Remember this plant? The one that’s growing in the tea garden, and I took a nice photo of, but didn’t know its name, but I liked the photo, so I still put it on the internet in a previous blog post? It turns out this is Mamaki, a plant that is only native to Hawai’i and is known for its medicinal qualities. Mamaki is commonly made into a cleansing herbal tea, which is good for digestion and general relaxation. (That sounds like code for “a laxative that will get you high,” but it’s not.) I was told by some of the other farmies (folks who work here) that just a…
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Tea Tuesday: Where Your Red Zinger Comes From
If you live in the US, you’ve probably seen Celestial Seasonings’ “Red Zinger” tea in your local grocery store. But what exactly is a “red zinger”? I’d never really thought about it until I was being shown around the vegetable garden at Hana Farms, and someone pointed to a thin bush saying, “that’s hibiscus, you know, red zinger, you can make tea from it.” If you can make tea from it, my interest is peaked, so I decided to try it out. After some internet research, I discovered that this wasn’t going to be as easy as I’d expected. Most recipes for hibiscus or red zinger tea suggest that you…
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Tea Tuesday: The Tea Garden
I mentioned in my last Tea Tuesday post that Hana Farms grows many plants that can be made into herbal tea. They’re also working on making a designated tea garden, which is a number of stepped beds located beside the farm’s communal buildings. Apparently, this area was entirely overgrown just a few weeks before I got here, but E’s sister started clearing the land and uncovered some forgotten stepped beds. The tea garden has become her pet project, and she has been rebuilding the rock walls out of the farm’s plentiful lava rocks, turning the soil, and planting. So far, there aren’t a lot of plants growing, although there is…
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Tea Tuesday: It wasn’t meant to be
The farm where I’m working in Hawaii grows many different kinds of fruits and vegetables, including a number of herbs that can be made into tea. The most plentiful and identifiable, at least for me, are definitely the mint plants that grow in and among the beds in the vegetable garden. On this farm, they act as a cover plant, which means they take up space where unwanted weeds might otherwise grow. The mint is not explicitly tended to, in part because this variety of mint grows without much encouragement (it grew beside the driveway of my childhood home), but it’s presence is useful and appreciated. As I was walking…
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Tea Tuesday: My Flight is Tomorrow!
As evidenced by the title of this post, I’m leaving for Hawaii tomorrow! So instead of devising a complex blog post for you, I’ve spent the evening furiously packing, and wondering what I’m forgetting. Therefore, this Tea Tuesday is going to be a bit brief… Have some tea porn everybody! My friend, Katie, moved into a new apartment last week, and inherited this coffee table, which she proceeded to turn into a shrine to her tea. I can only hope that when I finally get a big kid apartment, I will have as much beautiful loose leaf tea as her.
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Tea Tuesday: Tealuxe
Tomorrow I will have been home from Europe for four weeks. I’ve mostly been spending the time with friends and family as well as sleeping in and organizing my closet. Today, however, I spent some time exploring my home state. I was meeting a friend in Providence (Rhode Island’s capital) this afternoon for coffee, but first I decided to stop by a local teahouse called Tealuxe. Yes, I got tea before going to my coffee date. What of it? Anyway, Tealuxe is a local chain with locations in Boston and Providence, and I always feel good supporting small(er) businesses. (Afterwards, my friend and I got coffee at Blue State Coffee–another…
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Tea Tuesday: Christmas Presents
I’m the avid tea drinker in most of my friends’ and family’s lives, so tea and tea accoutrements have become people’s go-to Christmas presents for me. I have no problem with this trend. My best friend visited Rhode Island this past weekend and, because I hadn’t seen her since I got back from Europe, she gave me my Christmas present then. You guys, it was so exciting. This is no ordinary tea tumbler (which is really just a fancy way of saying thermos that has a tea strainer in it). It’s lined with Yixing clay. Yixing clay is especially porous clay that retains the flavor of the tea you brew…
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Tea Tuesday: Dobrá Čajovna
I first fell in love with teahouses in Barcelona, at a teahouse called Čaj Chai, which was founded by some Czech immigrants to the city. I have written, and waxed poetic, and gushed about this teahouse before, and I will do so again, but for now I want to tell you about a teahouse in Prague called Dobrá Čajovna, which I was pleased to stumble upon. It was so good, I went twice over the course of my five days in Prague. When I found it, I was surprised–an Asian-style teahouse in the Czech Republic? Apparently this isn’t at all an unusual thing. The teahouse in Barcelona that I so…
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Tea Tuesday: Advent Calendar Tea
Merry Christmas from An Opportune Moment! Well, friends, I returned home from my European Adventure to spend Christmas with my family, but while I was still abroad I wanted some way to get in the Christmas spirit. I had planned to buy an advent calendar with chocolates behind each door, but then when I was in Sarajevo I stumbled upon a box of Advent Calendar tea. Well, my tea-loving-heart couldn’t resist, despite the fact it was a German brand of tea (Alnatura), which meant that I never knew what kind of tea I was drinking. It was like a fun, Christmas-y adventure! Did you do anything special to celebrate the…
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Weekly Travel Inspiration: The World’s Best High Teas
This morning Lonely Planet tweeted the article: The World’s Best High Teas and it seemed like an appropriate weekly travel inspiration given how tea- and Britain-focused An Opportune Moment has been these last couple of weeks. Only one of the high teas mentioned in their post is in London–Claridge’s–but many of the others are in countries that were once British colonies. Half of them are in Southeast Asia, which I’m tempted to take as a sign that that region of the world should be my next destination after Europe… But I’ll probably settle for taking a daytrip to New York City once I’m back in the states, to visit Tea…
