8 Months In Ukraine: tea

Showing posts with label tea. Show all posts

Friday, December 9, 2016

Snowfall + Tea Haul!

Well, that post about the snow in Kharkiv must have worked some magic... there is actually snow in Portland! For most cities, it's a tiny bit of snow. For this city, it's ARCTIC BLAST SNOWPOCALYPSE 2016.

School is canceled. People are staying home from work. The library is closed. The buses have chains on. There are only two kinds of creatures you'll find outside (here's the other kind.)

Russian tea haul

It's hard to stick to the no-new-teas rule. Really hard.

I broke it.

I've gone all out and have a collection.

The tea situation as a temporary student is not great. That sounds absurd- it's Russia, after all!- but it's just not happening. It's like a game in which constant upgrades are required.

Tea update

Even though it's been super hot lately, every day has been borsch day. Yum. It would make more sense to eat something cold, but D made a giant pot of the soup and I got hooked on it. He used a seasoning packet from the Russian store this time. It was okay, but I think he's actually really talented at just picking out random spices from the cupboard to use.

But- tea news!

So, I promised in February that the days of tea craziness would end. And they have. We still drink tea every day and every night, but the tea buying sprees are over. These past few months I was focused on drinking up what we had, not looking for new ones. Today I want to share just three teas with you: raspberry / currant, rose, and root beer.

Pryaniki and pig fat

This weekend I'm going to visit a friend. When I asked her what to bring (a pizza?), she suggested some Ukrainian food instead. Love this idea! :)

Marie, if you read this- borsch was on the menu, but our borsch chef has fallen ill and suggested a replacement of pelmeni instead. The fun part was that this meant visiting one of Portland's Eastern European food stores.

The last big tea roundup

Every time we talk about tea on here, the tea collection has grown. It's been a guilty pleasure for a long time- not candles, not lotions, not lipsticks, just boxes and boxes of teas. But this really is going to be the last big tea roundup. Enjoy!

Favorite Winter Teas

Republic of Tea haul for fall

In Ukraine there was never ever a too-hot-for-tea point on the temperature scale. It could be 5000° C and my husband would still be hovering over the tea kettle, waiting for it to finish boiling, asking me if I wanted a cup too.

On a recent trip to Nicaragua, though, every single day was a too-hot-for-tea day. Hence this, uh, slight overcompensation upon returning.

Decaf tea overload-

Republic of Tea haul

It's tea time again : )

We placed our very first order from The Republic of Tea in February! Here's what it looked like when it arrived:

While I was excited about all the tea, the boxes turned out to be the highlight of a certain someone's afternoon-

Believe it or not, but this actually is his I'm-having-fun face.

Warmer weather being ~~around the corner~~ already here, it's time to start thinking about iced teas... hence this beautiful trio below. The Strawberry Basil and Pineapple Orange Guava have already become fridge staples. We drink them without any added sweeteners since the combo of green tea + fruit is already flavorful enough.

Saving the Watermelon Mint for a hot summer day.

Meanwhile, matcha caught my eye after seeing this video:

Perhaps we went a little overboard when making it for the first time, though, since one cup sent D into a frenzy of hyperactivity for the next few hours. Does that mean we used too much powder?

Stash tea haul

I am LOVING the tea situation in the United States. The grocery store alone has a vast selection of different brands and blends; add in the possibilities available on the internet and the choice is infinite!

Recently I've been noticing a number of little tea shops downtown that sell their own loose leaf teas. Browsing in The Spice & Tea Exchange (a national chain of franchises) last week, I overheard 2 girls chatting in Russian while checking out the black teas. They laughed when I told them that if they were shopping here, it must truly be очень хороший чай, very good tea.

Oregon is also the home of the Stash Tea Company.

9 new things I tried this fall

1. Making blini for the first time in our (now not so) new apartment.

It's official: wherever one goes, whatever the local ingredients available for toppings are, blinis are still the best snack food ever!

Tea tour

To totally misquote Tinie Tempah, I live a very very very tea lifestyle. It hasn't always been like this. I blame it on D; he says he never remembers a time in his life when there wasn't tea. "My parents probably put it in my baby bottle", he laughs.

