With or Without You

I can no longer move forward emotionally until I face my demons. Let’s get this skeleton out of it’s cold cold closet: I have a difficult relationship with ice. As Bono so meaningfully crooned: "I can’t live... With Or Without You."

Given my addiction to iced tea, ice cubes play no small role in my daily life. So it is not surprising that I have strong emotions about these frozen modern marvels.

The right ice, submerged in even moderately fresh iced tea, can result in a high-flying, hard rockin’, happy happy, super-productive super-mom kind of day. The wrong ice can lead to a dreary, yesterday’s news, murky-surly-cloudy kind of day. Because who wants to imbibe foul-smelling iced caffeinated beverages? And without the caffeine, things get a little ugly.

First, let’s talk about home ice-makers: As much as I wish it were true, they are just not the same as the industrial-variety ice makers that are found at restaurants. I don’t care how meticulously clean the rest of your house is, I really don’t want to use your home-made, cloudy, crusty old cubes that smell like last week’s pot roast. Though I know it is terribly rude, I have been known to bring my own fast-food-chain-bought iced tea to parties at the homes of perfectly respectable people. When you need a fix, you really can’t take a chance that your beloved beverage of choice won’t be drinkable due to the lousy ice. Better to insult the host than to spend the entire party sans caffeine, when you’ll likely insult all the guests instead.

 
At home, I prefer to keep a bag of store-made, spring-water ice in the freezer for ice emergencies. But even this is fraught with drama:

The first day, you bring the ice home, and you’re all aglow with anticipation. It feels like a shiny bright new relationship. You have everything you need: fresh cool tea, fresh ice, a straw or two -- maybe even a lemon. You and your frosty glass of Earl Gray can spend the days together in perfect harmony, musing on each other’s perfection and your uber-productive, if jumpy, future together.

But soon enough, that happy little relationship begins to sour. Those cubes that at first seemed to satisfy your every thirst have begun to show their true colors. They are a little gray and they’ve taken on a slightly musty flavor. Plus they keep falling all over the floor when you open your overstuffed freezer. 

Then those sneaky little cubes begin to insinuate their flavor into your tea, rudely taking on more and more cup space as the hours go by. Soon enough, you can’t stand the sight of those once-beloved spring water cubes. You wonder what you ever saw in them in the first place. Realizing the relationship will never again be the same, you guiltily dump the remains of the bag into the sink, and stand a bittersweet vigil until the offending ice dissolves.

But what to do, what to do? Without ice, there can be no iced tea. And a world without iced tea is not a world I want to live in.

As I see it, there are two alternatives: You can spend your life speeding between fast-food restaurants in search of clear-water, clean-iced beverages, or you can purchase bag after bag of spring water ice that then sits in your stinky old freezer, only to part with 9/10ths of it in a week. (And don’t tell me I just need to clean my freezer, because I am convinced that the problem is not just the odor infringement, it is also the primary ingredient itself – the unfiltered tap water -- that muddies an otherwise lovely beverage partner.)

I have taken much well-deserved grief from my friends regarding my ice snobbery. When Hurricane Sandy hit, and every restaurant was closed, and the store shelves were cleaned out, I had to go groveling back to a neighbor whose ice I’d previously spurned. Like a cheating spouse with my head hung low, I had to beg for her homemade ice -- which, I should note, was perfectly tasty by any reasonable person’s standards. Still, it was no drive-thru ice. My generous friend filled up two bags of the stuff for me and kept her gloating to a minimum, but she also kept my jittery voicemail message and texts as proof that I once sank low.

That’s okay, I’m not proud of my addiction. But I also know that nothing beats a good old fashioned, fresh-brewed iced tea with fresh-as-possible, filtered-water ice. Lemon is nice too, but not essential. It's the ice, man:

can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

Written for MamaKat's pretty much world famous Writer's Workshop: "Take a line from a song you love and turn it into the title of your next blog post. Let the content follow." Check out more prompts and responses here.

Buttery Papaya Preserve Cookies

When I read DorieGreenspan’s description of these cookies, I felt an instant love connection. These cookies are just like me: “a cross between a sturdy cookie jar cookie” (read: salt of the earth, no frills, call ‘em like I see ‘em Buffalo gal), and “more delicate side-of-the-saucer sweets” (read: semi-urban, semi-sophisticated and semi-refined food snob). When the MOTH reads this, he’ll be snarfing his papaya cookie at the idea of me being “refined,” but you get the point. These cookies, like me, waffle between high tea at the Palace and “Mom, whadda’ ya’ have for an afterschool snack?” On second thought, maybe it’s just the tea part of the high tea.

