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This was the first tea of tea party today. I broke with our usual attempt of having black, oolong, and green, or some other form of variety and just made two black teas and one flavored black because I was pairing it with something that I felt needed black tea to carry it.

You see, the lovely JacquelineM sent me a tiny little tea book with recipes in it a while back and today I tried one of them for tea time. The recipe is Pear, Walnut, Bleu Cheese sandwiches on Seven Grain bread, except we could only find twelve grain so we used that instead! LOL! The Bleu Cheese is mixed with cream cheese to spread it on the bread. It was very tasty and I don’t EVEN want to know how many calories were in each little triangle!

The sandwiches were very rich, so I wanted a good, strong black tea to stand up to the flavorful Bleu cheese and to contrast with the delicate pear. It was delicious! Thank you, Jacqueline!

Tonight’s tea with hubby while peaceful music plays on Pandora. I want to own every jasmine tea Teavivre sells. They are that good. The Jasmine Dragon Pearl and Extra Downy Jasmine Pearls are probably my favorite, or the white jasmine, with this one coming in as an excellent every day drinker, so much smoother and milder than the loose leaf I bought at the Asian Market. Lovely.

I saw the tin sitting off to the side and said, “Why not?” I completely forgot until I saw it just now about the experiment of icing it and adding vanilla. Seriously? I did that? And liked it?

Well, having made it the usual way I make hot tea, I tried to like it once again. I find it slightly more palatable now, but I think I would rather put this in my bath water because it smells so great. The taste is still soapy and perfume-y to me. And now that I have fallen in love with Teavivre’s jasmine teas….all of them…I know that I DO like jasmine, just not this one. And I don’t see myself caring about it enough to ice it with vanilla. As it cools, it gets worse and worse. I want to wash my tongue.

Foot tea and bath tea it is!

Back logging from last night: I decided to revisit this sample from Russel Allyn of Harney and Sons. This was our late night yoga tea for hubby and me! :)

As I said before, this tastes likes snowmelt in which one has cooked veggies, something like artichoke, asparagus, some smooth and mild and lightly buttered. Hubby, who still adds milk and sugar to his black tea, likes green and oolong tea plain. I watched as he poured cup after cup and drank it down. I think I got about seven of the twenty two ounces I made!

I didn’t want to finish my sample so I had steeped the same leaves three times in a tiny glass pot. I am glad I have enough leaves to drink this one more time – probably soon!

Thank you, Russel and Harney and Sons!

I am decupboarding this one as I finished it today! I was experimenting, and I am hoping someone on here can help me because it was NOT a success.

I made a big batch of this tea, added cinnamon, cloves, and a tiny bit of nutmeg, squeezed a Clementine orange over it, and threw the peel and fruit in to simmer. I also added sugar.

This is very nearly good, yet almost undrinkable at the same time. It smells good and the sip is almost good but there is a really weird aftertaste. It was somewhat drinkable other than that while it was hot but as it cooled it was pretty terrible!

I wondered if this is bitterness coming from the orange peel?

Does anyone have a great recipe for a mulled tea that can be simmered low and slow in a crockpot? Other than the old standby of instant tea, Tang, and cinnamon?

My bestie of 26 years came over for lunch today. I made stuffed baked potatoes with sour cream, sautéed onion, cheddar cheese, and bacon. For dessert we had fresh Snickerdoodles and Lapsang souchong. It was very yummy on this gray, rainy day! My bestie loves puerh, and she liked this, her first Lapsang, but she said it isn’t one she feels she must purchase. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that she craves it later, though. That is how Lapsangs worked on me and on my youngest daughter. They sneak up on you!

Back in the early loose leaf days when I used to go to A Southern Season and sniff sniff SNIFF pouch after pouch of tea and tin after tin from the Fine Tea Wall, I thought Russian Caravans were pretty much the same thing as Lapsang Souchong. They both smelled really smoky to me and I was afraid of them, and puerh was on that list, too.

I lost my fear as I drank teas that had natural light smokiness, then I had some lovely blends, and then I was finally ready for the real thing. The funny thing was that my youngest child loved smoky tea right off the bat.

So here I am drinking this Caravan and wondering where the smoke is! LOL! There are a number of teas that used to seem so very smoky to me that now just seem hearty. This is very lightly smoky but it is sweet and good. No milk or sugar is needed to make this palatable, and it is comforting and bracing as we look out on yet another gray, rainy day with no sign of sunshine in the near future.

Grace Rare Tea has done what they set out to do. They carry only a few types of tea but strive to carry the best examples they can get of those types. I have never been disappointed by them.

Thank you again, Hesper June, for the amazing box o’ smoky teas! This has been the perfect week to try them all!

This was the final tea of tea party today. Because it was sold as a green, I made it like a green tea even though I knew it MUST be oolong. Those parameters have served me well so I still use them. Three minutes in 180F water and you get a pot of buttery popcorn flavor. Treat it like oolong and you still get great flavor, just nuttier and less butter-y. The memory of this tea is tantalizing me even now.

Sip down! It is hard to believe that I thought this was smoky when I first tried it. It is very lightly smoky with fabulous body, almost chewy. Rich, full-bodied tea.

With all the kitchen revamping, I have had to move my tea stash. I realized that I seriously need to prune my collection and I am trying to drink some of the older teas. When we first went loose leaf we drank a lot of Ceylons, but then I went to Fujian black, then oolong and green, and I ignored my Ceylons. Snce this one caught my eye, I thought I would try to find out why I had so much of it left after so long.

This was the second tea served at tea party today. We had White Stilton Cheese with Cranberries on crackers and Pepperidge Farm Pumpkin Cheesecake Cookies, as well as Oreos and Danish Wedding Cookies.

The color of the tea as I poured it was so deep and rich, and the flavor was the same! Why didn’t I drink this up when I got it? This is fantastic tea, and my guest loved it, too! The aroma and taste were fruity fruity fruity. I won’t wait long to make this one again.