Spot of Tea in the Morning

I have never been, nor will I ever be, a true coffee drinker.  The closest I come to coffee is a white chocolate mocha from Starbucks or perhaps a caramel latte.  Black coffee is as likely to cross my lips as a raw onion.  Before my discovery of the wonder that is the caramel latte, I was an avid hot chocolate consumer.  That was my coffee.  I would get it in the morning and try to convince myself that the simple act of getting a hot brown beverage in the wee hours of the day would wake me up.  Mostly I just got a sugar high followed by a sugar crash.  Living in Boston one must consume some form of hot beverage in order to survive.  In an attempt to avoid early onset diabetes I started drinking tea, which warmed me up and also made me feel just a bit more sophisticated.  Unbeknownst to me, there was a whole underground culture of tea drinking and I was about to dive into its depths.

Tea is not just tea anymore.  You can basically get any flavor tea that your mind can imagine.  I once tried the most delicious strawberry tea a friend brought back from Poland.  It was the perfect balance of sweet and tea - just a hint of strawberry in every sip.  This experience was the first time I tried a tea that I actually liked.  Prior to this momentous occasion, I had only tasted standard Lipton teas - you know the ones your mom tried to give you when you were sick, enhanced by a squirt of honey from the bottle shaped like a bear.  There was never enough honey in that bear to make that tea palatable to me.  So, when invited for an afternoon of hanging out and perhaps a spot of tea, I was understandably skeptical of how the tea portion could possibly be construed as something to look forward to.  In fact, I went so far as to tell my friend that I didn't really like tea - did she have any hot chocolate?  Never one to give up (this is the same person who introduced me to sushi), she served me up a cup of the strawberry tea.  Of course, once I became addicted to this wonderful, hot, strawberry drink I came to find out that it was only available in Poland....go figure.  Short of demanding a box every time she visited her home country (and trust me I thought about it).  Never one to give up hope quite so easily I set out to find some darn strawberry tea - after all, how hard could that be?

Turns out, pretty darn hard.  Two years later I found strawberry tea in the tea section of my food store....in San Diego.  Prior to that discovery there was Teavana.  Teavana can be an intimidating place for the uninitiated.  This is an industrial tea store, they only sell tea, teapots, teacups, tea strainers, etc.  Nothing else.  And they are very serious about it.  You can't just walk in and say, I want a quarter pound of regular tea.  There are fruity teas, dessert teas, spicy teas, flower teas and straight teas.  And within each of these categories are a myriad of tea options.  You say straight tea, well you can choose from Monkey Picked Oolong Tea, Silver Yin Zhen Pearls White Tea, or Copper Knot Hongcha Black Tea - just to name a few.  There are at least three different strawberry teas to choose from here and each has a different strength and different health benefits.  And once you choose your strawberry, you can also choose another tea to blend it with and the process starts all over again.  And different teas have different preparation methods.  Some should be steeped for 2 minutes in 175 degree water, while others should be steeped for 3 minutes in 195 degree water.  And we aren't talking tea bags here, these are tea leaves, which means you need to buy the strainer and a measuring spoon if you don't already have one.  Teavana is for hardcore tea drinkers for whom that Lipton cr*p won't do.  They might as well say tea bags are for wimps.  But after a few visits I began to feel comfortable in what is a haven for tea drinkers.  And like the good little tea drinker I was becoming I even went there seeking medicinal remedies for my cold ridden husband.  A peppermint and white tea combination was recommended and darn me if it didn't work.  The peppermint cleared out his sinuses and the tea soothed his throat.  Move over Niquil, there is a new cure in town.  But, like many people, I tend to run in cycles, and soon I tired of my strawberry tea and since summer had come around I abandoned my hot tea habit for something less boiling.  My love for tea would soon make a resurgence in the most likely of all places - a sushi restaurant.