It all started with the jams. My gracious and ever-thoughtful foodie sister, who lives in Atlanta, sends me oodles of local jams and preserves every year. This generally happens the last week in September, after she’s sampled each of the unique offerings at an annual fall festival held in her town. Last September, she sent me this cool papaya preserves from Jill's Jam's. Papaya preserves seemed too high-end to waste on PB&Js, even in our house. And so it sat in the pantry, waiting for inspiration. With the cooler weather upon us and the next shipment of Jill’s Jam’s looming, I urgently needed to clean house. This coincided nicely with my need for a quick sugar fix. Which reminds me ….

The other big bonus about these cookies is they take only minimal effort: about 10 minutes to mix the ingredients and get them on the cookie sheets, 12 minutes in the oven, and they’re done. All you have to do is wait for the kettle to boil and the tea to steep. Which gives you just enough time to invite your semi-urban, semi-sophisticated, semi-refined food snob girlfriends to join you for a nice little afternoon tea.

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Buttery Papaya Jam Cookies

From Baking From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan

Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp ground ginger

¼ tsp salt

1 stick (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, at room temperature

2/3 cup sugar

1 large egg

2 tablespoons milk

½ tsp pure vanilla extract

½ cup of your favorite jam or preserves (Dorie uses apricot jam, I used papaya preserves.)

Position the racks to divide the oven into thirds and preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with parchment or silicone mats.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder, ginger and salt.

Working with a stand mixer, preferably fitted with the paddle attachment, or with a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat the butter on medium sped until creamy and smooth. Add the sugar and beat for a minute. Add the egg and beat for 2 minutes more. The mixture will be satiny. Add the milk and vanilla and beat just to combine. Don’t be concerned if the mixture looks curdled, it will even out shortly. 

Reduce the mixer speed to low, add the jam and beat for 1 minute more. With the mixer still on low, add the dry ingredients and mix only until incorporated. You’ll have a very thick dough.

Spoon the dough by rounded teaspoonfuls onto the baking sheets, leaving about an inch between mounds (Note: if you don’t roll them into smooth balls with your hands, they will come out of the oven looking a little shaggy).

Bake cookies for 10 to 12 minutes, rotating the pans from top to bottom and front to back at the midway point. The cookies will be only just firm, fairly pale and browned around the edges. Pull the sheets from the oven and allow the cookies to rest for one minute, then carefully transfer them to racks to cool to room temperature.

Repeat with the remainder of the dough, as needed, cooling the baking sheets between batches.

Serve with tea or keep in a sealed container for up to about 4 days.

How To Make Iced Tea, or a Lesson In the Perils of Multi-tasking

In my world, making iced tea is more art than science. My friend, however, uses an actual recipe for hers. To protect the innocent, we’ll call her H.

H is able to brew two perfect, aromatic quarts of iced tea within minutes. That is, just minutes after she gets out the recipe, plastic pitcher, tea bags, measuring cup, ice, saucepan and thermometer, then measures out her water, and combines it with 5 tea bags in a medium, non-reactive saucepan, heats it to exactly 190 degrees, waits for small bubbles to form on the bottom and sides of the pan, and cooks it for 10-15 minutes. 
She then allows the tea to steep 3 minutes more, but no longer (it could become bitter). Once that’s complete, H removes the bags and pours it over 1 quart of ice (previously measured into the pitcher), stirring until the ice is completely melted.

If she’s using sugar, she tells me 1 – 6 Tablespoons of natural cane sugar, stirred in while dissolving the ice, is the only way to go. For such a precise recipe, I find this wide range of sugar measurements perplexing. But thankfully I’m an unsweetened kind of gal, so once I actually try this recipe, I will skip that step.

Being the meticulous scientist that she is, H almost always accompanies this perfect brew with tea-ice. If you’re feeling ambitious, here’s how to make tea-ice: pour some of this hot tea into those ice cube trays you just emptied, stick them in the freezer and wait for them to harden. If you use plain old regular cubes made with water, your tea will become watered down before you can finish it. All this waiting for the cubes to freeze will give you plenty of time to repeat the above process again to actually make the tea you’re going to drink.

Once you’ve completed making the tea (twice), you are ready to pour it over the tea-ice-filled glasses and garnish with lemon-wedges. Drink and enjoy – after all that measuring, you deserve it.

My version of a “recipe” is a little less scientific. And sometimes, though not usually, there is a certain pleasure in the element of surprise that comes with my approach. 

