tea cakes

I have a vague memory of reading that during the first century or two of tea's introduction to the West, it wasn't unknown for people to take steeped-out tea leaves and eat them like any other boiled vegetable, seasoned with salt and butter. (Apparently fresh tea leaves were sometimes consumed as a vegetable back in China, so the categorization wasn't completely without precedent.)

This morning, I decided to make some green-tea concentrate; I couldn't get the pantry to cough up the spices I'd had in mind for green tea chai, so limited the extra flavor agents to a few lightly pestled pods of black cardamom and rather a lot of rose-flavored raisins which I hadn't been able to think of much else to do with. Afterward, I had a strainer full of the usual dead tea leaves and less usual bloated raisins, and remembered the above anecdote. Hmmm, I thought. I may not want to eat tea leaves straight, but at the least they've got to have some useful digestive fiber.( Read more... )

more BSG impressions

So at this point, we've rented our way all the way through the first season of the new BSG and a few eps of the second season. I've been listening more than watching, due to multitasking the media consumption with modular origami. A few thoughts, doubtless well-duplicated in the horse-shaped crater that's been beaten into the ground since these eps first aired--

1.) When Starbuck landed on Caprica, why didn't she either have a bewildered moment of "Boomer, WTF are you doing here?" or also immediately conclude that Helo might be a Cylon copy as well?

2.) Ellen Tigh is a very poorly realized character. Her autocratic advice to her husband wasn't completely unrealistic-- iirc from Robert Massie, toward the end of the Romanovs' reign, Alexandra pushed Nicholas to clamp down rather than allowing more participation from the Duma-- but so far she isn't much more than a caricature of Lady Macbeth as dissolute sexpot. For that matter, the female characters generally seem to be falling into the easy categories of brittle blondes and earnest dark ladies.

3.) Jamie Bamber has a damn good American accent.

That is all for now.