variations on tea

Ever since Jodie introduced me to mauritius tea about six or seven years ago (which I can only find at Alice's Tea Cup in New York) I have had the exact same pot of tea five days a week. It is definitely in that rare and refined group of one of my five favourite things, one of those things that I wouldn't want to live without. Here's how to make it (and this, I think, is going to be the best recipe on this blog--nothing surpasses it).

One small teapot with a holder for loose tea ingredients.

One teaspoonful of mauritius tea (I've tried to find it other places but thus far have been unsuccessful. If you go to to NYC you should buy a lot. I usually ask for $100 worth while Joel W faints in line beside me and Joel E suggests I should seek treatment for my "habit"). IF you can't get to NYC, you can substitute a regular tea bag of strong tea (PG tips is ideal but Tetley will do) and a one-inch vanilla bean cut open or vanilla extract. Mauritius tea grows on the island Mauritius and is apparently naturally infused with the vanilla plants that grow alongside it.

Half a teaspoon of whole cloves.

Half to full teaspoon of cardamon (adjust to taste--some cardamon is stronger than others)

broken up cinnamon stick

hot pepper flakes (just a few)

1/2 cup or so hot milk (adjust to taste)

teaspoon of honey.

Mix it all together and you have the best hot drink in the world.

BUT there is recent breaking news on the tea front. This past weekend I bought a premade organic chai mixture from the hole-in-the-wall tea shop, "Tea and Ginseng," in Ottawa and I was shocked to discover that it is almost as good as the above recipe. I have tried dozens and dozens of premade chai's, trying to avoid the process above because it takes a comical amount of time to make, and this is the only one that is in any way comparable.

The best chai I've had in a restaurant was in Palo Alto waiting for the train to San Francisco. Sarah L introduced me to this place; in my memory it serves only tea (but in fact surely must serve more things). A woman was always there stirring an enormous vat of this milky tea and on the few occasions when my train came before I could get my tea I mourned my lost cup of tea all the way to SF.

The best tisane I know of is from Cha Yi's Maison de Thé. It's called honeybush vanilla.

And, finally from the list, Eran mentions Mariage Frere Tea as his favourite tea and lots of people (way more than those who mention sports) note drinking tea and reading as a favourite activity.

ottawa race weekend & sports

This weekend Michal ran the 5K with some other kids and teachers at her school. I took her to the race and cheered her on. It was exciting! The next day we went and cheered for those who were running the marathon (in the pouring rain!) a few blocks from our house. There was an extraordinary range of people and almost all of them, at 38K, looked great. We would cheer and often people would say "thanks!" and I was thinking, "are you crazy? don't thank us--save your breath!" They had only 4K to go and so we can hope that most of them made it. There was a family in front of us and the father kept calling to the kids to make sure their ball didn't roll into the track of the runners. As they left, he said to his kids, "be sure to clean up your banana peels." And then in an aside, "that would just be too cliché."

Not that many of my friends mentioned sports as a favourite activity (not surprisingly?). Here's Larry's response (which made me smile): 1. Favorite Winter Sport: Drinking Hot Cocoa (Those cups can be heavy); 2. Favorite Winter Sport, Active Division: Cross-Country Skiing with friends.

glacial lakes

Another huge gap in postings and another back log. A few weeks ago we went to Jasper, Alberta and I didn't have my computer (a rare occurrence) and, as a result, didn't write here. And, once again, as soon as the habit of writing slipped it slipped and slipped.

At any rate, while we were in Jasper I remembered a favourite thing that I had forgotten all about: the brilliant turquoise colour of glacial lakes. Jasper was great but my two favourite lakes in this regard are the lake just before one climbs Black Tusk in BC and a lake in the Sierras where I had what was probably the best swim of my life. The water was clear as crystal and each time we jumped in it was like glass cracking and splintering, the light going off in all directions, and then the sudden quiet when one is underwater. I can still remember the shocking cold but also the beauty of it all.

the perfect mango & the most eclectic list

There is no connection between my two topics today. My favourite thing today was a perfect mango that Imelda brought us. There is something about mangos: they slice beautifully, they are so spectacularly orange, they have a complex surprising flavour that changes closer to the skin and closer to the pit, they smell tangy, but most of all their texture is perfect. Something for all the senses. (Shortly after I moved to Ottawa, Erin M wrote and produced a play entitled The Perfect Mango that she put on for about 20 guests. We all sat on the floor in the small space of an art gallery that she'd also started and ever since then I can't experience a perfect mango without also thinking of Erin.)