1.            Fill a tea pot with water (how much depends on your mood and how many times you are interrupted by one of your children, coming to report on the other one who is splayed out moaning and bleeding in the next room).

2.            Put the pot on to boil while stirring oatmeal, frying an egg, digging out recyclable containers to hold the kids’ lunches, answering the phone, checking your daughter’s homework, and tying your son’s shoelace.

3.            Wait for pot to start wailing at you while boiling over, leaving permanent residue on your burners, and scalding you with steam and spittle as you try to remove it from the stove.

4.            Realize you’ve forgotten to make space in the sink for the monstrous jug you’ll need to pour the water into, and scuttle back to the stove to return the teapot to the range while you do the dishes.

5.            Do the dishes.

6.            Repeat steps 1-3, as needed. (You may need to re-fry the egg that burned while you were doing the dishes.)

7.            Remove teapot from stove and try to pour water into your container without burning yourself on steam. If you’ve purchased your teapot on clearance from a discount chain store, I can’t help you. Not that I would ever do this, of course.

8.            Tear open 4 or 5 teabags of your favorite tea, depending on how much water has spilled out during earlier steps. If using Trader Joe’s Earl Grey, you must do this quickly, before your foodie husband comes downstairs to find you blatantly disregarding the collection of $100/pound loose leaf teas he has specially ordered from his tea vendor in Chicago (Todd & Holland, if you must know). Drop teabags quickly into the container, submerging any evidence of pre-bagged tea.

9.            DO NOT GET DISTRACTED. No dishes, no checking email, no starting another cooking project. JUST WAIT. After 3-5 minutes, get those tea bags out of there! Some of those hard-core types will actually set a timer on this step, but I prefer to live on the edge. (Ya think?)

10.       Add another ½ gallon or so of cold water to the brewed tea. Wait a few more minutes, then refrigerate for a couple of hours. Don’t try to drink it right away: you’re just going to end up diluting it with all the plain-old-water ice cubes you’ll need to add.

I’ve drawn you a map, now you can choose the path – the tried and true, Cook’s Illustrated-approved, scientific method, or the more artistic (read: messy and often risky) approach. Just don’t try to multi-task, and you’ll be all set.

Haiku To A Tea Shop

You, dainty floral

Delicate bites of England

Me, bull with china


Disclaimer: the photo here is not an actual cup and actual cookie from my "high tea" with the girls. It is for representational purposes only. Actual cup and plate designs varied, and actual tea time snacks were much smaller and prettier than my monstrous, over baked coconut biscotti. Though I think I can match them on taste, actually.


I have to admit that I was pretty skeptical when a friend suggested we visit Tea Rose's Tea Room this week for an authentic "Afternoon Tea." I've never been one to appreciate anything dainty, girly or even British. I think I'm missing the traditionally female gene that makes us long to collect dolls, tiaras, floral patterns and tiny baked goods. 


Still, the outing involved lunch with good friends, tea, and an excuse to avoid the laundry for another day, so I was game. 


The Tea Room was exactly what I expected -- thousands of delicate tea cups, saucers and china pots in one room, just waiting for a klutz like me to knock something over. I made a fairly good showing, as these things go -- I only tipped over one creamer-full of milk, but at least nothing chipped. The food was better than expected, too: there were the requisite cucumber sandwiches on soft round white bread, some lovely tea bread, mini quiches, an unoffensive chicken salad, and of course, there were the scones. 


Oh, the scones. For those of you who know me, you may know that I have a bit of a scone addiction. And there is truly nothing like a tiny, heart-shaped, crumbly brown sugar scone with double cream, lemon curd and strawberry preserves to make a girl go weak in the knees. It took every last ounce of self-control I had not to ask for the recipes. (Somehow I felt that would be inappropriate for our day in Downton Abbey.) I can't comment on the other desserts, because I was too distracted by the scones to bother with the rest of the delicacies. My friends tell me the other sweets were lovely, and I suspect they will never let me live down The Day Tammy Refused Dessert.


One of the teas, however, did stand out. Provided by SerendipiTea, Congo Bongo is a coconut-mango black tea that somehow creates an intense, caramel-like aroma and flavor. I bought some Congo Bongo and brought it home for my tea-snob husband, and even he agreed that it paired very nicely with chocolate after dinner that night.


We left the Tea Room charmed by our experience there, full of talk about when we might be able to return. And I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a true convert in the dainty department. Now, I have the strangest urge to bake tiny, heart-shaped scones in time for Valentine's Day. I've gone to four stores in the past two days in search of a mini-heart scone pan, but so far, no luck. If you know where I can score one, please send me a note.