me) kicked a lot of ass. She taught us how to make yogurt/mascarpone dips with Basket o' Berries (good with fruit) or matcha powder (great with veggies, or, you know, a spoon). We learned Green Dragon Oolong Steamed buns, which were so good we finally bought the yeast that's been on our grocery list for the past year, so we could make more ourselves. Every kind of vegetable we receive from our CSA this year will go into Ancient Beauty Jasmine vegetable tempura. Leora was surprised to like Shrimp, Turkey, and Green Tea Nori Rolls made with Sencha Uji, and I was surprised not to like them much. And came the Chai Spice Pumpkin Donuts, made with the TeaSource chai spice blend. If you drank chai at CON last year, you know what this is and will understand why the donuts will be reincarnated at our house as waffles this very week. This is the kind of shit you sell your grandparents for. Each course was served with a tea painstakingly chosen to match. Our class packet included a tea pairing chart, so now we can do it at home.
Almost as much fun as learning about the food was watching the other people in the class. Leora and I had, perhaps foolishly, assumed that anyone who signed up for a class about cooking with tea was either a foodie or a teaie. But, no. Many were late middle-aged yuppie women who thought the class would be quaint in an ethnic sort of way. A few read like dedicated fad dieters for whom tea was the hype of the month. Li Hua gave them conniptions by specifying full fat yogurt and whole milk in her recipes. The woman across from me snottily informed us, after Li Hua said that most of her "exotic" ingredients came from Cub, that she "only shop[ped] at The Wedge." We know people who only shop at co-ops, for all sorts of good reasons. Looking down your nose at your fellow human beings is not one of them. I am told the terms for such people is "bobo." I will use it often (thanks, nemoren!).
The two TeaSource employees who were maintaining order in the class also spent much of their time in a tizzy: we went off-schedule less than fifteen minutes in. Li Hua did not believe in bringing food pre-made at various stages to show us how it looked and then feeding us a batch she'd made the day before. It had to be fresh, or it wouldn't work. The room frequently filled with cries of, "What do you mean, they have to steam for ten minutes? We already made the tea for this course!"
I think everything sorted itself out in the end. We went twenty minutes over, but no one minded, because the food was just that good. When the class was over, the yuppie women and dropped a metric ass-tonne of money on tea (this, Leora reminds me, is what makes the classes profitable for TeaSource, and why we should not complain overly much about silly yuppie women in cooking classes). Leora and I collected our recipe packets and tea samples, came home, and watched a dog show. Delicious food, delightful tea, and other people's dogs. A perfect ten Saturday afternoon.