My Jamie Oliver Experiment: My Newest Kitchen Acquisition-And Learning to Appreciate Tea

How This Started and My Hope For This Experiment

My Husband and I are both big fans of Jamie Oliver. For Christmas I bought him Jamie's cookbook "Jamie's 30 Minute Meals: A Revolutionary Approach to Cooking Good Food Fast". As I read the preface of his cookbook I was inspired by his ideas. He felt that he was spending too much time cooking during the busy week and doing too much clean up. So he decided that for the week night meals there needed to be something quick and still healthy and yummy. He and his team did a lot of work and made the "30 Minute Meals". He has explicit directions for step by step getting the meal done in 30 min. He tells you what to do first, second, and third so that you have all dishes going at the same time, instead of making it dish by dish. Since we aren't doing once a month cooking right now I was captured by this idea and dying to start trying. I have been spending way too much time in the kitchen during the week and can't wait to be able to prepare good meals fast. My husband was all for it since he loves to eat great food and has a very particular palette. He will be making some of the meals on weekends when he isn't working because, this is after all, his cookbook :)

Monday, August 8, 2011

My Newest Kitchen Acquisition-And Learning to Appreciate Tea

These beautiful tea cups are my newest kitchen acquisition and I am in LOVE with them. They are made in Italy and I have had my eye on them since we moved here over 8 months ago. I finally decided to buy a set of six and I am really enjoying them.

Here where we live now they have 3 meals a day and then morning and afternoon tea and sometimes pudding which comes after the last meal of the day. It depends on where your roots are I am told. I used to have a huge amount of tea in my cupboards in the USA, but only drank it for medicinal purposes because I forgot it was there until someone couldn't sleep or had an upset tummy or something. Here I drink a glass of tea everyday and sometimes two. I am really enjoying the Fijoa tea, the lemon and lemongrass tea, the strawberry and mango and my staple Mint tea.

For me it makes it even more enjoyable to drink it out of my new tea cups. It combines beauty with taste which is something I have always had an appreciation for. My kids LOVE having tea as well. Their favorite (and mine) is to eat biscuits with their tea. I couldn't really understand the obsession with small hard round biscuits that are barely sweet. Until the day we had some with out tea and it all made sense. They really are quite good with tea (not good for much else though).

My two year old really enjoys her tea and she and the boys were quite put out with me when I wouldn't let them drink it out of my new tea cups. But they would drink it from anything as long as these homemade gingerbread men were on the side :)

This is one of the homemade gingerbread men that we made to decorate at my sons birthday party. These were also really great with tea. I was glad I made an extra batch. I had to go all over to find molasses here. I finally found it at "Common Sense Organics" and it was just what I wanted-unsulferd molasses. Here is the link for the recipe to make you own homemade gingerbread men to dunk in your tea: http://www.joyofbaking.com/GingerbreadMen.html I like this recipe because it is real gingerbread made with molasses. It has a wonderful flavor. I used fresh nutmeg in mine as well which was nice. Hope you enjoy your tea and little men as much as we have.