As I am sure you are all aware, my love for sushi knows no bounds.  Lunch, midday snack, dinner - there is never a bad time for sushi.  But, as yummy as it is, on a freezing cold day, sushi is not the food to warm you from the inside out, at least not literarily (sushi always warms my heart...).  On one particularly freezing day I needed a boiling hot drink to thaw me out.  And so, once safely ensconced in my neighborhood sushi restaurant, I ordered a green tea for the first time.  It was love at first sip.  Green tea is not a blow your hair back tea.  It is mild and peaceful.  When coupled with sushi it can scale back on the saltiness of soy sauce or spiciness of the chili sauce  It doesn't interfere with the taste but instead lets you to enjoy the flavor of the sushi while allowing you to relax from the inside out.  At first, I was a green tea with sushi only person.  And then one day I had an epiphany - why must I only have this wonderful drink with sushi?  Why can I not enjoy a relaxing cup of green tea in the morning while in front of my computer?  And so another green tea drinker was born.

It was only well into my cup a day of happiness green tea habit that I came to realize the health benefits of my favorite AM drink.  Green tea, along with being very relaxing, is an excellent source of antioxidants.  It might help boost your immune system (I for one have been pretty healthy since I started drinking it regularly) and it can help you maintain a healthy blood sugar level.  It is also known to help lower cholesterol.  Isn't it nice when you can benefit from something that you also find so enjoyable?

Along my travels I have discovered many an enjoyable tea, along with my favorite green tea (I mostly drink Bigelow Green Tea as that is what they stock in my office), I had the wonderful fortune of coming across Celestial Seasonings Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride, which is the best interpretation of a sugar cookie in tea form that I could ever imagine.  And don't even get me started on The Republic of Tea's Coconut Cocoa tea - expensive but awesome.  So, the next time you are looking at your can of Folgers, stop for a moment and contemplate the possible nirvana of a cup of tea flavored subtly with cocoa and coconut.  So sit back, relax, and sip some tea (with or without your pinkie finger extended - it is up to you).

Get Jiro: A Graphic Novel for Those Who Would Kill for Good Sushi

While I will never claim to be a hardcore graphic novel aficionado, Get Jiro opened my eyes to a genre of books that I had managed to ignore for far to long. I like to think of myself as an avid reader.  I mostly enjoy fiction but I will throw in some  non-fiction every once in a while to spice things up.  My reading genres typically range from mystery to romantic comedy to science fiction.  Vampires, witches, werewolves, and fairies?  Bring them on.  Novels about north Jersey female bounty hunters?  I will have it downloaded to my Kindle faster than you can say, "Have you read...?"  Graphic novels were the last frontier for me.  Sure, I loved the movie adaptations of well known graphic novels just as much as the next person.  Sin City was great in my opinion; who doesn't love a movie that brought back Mickey Rouke?  And who amongst us did not feel like going out and kicking some butt after seeing Scott Pilgram vs the World?  As much as I enjoyed those movies, I never considered reading their source material for more than a fleeting moment.  But then I heard about Get Jiro.

Get Jiro is a graphic novel about a killer sushi chef; killer in every sense of the word.  It is the brain child of Travel Channel icon Anthony Bourdain and journalist/ author Joel Rose and was illustrated by Langdon Foss.  I first came across this graphic novel while researching the panels I wanted to attend at this year's Comic-Con.  It was during this tedious process that I came across Anthony Bourdain's name and learned that he had authored a graphic novel about a sushi chef.  A fan of his Travel Channel show and books, I was quite excited at the prospect of getting to see him in person.  Wanting to be fully prepared for his panel session, I immediately went to the Barnes and Noble website and reserved a copy of Get Jiro for pick up.  

Having never read a graphic novel before I was incredibly impressed with the level of detail; the drawings really need to speak for themselves as the dialogue is kept to a minimum.  The slight rise of an eyebrow could mean many things to different people.  The illustrator needs to be able to convey his point through that eyebrow hitch, the set of the mouth, the squint of the eyes, the stance of the individual - arms crossed or at the sides.  All of these miniature details combine to tell a story with few guiding words.  It was an interesting learning experience for me - learning how to read in a whole new way; taking in the words and the images together, combining them to receive the final message.  The drawings of the food were especially effective.  I actually ended up attending the Comic-Con panel prior to finishing the book and learned that great pains were taken to get the illustrations of the sushi and all the foods just right.  Various chefs were consulted and the end result was nothing short of mouthwateringly fantastic.

