I love to cook and I am good at it too. Great teas need to compliment with great food, so I want to share some of my favorite dishes with you.

Fried rice is a popular dish among Asian cuisine. Back to the old days when microwave was not invented, one of the good way to get rid of leftover rice is to pan fry it in a wok to warm it up again. People started to throw in different variety of ingredients including eggs, meat, veggies and etc to enhance favor of it.  Many people complained to me that their fried rice became very mushy.  If you love fried rice, you need to follow my advices:

1)You need to use leftover rice. If you don’t have any, please make a pot of rice and put it in a fridge for at least a day before you use it. I normally keep it in the fridge for 2 days before i use it. The idea of using leftover rice is  the water content of leftover rice is a lot less than the fresh cooked ones. Most of the ingredients that go into fried rice generally have some sauces coming out when you saute them for a while. So you want to make your leftover rice as dried as possible, so that it could absorb all these juicy great sauce without getting too soggy. The dried leftover rice is easier to separate each rice grain too without sticking all together.

2)Oil is important. Most cuisines used a lot of oil to separate the rice grain out, and the shinny rices look good when they present it. You could use olive oil and reduce the amount of the oil, if you put the rice in the fridge longer time.

3)Heat up your wok very HOT before you put in oil and rice. It reduce the chance your rice stick to wok.

4)Pan fry each ingredient separately and mix them all in at the end. If you have green and meat together, you probably want the green still look green in the rice, right? So don’t overcook the food.

4)Combination of ingredient. You should avoid put in the ingredient which could generate a lot of sauce after pan fry it. If you do so, your fried rice will turn out like congee or rice swimming in a bowl of sauces.

5)There are dozens of varieties of fried rice, each with its own specific list of ingredients. You really don’t need to follow all these specific ingredients and you could mix in any ingredients you like is fine.

I made dried scallop and egg white fried rice today. It tastes good to me. Happy Cooking.

No Comments » Posted by june / Food & Drink

One of the good thing after being a mom is to learn how to prioritize my work a lot better and let the not-so-important things are out of my picture. For instance, I used to spend 2-3 hours in front of television watching junkie soap operas and I don’t do it anymore. My day normally starts with a cute cooing and babbling sound of Jacob and follows by half screaming & crying loud noise if I dare to ignore him. Thereby, as you could image that he is a sure the most effective alarm in my life. David & I turn him into bed around 9:30pm, so that we could have our personal time to follow up the work, tea business and my new hobby.

Most of my friends know I love cooking, but I don’t bake. I never grew up having an oven in the house, so baking to me is a challenge. Anyhow, Markus, one of my foodie friend simply made a delicious funeral cake (aka Streuselkuchen)when we went snowboard trip last year. He taught me into baking since then and  he certainly has a lot of patient to answer my brainless questions and even showed me how to bake.

I am doing a lot baking project and experimenting many new recipes. I made Tiramisu using TGY powder last nite before I went to bed!  Instead of using espresso powder, I grinded High Mountain TGY into fine powder and dipped the lady fingers with lot of Grand Marnier. At last I dusted with TGY powder and dark Belgium chocolate. It’s no way you could turn down such a nice tea & liquor!  It should go well with a nice cup of High Mountain TGY. Yeah! Happy Baking 101.

P.S. I should have taken the picture before I shared this yummy cake with Lisette and Paul, but it’s too late. I only have 1 slice left and the picture looks awful..

1 Comment » Posted by june / Food & Drink

Being a careless person definitely needs to pay off your due eventually. I mentioned the red date ginger soup with you folks a few weeks ago and I made myself a pot of red date ginger soup in my favorite Pu-Erh Thermos the other day since the weather is so cold in San Francisco, CA. I thought it would be nice to drink this soup to warm me up especially my very cold feet. I forget to mention one thing on my previous blog that you should buy the red date with a seed inside it and it has a better herbal effect than seedless ones. The only hassle part is that you need to use scissor to prune the seed out. Many of my American friends asked me about the red date from emails, the red date is jujube indeed, a member of the Rhamnaceae - the buckthorn family. The jujube fruit, which originated in China more than 4,000 years ago, is believed to invigorate the body, increase metabolism, give strength to the heart and slow down the aging process. In China, it is considered a daily dietary must.

After making my caffeine free red date ginger soup, I made PuErh tea the following day and the ginger smell was still lingering in the pot. Well, you could image I am drinking the Ginger Pu-Erh tea a whole day.

The taste is not really that bad and my husband David even joked to me that I should encourage tea lovers to try it out. Anyway, I don’t think the ginger and Pu-erh go well together, but you could definitely try to mix the Pu-erh with chrysanthemum and it add a very light and fresh fragrance to the tea liquor. Many Chinese from older generation know this recipe and they like pair this tea with dim sum. If you go to Dim Sum restaurant next time, you could tell the waiter or waitress to prepare you a nice pot of Pu-erh with chrysanthemum or just simply say guk bou (菊普; pinyin: jú pǔ).

X’mas is coming soon and I will get a new Thermos from David. Hehee.

