Tea Snack and Tea

trail-mix sticky-rice balls

This picture shows how non-chewable green tea leaves were incorporated into sticky-rice balls before entering me and my friend’s mouths. I made these at the beginning of the semester before gradually detaching my nostalgic appetite for the taste of home. Technically, I was going for a sweet rice-based dish called “sweet rice” (a luxury festival dish with sticky-rice, nuts, dried fruit, and lard), but given the materials available--trail mix from Roche Brothers’, steamed rice from Chase, and green tea leaves left the night before--they turned out as these poorly-ground rice blobs with only a spoon and a bowl as tools. Butter, honey, and more cranberries were added to the “pink” ones, more tea leaves and less sugar to the “green” ones. The pink ones turned out more preferable to my Caribbean friend though she wished for an even stronger taste, but I was glad I went in the right direction for her preference after our snack-exchange.

“八宝饭”/eight-treasure sweet rice 

Growing up with rare occasions of snack-tasting while regular meals are delicious and enough for daily nutritional intake, members from my family and my generation or above, under subtle influence of older generation and rural relatives’ traditional virtues of thriftiness, have abstained from eating snacks (which came to my late understanding as an effective medium for communicating with peers, or lack thereof). If I happen to have excessive snacks, or “supplementary food”, unfortunately motivated by curiosity, I would therefore substitute a meal just to keep cultivating the habit of acting asceticism in life (even when it means tolerating the refreshing bitterness and earthy taste of tea leaves) letting go of desires which could turn into gluttony and other traits undesirable for keeping the traditional lifestyle treasured as a nice balancing model opposed to the disrupted urban lifestyle.

金骏眉 red tea

The reason I bring up snacks first is that tea is not so prevalent in a modern urban Western context and not considered "food" or side drink to a meal, but any vegetarian dim sum can brighten up tea drinking experience meditative enough to make people drowsy. I have mixed feelings about the simplified tea set I brought from home which are convenient enough to brew tea soup for me and a couple of friends, but too humble for me to replicate the desired atmosphere and to restore the state of mind making tea at home (my decent range of tea selections still sit there quietly). The water, tools, furniture, and space here are not really helpful in facilitating an elegant tea brewing process for someone unskilled as I am. However, I still attempted to make tea several times earlier just to familiarize my skill in a different setting before inviting some friends over for what one gladly named a “tea party”. 

      

                 铁观音 green tea                                                        tea-pets (miniature tea pots)  

I would prefer an atmosphere and space more similar to that at home or at family friends’ apartment discreetly set up for making Chinese tea. Different from various popular brands of portable instant tea-bags more suitable for a modern “tea party” idea (no intention to go into any details but tea-bags can be made of crushed low-quality, rotten, or reused tea leaves, flowers, and other herb scraps), Chinese tea is more about tranquility, patience, tolerance, and courtesy instilled in the utensil washing (cleansing of tools, pots, and pets with boiled water), tea washing (immediate washing off of dirt and smell on the tea leaves), tea brewing and filtering (conducted in separate containers), and lastly pouring and inviting with careful use of tea-towel. Unfortunately our interest in having a “tea party” was gone as none of us have found a time fit for such a slow-motion time-consuming exotic process!