Chattanooga Tea Tour 2012 - Part 2, Court Side Tea Room

With the taste of Miss Audrey's dessert still resonating on the taste buds, we hopped back on the interstate - using the direct route - and continued our journey toward a 1:30 appointment at the next stop, the Court Side Tea Room.

Now, before I get into this, I first have to say the owner is a very nice woman.  She has the right personality for running a tea room.  Her intentions are sincere, and I'm sure she put a lot of thought into everything.  It's the execution that falls a little flat.  What follows is by no means meant to be reflective of her as a person, it's a critique of how she runs her business.

We drove around the block the first time we pulled up.  We weren't sure where to park.  There was a business next door with all the parking spaces next to the building labeled "For Customers Only."  (Great.  While we're having a relaxing tea, the store owner will tow the van of "them outsiders".)  We parked next to the road, hoping those were fair game.

We walked up the brick sidewalk to the porch, tugged on the door....  and it was locked.  Locked?  We knew it was the right place - the sign out front said so.  There was another sign in the window that indicated it was Open.  Tried the door again.  Still locked.  She knew we were coming - we made reservations.  Well, we were early, by 12 minutes.  As we stood there wondering what to do, the owner came and opened the door for us.  Okay, good.  She even called us by name.  Right place, right time.

The dining room was, well, the dining room for the house.  It was a quaint house, nicely decorated - not exactly with a theme per se, but it was comfortable and pleasing.

Our table

We were seated at the table in the center of the room. (Obviously, since the door was locked prior to our arrival, we were the only ones there.)  She shared what she had planned for our meal, complete with dessert. 

She said she had "a selection of teas" that we could have either hot or iced.  We asked what the selections were.  She disappeared for a few seconds and came back with a saucer with six different tea bags on it.  O...K...  Seeing how I haven't been to that many tea rooms - in case you're not keeping count, this is number three for me - I cut her some slack, chastising myself for making an assumption that tea rooms only use loose leaf tea.  I chose the green tea.  Sweetie chose iced tea and was given iced green tea.

Complete with Valentine's decorations

Our tea.  See the pitcher on the left?  Yeah.  That's what my tea was served in.  The only thing I could think was maybe she thought that was a more manly selection.  There were "real" tea pots sitting around that would have worked just fine.

One more thing before I tell you about the food.  Most of the pictures are of half-eaten items.  I'd like to say this is by design, giving you a chance to see the inside of the dish, but, really, I just stink at remembering to take pictures when the food first arrives.
The salad was a generous serving of spinach leaves, with strawberries, kiwi, sunflower seeds, and croutons, with a little serving of balsamic vinaigrette dressing.  I'm not a dressing person.  I usually stick with Thousand Island, and sometimes if I want to go crazy, I'll do Catalina.  But nothing that sounds like it has balsa wood in it.

It looked really tasty.  We gazed longingly at our salads after she served them -- no silverware.

After she came back and discovered us with handfuls of spinach held up to our mouths, she realized what we were missing.  OK, that's what I thought about doing.  Actually, we sat there politely waiting for her to return.

Once we had silverware in hand, we dug in.  I'm not a spinach lover, but I have to admit that was a great salad.  I had my doubts about the vinaigrette, but it was good, too.

The sandwiches were Black Forest Ham with Swiss, and Chicken Salad.  We each got half a sandwich of each, along with a generous helping of ... potato chips.  (Really??  Yeah, really.)  The bread looked like it was Arnold's bread from Kroger.  Definitely not homemade.  The chips would've been redeemed if they'd been made from scratch, but, alas, they came from a bag.

Fuzzy, partially consumed sandwiches

After the sandwiches, she told us about the dessert and then went and got it for us.  It was a two-layer chocolately confection, with the bottom being a sort of mint ice cream Klondike bar.  That part wasn't bad, it reminded me of an Andes Mint.  Laid on top the ice cream bar was what resembled a Little Debbie Swiss Roll.  They were drizzled with a chocolate syrupy pudding piped onto it.  There was also a strawberry with the chocolate syrupy pudding piped on it as well.  ("Chocolate syrupy pudding piped on" is the closest my limited culinary experience comes to describing it.)

All through the meal I drank my tea, resisting the urge to swing wide my pinky finger from the dainty little cup.  It was a smooth tea, very pleasant to drink, and a nice compliment to the meal.  However, with each cup, the tea would get a little more stringent.  I had a strong suspicion I knew what the reason was, but still, it tasted good, so I kept drinking.  Maybe I'm interjecting false memories after the fact, but I think it tasted a little pulpy, too.