From the very beginning one is shown, quite graphically, that this is not the law-and-order society we are all used to.  Get Jiro is set in a not so distance future LA.  The city is divided between two waring chefs - Bob and Rose.  Bob represents all that is corporate and soulless in food society - the Internationalists.  He likes everything big, shiny and new.  He shows no regard for the environment or sustainable living.  If someone wanted shark fin soup, he would kill the last living shark just to make his customer happy.  Rose is the farm to table hippie who only cooks with sustainable foods - the Vertical Farm.  Woe be the person who cooks a vegetable that is not currently in season.  While she has no qualms about killing a person who imports an avocado, she would never think of harvesting a tomato before its time.  In the middle lives Jiro.  He is a simple sushi chef who just wants people to enjoy and respect the art and craft of his sushi making.  He doesn't ask for much - eat your sushi fish down, no soy sauce, no wasabi and whatever you do, do not order a California Roll.  Follow the rules and you will be rewarded with the best sushi experience of your life.  Violate one of these simple rules and your head might just end up laying next to your plate and not because you had too much sake.  Because of his special sushi knife skills, i.e. the ability to cut off an opponents arm with several quick flicks of the wrist, Jiro unwittingly finds himself in the middle of Bob and Rose's war.  Each would like this lethal chef on their side, thinking he would give them just the advantage needed to overturn the other.  When it becomes clear that he will not be left alone until he chooses a side, Jiro makes a decision that will change the LA food world forever.

I found Get Jiro to be an excellent introduction to the graphic novel world.  It was accessible (two chefs at war, both want the third chef, fighting ensues) but at the same time outlandish (murdering over none sustainable harvesting practices).  The plot was easy to follow but with enough twists and turns to keep the reader engaged until the end; Will Jiro choose a side?  Will good triumph over evil?  Who exactly is good and evil?  For a relatively short novel, I found the characters to be well developed.  You knew who they were, where they were coming from and what the motivations were behind their actions.  Jiro is a sympathetic character even as he is murdering someone.  He is just looking for people to appreciate him and his food.  If he serves you a perfect piece of salmon on a small, tightly packed bed of rice, you should admire the beauty of the roll, recognize the time, energy and skill that went into making it, and only once you have done that do you place it gently on your tongue - fish side down.  Then you enjoy it all over again, this time from a taste and texture standpoint.  The smoothness of the fish, how it just about melts on your tongue, the soft, stickiness of the rice.  How they both come together in a perfect food symphony.  That is all he is looking for.  At the very least, don't drown the thing in a slurry of soy sauce and wasabi.  Jiro is a true lover of food.  Physical torture will not faze him, but pre-made, store bought sushi might just cause his demise.  Bob and Rose are painted in even clearer pictures.  Money is their ultimate goal.  Sure Rose may claim that she is trying to make the world a better place by saving the earth one local farm at a time but even she has her moments of weakness.  Bob makes no secret of his love for the almighty dollar but he is a slave to his consumers - a true chef at heart, he is forced to churn out whatever is the most popular dish of the day - even if it does turn his stomach to do it.

Fans of Bourdain's other novel, Medium Raw will recognize a scene involving a meal of the Ortolan bird.  There are bits and pieces of Bourdain's sharp wit and humor sprinkled throughout the novel and you get the sense that he had a great time creating it.  At the Comic-Con panel it was with pure joy that he described the creative process behind bringing this novel to life.  Bourdain talked of his childhood collecting comics and how he could not possibly turn down the opportunity to have a graphic novel of his very own.  Being able to work with his longtime friend Joel Rose only sweetened the deal.  Rose has been with Bourdain since he wrote for the Lower Eastside Literary magazine, Between C and D.  In fact he has the distinction of being the first person to publish Bourdain.  During the panel Rose and Bourdain discuss how this was a true collaborative effort that could never have come to light without the artistic talents of Langdon Foss.  Bourdain had the vision, Rose the storytelling ability and Foss brought it all to life with his brilliant depictions of everyday life in this not-so-everyday world.

I enjoyed reading Get Jiro.  Not only did it gave me an opportunity to get outside of my reading box and try something new but it was fun to read.  For me, a good book is an escape, a chance to check out a world different from my own.  I may not learn a whole lot (though in this case I did learn that the proper way to eat sushi was fish side down), but as long as I am entertained I consider it a successful book.  So pick up a copy of Get Jiro and grab some sushi.  Just make sure it isn't a California Roll because you never know who might be standing behind that counter of raw fish.