You have to love the sheer exuberance of Bill's contribution to the 5 things list. I'm including about half of it here: "My problem, being excessive, is giving you a paltry five favorite things. I want to give you a thousand spots to see in my favorite city, and then move on to 5 poems (or a hundred), 5 songs (or a concert), 5 Chicago inflected films ( Ferris Bueller, Blues Brothers, Barbershop, The Fugitive, Chicago, the musical), 5 rockers, 5 novels (Sister Carrie, Native Son, Hard Times, Man With a Golden Arm, Nowhere Man), 5 films, 5 restaurants (Nueva Leone, Al's #1 Italian Beef, Carnitas Michuacan, Harold's, Ribs n Bibs), 5 Chicago writers (Brooks, Cisneros, Wright, Algren, Hansbury), 5 singers, 5 geniuses, 5 legends, 5 heroes, 5 saints and 5 demons. I want to set up special tours for folks beyond the great ones (Architecture, Blues, Gangland) already in existence: Immigrant Chicago, Civil Rights Chicago, Labor Chicago, Underground Chicago, Literary Chicago, Chicago Sports and Games (Montrose Harbor!), Chicago Faith, Chicago Avenues, Chicago Murals, Public Art, Chicago Museums, Chicago Theater, Dumpsters to Dive Into, Halsted Street from the Stockyards to the Shipyards, Chicago Cemeteries (including the graves of Emma Goldman and the martyrs), the Lakefront, Bronzeville, Haymarket Square and the statue, Malcolm X's home behind the Hon. Elijah Muhammad's residence, Hull House, Cook County Hospital, West Madison and the site of Fred Hampton's assassination, and more more more!

I want five essays about social justice, peace and love, novels, poems, people’s histories, memoir and autobiography, plays and film and painting, and the best songs and musicals. I want the classics—where would we be without Marx and Gramsci and Luxemburg?—and the newest stuff too, like Klein and Lebowitz. I want fighters like Che and Tanya and Malcolm and Emma Goldman and Ella and Cabral, and thinkers like DuBois and de Beauvoir and CLR James and Eqbal Ahmed and Edward Said and Freire, and then I want Dylan and Simone and Brooks and Ginsberg. I want manuals and instruction and how-to books, but I want inspiration as well. And, of course, every issue thoroughly covered from every angle: war and peace and empire, the destruction of Mother Earth and the utter madness of capitalism, oppression and exploitation in its endless forms, awakening and resistance and liberation in all its mighty creativity, the dance of the dialectic as it plays in a single life and through all time. I immediately want to assemble a reader with short stuff from every one of my all-time favorites.

havdalah & rembrant's jewish bride & roden's cookbook

Last night was Saturday night and so at a reconstructionist chavurah gathering we closed with havdalah. Every time we do this ritual, I think I will now definitely incorporate it into each week. But I never do. It is the ritual that recognizes the end of shabbat and the beginning of the week. I love the simplicity of it, the braided candle, the sizzling sound of it being doused, the spices, the melodies to the songs, and the way the occasion marks time.

I looked to the list for Jewish things and found two. Ruth notes Rembrandt's "The Jewish Bride" in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (see image above). And Luisa notes Claudia Roden’s Jewish Cookbook (another cookbook that I don't know but am eager to try. For the record, Luisa recommends the tagine from Roden's other cookbook, Arabesque, as her favourite recipe.)

mother's day & time on the weekend

One of my favourite days of the year is Mother's Day. Because I had kid's late, the whole being-a-mother thing still seems kind of miraculous and surprising to me. I love the pure pleasure of breakfast-in-bed, kid-made gifts, a holiday-for-a-day in the Spring. Today Ben woke up (he'd come into our bed in the middle of the night--one of the down sides of parenthood!) and grinned and hugged me, saying "Happy Mother's Day!" remembering right away even in his sleepy state. Less than an hour later, however, he threw all the presents he'd made me in the garbage because he was so unhappy about Joel taking him and Michal zip-lining. And so these moments don't always last! (And when they got home from ziplining, Ben was bursting with excitement because he hadn't been afraid after all and he shyly asked me to come into his room and then said that he wanted to take my presents out of the garbage and give them back to me.) In the morning we went to the Farmer's Market with Andre and kids. On the way home, Andre told us that the qualities he and Brenda both appreciated most in their mothers were kindness and compassion. He asked me about my mom and I was surprised by the sheer number of things that came to mind (her zest for life, her sense of humour, her enthusiasm for the creative projects we did as kids, her creativity in general, her appreciation of beauty, the zillions of little sayings she still repeats, and her compassion, and her kindness--the list went on).

