I was visiting Cooking with Amy as I do periodically, when browsing through the comments, I came upon a comment by Catherine Ross of Albion Cooks (www.albioncooks.blogspot.com). Catherine has a nice soup recipie to keep us warm this winter season. But more importantly, Catherine has a very nice section on “tea time”!

So if you haven’t seen Catherine’s blog, I encourage you to do so. You will find the link in the blogroll section of our weblog.

If we can get Catherine to agree to this, may be we might have her share a couple of recipies with you, our favorite readers!

Catherine, keep up the good work. We love your blog!

Sourdough Bread - Baker Sunil!

I have been baking bread off and on for several years, and the results have been mixed. Some times the bread would taste too yeast, at other times the bread would be fine to taste but pale in color. I could never get it quite right. So, after a while, I just brokedown and bought a breadmaking machine. And for a while, I baked and baked. The breadmaking machine makes baking bread a cinche. I loved waking up to the smell of bread, so bread making continued. But after a while, it stopped.

Recently, when my parents arrived here to spend a few months with us, I decided to pick up bread making. My dad loves freshly baked breads, and sourdough bread is his absolute favorite. So, I thought I would bake sourdough bread for him every few days, so he could really get his fill.

But this time I am doing things differently. I am using the bread making machine more to knead the dough and to let the dough rise. I am now taking the dough out for proofing and am forming the dough in the shapes I want, and baking it in our generic oven.
You can see the results for yourself. Not bad eh? Taste was good too. Just ask my dad!

From Gong Fu Tea C…

If you have spent a few minutes on our weblog, you may have noticed that we have a little quiz for people about common beverages - which beverage is healthy beverage. The results so far are - Wine is winning as the healthy beverage.

What does this mean? May be this means that the tea industry has not done enough to publicize the value of tea as a healthy beverage. Wine is a healthy beverage indeed, but tea is not too far behind. While studies have shown that people who drink wine have lower risk of heart disease, there are hundreds of studies that vouch for the health benefits of tea which include its anti-oxidant properties, its anti-cancer properties, and its positive effect on weight gain.

However, there may be some thing else going on here. With wine there is a certain glamour involved - Wine is often portrayed as a beverage to be enjoyed at dinner time, in others company, and there is a certain romanticism associated with wine. Being an alcoholic beverage of glamor, one tends to think of wine as a gift item, not tea. Thus, perhaps wine is often top of mind for people.

Tea on the other hand, is not associated with glamor in the western world. While it is true that tea is just as natural and just as complex a beverage, when was the last time you thought of using tea as a gift? When your guests arrive, do you reach for the best tea you have in your collection, or do you reach for the box of Lipton?

If you were in India or China, or Japan, it would be quite different. In India or China, they do reach for the best tea in their collection. In China, when a head-of-state is toasted to, the toast is often of the highest competition tea. If you were to go to Calcutta, you can bet that the host will try to dig out their best first or second flush Darjeeling. Here, alas, Lipton is all we know about, so the expectation from tea is very low.

May be the reason why people think of wine as a healthy beverage because people drink wine more than they drink tea. Or may be I am reading too much into a small survey with only 7 response, and it is all just a figment of my imagination.

Neverthless, the results up to now got me thinking. What do you think?

Its amazing how quickly this month has gone by! Its already the 14th, and Christmas is around the corner. Its been rather busy season with all the gift baskets to be made, but its coming to an end. I think we will get a few more orders next week and then it will slow down.

Tomorrow I intend to take a break to host some friends with traditional Rajasthani food. On menu for tomorrow is
> Aloo tamatar (a potato and tomato gravy vegetable)
> Gatta saag - chickpea gnocci prepared dry - very spicy!!
> Paratha - traditional Indian bread
> Vegetable Pulao - Fried rice with vegetables
> Kadhi - Chickpea soup made with yogurt
> Dudhi halva for desert

Now I know these things probably don’t make sense to you; you probably haven’t heard of them at all. Sad fact is that you won’t find any of these items in the restaurants in US that masquarade as Indian restaurants in US. But this is the stuff I grew up eating at home - not the stuff you find in the restaurants. Simple fare that will keep you healthy and tingle your taste buds, all at the same time!

May be I’ll post some pictures.

Hope you have a good Weekend!

Things you will need for this gift idea are:

Cut a small 10 inches by 6 inches piece of the card board and fold the sides up by about one inch on all sides. Place the card board on the mesh fabric, place two caddies of tea on it and the tea pot in front of the tea caddies. Now, start collecting the mesh fabric around the caddies and the tea pot and collect it at the top. Staple it together with your home office stapler, or simply tie it together with a string. Tie a nice little bow with a ribbon to hide the stapler or the string, and attach a card to it.
If you want, you can tie thinner ribbons such that they stream down the gift pack.

There - the whole thing should set you back by may be $20 at the most.

As a variation, you can use shrinkwrap cellphane wrapper instead of a mesh fabric with the same effect. In the photo instead of the cardboard you see a basket. A basket will cost you a few more dollars at Wallmart.