When I got to the bottom, as I suspected, the tea bags were still in the pitcher.  There were four of them resting on the bottom - with the tags still attached(!).  Tags?!?  In my tea?  Might as well tested the water temperature by dipping a finger into it.

At some point in the visit, I needed to visit the "Powder Room" - that was the sign on the door.  It was a large room with an antique claw tub, and a dressing/sitting room past it, curiously, with a handwritten note on the door saying "Please do not close."  I found out why.  The window in the dressing room provided the light for the powder room.  There were no bulbs in the fixture above the vanity.  And the sink only had cold water.

Well, it was finally time to leave.  You'd think this nice little meal might have taken a total of 45 minutes to an hour.  After all, we were still half an hour away from our final destination, plus we were going to be losing an hour crossing into a new time zone, and we had a concert to go to.  No, it's almost two hours later.  (Note to self - light conversation with customers is good - going on and on about pets is not.)

She brought the check.  I thought all the surprises were out of the way.  Au contraire!  The dessert, which she brought out without asking us, was a separate charge.  If anyone knows me well, you know I never pay to get a dessert if it's chocolate.  Well, that raised my blood pressure some.  The total bill was over $32.  For lunch!  And a small one, at that!  (OK, breathe.  It'll be all right.)  We anticipated that these smaller tea rooms might not be equipped to take plastic or checks.  We thought we'd make it simpler by bringing good ol' American currency.  I laid down two $20 bills. 

She picked them up and said, "Oh, I'm sorry.  I don't have any change."  I think I stared in disbelief.  Let's see - there was a sign on the front lawn - we were served a meal, even if it was an assemblage of store-bought food - we were presented a bill - yup, this is supposed to be a business.  So, I dug deeper in my pocket, and Sweetie looked in her purse, and we were able to come up with the exact amount, plus a little extra for a tip.

With money in hand, we settled up the bill, said some pleasantries, and beat a path for the van.  Fortunately, the van was still there.

That experience gave us plenty to talk about as we continued on to Chattanooga.

Thank you for sticking with this to the end.  This is longer than I normally write, but there was SO much to include.

Chattanooga Tea Tour 2012 - Part 1, Miss Audrey's Tea Room

This week was the fruition of the VD gift (also here).  It was time for our excursion to auditory awesomeness.  While a TSO concert would ordinarily be sufficient, we decided this trip needed more.  We love tea, and although my Sweetie's been to a couple of tea rooms, I've only been to one - that's now out of business.  I try not to let it hurt my psyche too much.  Wait - I've been to a tea shop that also served afternoon tea, however, they've closed their physical presence and now just maintain a virtual presence on the web.  Where's the number of that therapist?

Using the web, we planned our stops.  In case you like tea, I'll give a shout-out to TeaMap.com for being a wonderful source of information.  One can pull up a whole state of tea room entries and click a link that Google-maps everything on the list.  That's really helpful when one doesn't know that Arlington, TN, is closer to Memphis than it is to Bristol.

Anywho, thanks to TeaMap, we also discovered that most tea rooms had limited hours on limited days of the week.  Three were right on the way, at most, just a dozen miles off the interstate, but only two of them were open Wednesday.  One required reservations, the other recommended them. 

The first stop was an 11:30 reservation at Miss Audrey's Tea Room in Manchester, TN. 

If I had taken the right exit off the interstate, it would've been an easy off/easy on trip.  I had to make it challenging by getting off one exit too early as my Sweetie - who happened to get a call from her sister at that time - was frantically trying to motion with her free hand that I was going the wrong way.  As a guy, I know this:  there are no wrong ways, just the direct way and the long way.

Miss Audrey's is located in a historic looking home (not sure if it's officially "historic").  We were given a choice between "fruit tea", iced tea, and sweet tea.  Sweetie got the fruit tea, and I got the unsweet iced tea.  After asking, the waitress said they also had hot tea.  No flavor choices, no choice of green, black, etc., just "tea".  Since we're adults, and we didn't have any kids with us, we were able to order dessert.  Strawberry shortcake for me, and pecan "cobbler" ala mode for the Missus.  It looked like pecan pie to me.  We had about a tub of whipped cream between our two desserts.  Regardless of the names, or the abundance of whipped topping, these dishes were delicious!  Worth skipping the entree to get to it instead.

The atmosphere was nice, quiet, and relaxing.  Although I didn't see any power cords, Sweetie says the setting was elegant, complete with chargers.  Overall, it was a pleasant place to visit.  We plan to go back to order a meal next time.