June from www.just4tea.com

Jujube information is from

http://www.arhomeandgarden.org/plantoftheweek/articles/jujube.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jujube

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Instead of having a big juicy turkey dinner this year, I had Sashimi for Thanksgiving. David, Eric and I ordered Uni (Sea Urchin), Toro (Very fatty Tuna Belly), Hamachi (Yellow Tail), Hototegai (Jumbo Scallop), Monk Fish Liver, Sake(Salmon) and etc from http://www.catalinaop.com for 14 foodie friends. Sashimi was incredibly delicious and my top pick would be Uni, Hamachi and Hototegai and it’s around half price charged by top Japanese restaurants.

I wanted to prepare a nice pot of nutty refreshing dragon well tea for everyone to drink throughout the meal, but I was totally side track by all these lovely Uni and Toro. Traditionally, drinking green tea and eating Gari (pickle ginger) in between each piece of different sashimi could clean the palate and bring out original subtle favors of each fish; Interestingly nobody even noticed that they were missing their tea and I could completely indulging myself quietly with all these great food and conversation without running around to serve tea to everyone.

At the end of our dinner, Cathy picked the 2007 Spring Oolong as our first after meal tea and followed by Tie Guan Yin and Jasmine Pearl. The Spring Oolong bought out the sweet and flowery favor without overwhelming sashimi subtle favor. The more important is to help me to digest the meal faster for the coming dessert.

Many of our friends gave a 3-thumb up on the monk fish liver, here is the secret sauce Ben and I created:
Recipe:

1)Mix 3 tablespoons of soba sauce with 2-3 teaspoons of soy sauce
2)Cut a lime into half and squeeze out the juice.
3)Chop 1 green onion.
4)Put all the sauce on the monk fish liver and sprinkle the fresh chopped onion on top of it. Let it marinate for at least 15 minutes before serving. Feel free to add more lime juice or soy sauce as you like.

Cheers & Happy Holiday.

June from www.just4tea.com

No Comments » Posted by june / Food & Drink

I received a lot of congratulation emails from friends and tea lovers after I launched my website. Hey Guys, thanks a lot for suggestions and support.

My friend Maria, a talented writer, asked me if I carry any caffeine-free teas on my online tea store; as a writer, she needs to work long hours, but drinking too much tea or coffee could affect sleeping because of the caffeine.

Speaking of caffeine, it is one of the most important elements in tea. It’s odorless and has an astringent taste and is highly soluble in hot water. It acts as a mild stimulant which could help you ward off drowsiness and increase activity of the digestive juices. Compared to coffee, tea has higher caffeine when measuring both in a dry form, but a cup of tea contains only about half as much caffeine per serving as coffee, depending on the strength of brewing process. All types of true tea contain caffeine, but in different quantities. White tea has the least caffeine among green, Oolong and black teas. According to a Department of Nutritional Services report, an average cup of:

White tea contains 6-25 mg
Green tea contains 8-30mg
Oolong tea contains 12-55 mg
Black tea contains 25-110mg
Coffee contains 40-170mg

There is one popular misconception that the fermentation time (oxidation time) of the tea-making process is highly correlated with caffeine level. For example, most people believe green tea has less caffeine compared with black tea because of less fermentation time. In fact, caffeine is affected by many factors. Here are general guidelines:

The type of tea plant
The small Chinese Camellia Sinensis brush tea plants tend to have lower caffeine levels than the large leaf Assam tea plant (Camellia Assamica).
The younger tea leaves, such as very fine tips of tea leaves, have more caffeine than mature leaves.

Time of withering process
The longer withering time will result in higher caffeine.

Amount and size of loose tea used:
The more tea leaves you prepare for your tea, the higher the caffeine. A smaller leaf tea or well-ground teas, including traditional orthodox CTC tea process, will release more caffeine. Since the ground teas expose more surface to the water, caffeine can be released more easily and quickly.

Water temperature and steeping time during brewing process:
As we mentioned, caffeine is a highly water soluble element and the higher water temperature will provoke the caffeine to release faster. The longer brewing time will give more room for caffeine to dissolve in water. The overall average caffeine released in the first through third brews were 69%, 23%, and 8%, respectively.

As all true teas have caffeine, I suggested to Maria a caffeine-free herbal tea instead:

Ingredients:
30g of dried goji berries (good for the eyes)
10 dried black dates (good for sleeping)
A few slice of ginger (improves blood circulation)
Brewing/Cooking Method:
Put 4 cups of boiling water and all of the ingredients into a thermos and let it steep for 1 hour before you drink it.
Or put all of the ingredients with 4 cups of water in a pot, bring to a boil and simmer over medium heat for 45 minutes.

Note: In case you have a cold feet like me, you could replace the dried black dates to dried red dates to increase you blood circulation. You could also add some honey when you drink it and it’s very tasty.

The smallest one in the picture is gobi berry, the medium size one is dried red date and the biggest one is black date; thus don’t confuse with them.

Good luck.
June from www.just4tea.com

Information is from Food Research International Volume 29, Issues 3-4, April-May 1996

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