And from the 5-favourite-things list: there were no reference to mothers, but Photini and George did identify something that seems apt for Mother's Day: "One parent taking one child for an outing - to a play, for a bike ride, anything." It's because Joel took the kids this afternoon that I can finally catch up a little here.

dawlish avenue

Last weekend I was in Toronto for a conference at Glendon College. Mom and Dad lent me their car and so on the way home I drove to the street on which I grew up, parked the car, and walked around the block. It was a strange and surreal experience. The afternoon was beautiful and sunny and I parked the car in front of 181, the huge old house in which my grandparents once lived and of which I have a black and white photo on my desk. Or rather, I have a photo of the "backyard" (if it can be called that)--trees and bushes and wild grasses and a rough two- track country road going off into the distance--and two people, uncharacteristically not identified by my grandmother in her distinctive fountain-pen handwriting on the back of the photo, who are my great-ancestors. The woman, stylishly dressed, sits in a hammock and the man, in a suit and tie, sits upright on the grass beside her. 181 was apparently the first house on the block but it is now just like any other house wedged between all the others. I walked down the street to where our house used to be. It is now gone, replaced by a much bigger (but to my mind, less beautiful) house. The entire street seemed wider and more spare than I remembered it. I remember more trees, the houses closer together, the street more boisterous and active. On this afternoon, it was quiet. There were no cars, no people. It didn't match-up with my interior image and that was unsettling. I think what was most surprising for me was the recognition that returning to this street where I spent the longest chunk of my childhood--from 9 to 18 years old--did not generate new memories the way that thinking about it does. In other words, my memory of the place is much more real to me than the place itself. And this recognition is only reinforced by the fact that now, a week later, my memories of Dawlish and the surrounding neighbourhood have already started to replace, as if moving in to repossess occupied territory, the "reality" that I saw so recently.

habit & sennett's the craftsman

Before trying to catch up on postings (sort of), I thought I'd reflect on the idea of the habit of writing itself. I intermittently drop the "habit" of posting entries here and those shifts are interesting to me. Often I've been in a frame of mind in which I look forward to posting and have difficulty selecting a favourite thing for the day because it feels like there are so many; other times, no favourite things arise on a given day; and still other times, I don't think about it at all. It's the last experience that interests me the most because it's on these occasions that I've lost the "habit" of writing. This whole blog drops off my radar. Oddly, when I'm busiest I write the most. But that makes sense: when I'm busy, I need structures to my day and I just fold blog writing into that structure. When I'm less busy, I rely on these structures less. Someone told me that it takes six weeks to develop a habit in such a way that it becomes second nature (that is, if you can just push yourself to do a thing for six weeks, after that period it will become a natural part of your day in the way that eating lunch or making coffee is not a chore but just what one does). In general I like habits that take me out of the mechanical rhythms of the day, that make me think about a particular moment in a new way or a decisive way, and that define the day differently than when I just move remotely through it. That said, there is something lovely about a totally unstructured day as well. And I'm sure there's some happy medium where habit meets fluidity and both improve each other.

All of this also made me think of Richard Sennett's The Craftsman. He doesn't talk about habit, per se, but he does talk about the value of craft—investing time in really mastering something slowly and attentively—and its fading role in our culture. This blog is not a craft in Sennett's terms--a thing made with one's hands--but my casual attitude toward it does maybe relate to the tendency he identifies in our culture to try something out, enjoy it for awhile, and then drop it and move on to the next thing. A certain impatience rather than a paying attention. In my own experience, I do love anything that requires concentration--from drawing to cooking to writing--and habits seem to suggest the opposite: that point where concentration is no longer necessary. But maybe not. Here's an interview with Sennett on his book.