Getting back on the interstate was a breeze since they were only a half mile from the exit I should have taken.  Taking the direct route was much quicker.  We were on our way to the next stop - let's just say we were about to have the most interesting stop of the trip.

(For the uneducated, which I was until Wednesday afternoon, "chargers" are plates used as place mats, that all the other plates are sat upon.)

The Return (Even Though I Never Knew He Left)

This settles it.  We - as in the U. S. of A. - need to take our tea drinking more seriously.  Then we can have spokesmen -animals -stuffed animals like the PG Tips Monkey. 

As best I can tell, PG Tips (which I still find to be a funny name for a tea company) first used chimpanzees, ala  Lancelot Link, in commercials back in the 70's.  Later, they developed a sock monkey to be their mascot.

Search YouTube for "PG Tips Monkey", and you'll find some of his commercials.  Thanks in part to a legal dispute, he apparently went on hiatus.  This clip, is appropriately named, "The Return".

In typical British fashion (no pun intended), he's even been known to don a dress and wig. 



Well, Poo!

"I'm just a little black rain cloud
Hovering under the honey tree"

Ok, that's not the poo I'm referring to.  Pooh is Number One.  This poo is Number Two.

What did he say?  I'm going to have to think about that.

As you probably know by now, I'm not a coffee drinker.  A few years ago I heard about a new coffee from Thailand called Civet Cat Coffee.  If you've never heard of this coffee, what I'm about to tell you probably won't encourage you to run out and buy some.  First off, it's expensive.  The online retailer Dean & Deluca sells Civet Cat Coffee through the Kopi Luwak brand. One 50 gram bag is $55.  Using the magical Google calculator to convert it to something I understand, it comes out to just under $500 per pound.  Yes.  $500.  Per pound.

Next, what makes this coffee so special?  According to Dean & Deluca, the beans (or cherries) are "digested and fermented by wild civets".  Now, to my internal thesaurus, "digested" is another term for "eaten" and "fermented" means "sits in the intestines until pushed out".  So, the civet cats do all the hard work, climbing the trees, then picking, eating, and - ahem - cleaning the beans.  The farmers just shovel up the forest floor, wash them off, and package them in little bags for gullible foreigners to buy.

Thailand's answer to Juan Valdez

Seems to me the cats do all the hard work.  I guess it's so expensive because there's not that many cats that prefer coffee.  If they'd hire more cats, maybe it wouldn't cost so much.
 
Well, if that wasn't bad enough, now a Chinese entrepreneur has ventured into my purview with a new product called "Panda Poo Tea".  When I first heard about it, I imagined Kung Fu Panda giving tea plants the civet cat experience before they're dried and packaged for sale.  Fortunately, that is as wrong as it is stomach-turning. 
 
Panda Poo Tea comes from tea plants grown in a compost bed of panda droppings.  Now, it takes a lot of tea plants to make a pound of tea.  That's a lot of acreage.  A lot of acreage would require a lot of panda scat.  Apparently, that's not a problem.  The average panda creates some 44 pounds of panda poo per day.  44 pounds.  A day.  Every day.  That's enough to make a LEET-speak geek exclaim, "0# $#17!," and rightly so.
 
He hopes to sell the first harvest of this new tea variety for 22,000 pounds per pound.  For us colonial revolutionaries, that would be a mere $44,000 per pound.  16 ounces.  $44,000.  Now that cat-excreted java seems like a bargain, doesn't it?
 
I'll stick with a nice Assam, or Lapsang Souchong, or a good English Breakfast.

Awesome Vendors

I have to create a quick post during lunch here at work just to proclaim that we've got the best vendors in the world.  None of the places I've worked in the past had such generous - and dare I say loving? (ok, maybe that's a little too carried away) - vendors who lavished cornucopian tasties upon us.  (Still too much?  Ok, just a little hyperbolic.)
I have no idea who they are, or what exactly it is that they vend for us, but every day for the past week they've plied the IT Department with goodies.  One day it was festively decorated doughnuts.  Another was banana bread.  One brought bags of pre-popped popcorn (mmm, caramel covered popcorn).  One went healthy on us and brought a box of pears.  Sadly, there was no partridge.  They must have left it in the tree.

Today, it's a variety basket of crackers, cheese spread, nuts, dried fruit, and TEA!  10 glorious bags of English Breakfast tea.  I was courteous and only took one.  English Breakfast is one of my favorite blends, so it's amazing the box hasn't yet found its way into my desk drawer.  All bets are off if it's still there tomorrow.

The octagonal tin had peanut brittle from yesterday until it was finished off before 9:00.

Speaking of tea, I'm totally stealing this from another blog I follow, but I was so impressed I had to share.

I hope you enjoy it, too.

Just Try It....

Not Undecided, Just Waffling

Every once in awhile I'll fix waffles for breakfast, and of course, that means I have to be an ass, well, I have to paraphrase my favorite non-Biblical talking donkey and say, “It's morning. I'm making waffles!!”


Today was such a day. But, I didn't make just any ordinary waffles, I put a special touch on them.

Waffles and tea.

No, the special touch isn't the peanut butter. That's normal fare. So is the non-high fructose corn syrup-free corn syrup. Most people grow up putting the normal, boring butter and maple syrup on pancakes and waffles. I was raised on butter, peanut butter, and corn syrup. Actually, if you'll read the ingredients on your average so-called “maple” syrup, corn syrup is generally the main ingredient above maple flavoring.  So, most likely you use corn syrup, too.

But I digress. This isn't about what's topping the waffles. Not special.

The tea alongside is a little special. It's Vanilla Rooibos. Mornings generally mean lots of caffeine-bearing tea. Rooibos isn't what I call a “real” tea. It's derived from a South African bush, not Camellia sinensis that produces what we commonly know as tea – black, green, white, etc. It's an herbal “tea”, a non-caffeinated herbal tea.


I still digress. It's not about the difference between Camellia sinensis and (ahem) non-teas. Not special today.


What made this breakfast special is how the waffles were made. The rooibos isn't just served alongside the waffles, it's actually in the waffles. I infused a pot of the vanilla rooibos, cooled it down, and instead of plain water, I used the tea. It turned out very tasty, if I do say so myself.


It was suggested by our first-born offspring that next time maybe try Berry Blend or Jackfruit, or even the sweet, yet spicy, Berried Treasure. All these come from our favorite tea shop, Franklin Tea, lovingly served by Jan Erickson.


I've used ground Lapsang Souchong leaves as a dry spice, and the brewed version as the foundation for marinating brisket.


I invite you to experiment with tea in other uses besides just drinking. Anywhere a recipe calls for water, consider using tea instead.

I'm A Lumberjack and I'm OK

Alright, I know what you're thinking.  "Tea?!?  Are you kidding?  Wayne, I thought you were a man!"  Yes, I drink tea, and I'm proud of it.  So proud, in fact, I bought this shirt from shirt.woot.com.

 

Tea! the gentleman's coffee

When you think tea, you probably either have images of British people sitting around drinking with fine china, wearing fancy clothes, and eating scones, all while with an extended pinky.

No, when I drink tea, I drink with my friend Bubba.

Bubba - he's the one on the right

52 ounces of goodness!  I know this isn't the preferred method, but in our house Mr. Coffee has been repurposed into Mr. Tea ("I pity da fool!").  The first pot of the morning fills up Bubba, and then a second infusion of the leaves is used for iced tea.

I could go into all the benefits of tea over coffee, and the differences and non-differences black vs. green tea, but not today.  Gotta save something for future posts.

In case you're wondering about the title, you're obviously not a Monty Python fan.

http://youtu.be/5zey8567bcg

Don't "Teas" Me With Your Puns

Welcome to my blog. With the inspiration of a long-time (not old) friend, I've kicked around the idea of writing a blog for quite awhile now. The problem for me has always been two-fold. First, what to write about. I liked the idea of a blog of nothing but puns, however, that always seemed unsustainable for a long time, so I knew I needed something more. Another area of interest has been tea. Not just plain ol' sweet tea massed produced in all the Southern restaurants, or run-of-the-mill grocery store tea grown and sold in bulk; I mean the good stuff, bought from tea shops, with intriguing names like “Breakfast Assam”, “Iron Buddha Oolong”, and my all-around favorite, “Lapsang Souchong”.

The second obstacle was finding just the right name. Since the blog would deal with puns, it had to be extra punny, phunny, humorous. I kept wanting to go with an Ali Babba theme, something like “Oh Pun Sez Me”, but it just seemed too cliché. Finally, inspiration came while reading about the O-Cha Japanese Festival in TEA: A Magazine.

So, I hope you like what you read, even if some of it makes you utter a low, guttural groan while shaking your head in disbelief. Please drop in from time to time for (this is when you slip into your best Cockney accent), “a spot of tea,”a laugh or two, and even an occasional deep thought.