It all began when we started dating. D lived in a tiny dorm room and his black Walmart coffee maker was pretty much the only amenity. For that entire year we nibbled on late-night snacks of bananas and ramen. His mom and dad would drive up from the tiny community of Delta Junction with huge ziploc bags of dried bananas and D would stash them away in a dresser drawer. Delta Junction, by the way, has the highest percentage of Ukrainian people in the United States per Wikipedia. Per me, it's really cold there. Crazy cold! And the city we were in was a hundred miles north of that, even colder. We'd use the coffee maker to heat up water for ramen and tea on chilly Fairbanks nights (aka every single night). That was the first time tea became a part of my lifestyle. Back then it was one big box of cheap black tea... now it's nearly as extensive as some people's shoe collections.

We have tea for every part of the day. Black tea for the morning.

Herbal teas for the day.

And something uncaffeinated for the evening. Before bed D always goes for a cup of decaf Earl Gray. I don't trust decaf so I pick something out of my private anti-stress collection. (Basically I will buy anything that promises de-stressifying properties.)

In Ukraine we always had a shelf-sized tea collection but it's now grown and requires an entire corner of its own. This is one of my favorite places in the whole apartment.

The return


Names of all the in-laws in Russian. Yep, it's that complicated! (Муж = husband, жена = wife)

It's that time again, time for the Trial by ~~Fire~~ Visiting Relative. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know what that means :p

Someone's mother has come to stay with us (and it's not Кит's mom!).

The front door burst open yesterday, and a laughing, exhausted mother/son duo stumbled in. The power was out in the building and they'd had to walk up probably 200 stairs to reach the apartment. As soon as mom caught her breath, she lugged her bag to the middle of the floor and began the gift distribution.

Someone got his USSR birth certificate and a new pair of shoes (and lots of compliment fishing: oh, they're probably the wrong color, you must not like them, I should have bought a different pair)

Decaffeinated black tea, impossible to get in Ukraine.

Back in the kitchen

After our business lunch spree, I rolled up my sleeves and got back in the kitchen.
Now, I proudly present to you... the first 2013 edition of на кухне!

Enjoy : )

My new favorite snack

This is the best thing ever. It's easy to make, inexpensive, and the veggies- even the cabbage- stay crisp for days. It's as satisfying as popcorn: crunchy, salty, and sweet. Source: Natasha's Kitchen.

A Blast from the Past

Kremlin Butter / USSR Highest Quality

This butter is produced right here in Ukraine! There's a factory in Khmelnytskyi as well as in Zhytomyr.

Curry, Ukrainian-style

How To Avoid Coffee Life

Let's talk coffee shops!

If you've spent much time in Ukraine's urban areas, you've undoubtedly stumbled across one (or ten or twenty) Coffee Life coffee shops. Coffee Life is to Ukraine what Starbucks is to the rest of the world. "There's coffee in our blood!" proclaims the back of the baristas' t-shirts. And in fact, there may be; last year Kyiv Post reported Ukraine as having the highest growth rate of coffee-drinking in the world.

look familiar, anyone?

All foreigners end up at the Coffee Life chain sooner or later. It's a beacon of familiarity amongst the jumble of pawn shops, babushkas, and marshrutkas. Take a look at this page and tell me- how could you not get hooked? First off, there's the English prevalence: English menus, English logo and branding, even weekly Mafia games in English (free for native speakers). Then there's the free wifi, book exchange, drink specials, croissants, fancy desserts, lounge music, and 36 locations across the country. It's a franchise, so you can even open your own branch for around 1 million uah.

Going back to that question- how could you not love this place? By playing Scrabble there every week for 17 months, that's how!

I loved Coffee Life in the beginning- so upscale, so calming, so convenient- but eventually the monotony and the high prices got to me. Last week I dropped 33 uah on a mulled wine (original price around 25 uah but extra for a cinnamon stick and honey... but, uh, aren't those integral parts of mulled wine?) which, after they forgot my order and I had to wait ages for, tasted like a fish had just finished swimming in it. Luckily, there are plenty of other places to get a cup of tea here in Kharkov.

Happy Knowledge Day!

Halloween already? No, even scarier- school!

Tea with a Texan and the approach of fall

Despite the threat of rain, I set out this morning on a trek across town for the promise of real chai. See, the Russian word чай (chai) means tea but it's always just regular tea, not what we often think of a chai (spice) tea. Starr, however, had been to India recently and scored some real chai.... and then made the mistake of telling me about it :p Living in Ukraine there are only a couple American staples that I miss and chai tea is one of them. The others- root beer, peanut butter, cheddar cheese- I can live without as long as I don't start eating them. One spoonful of peanut butter and I'd start having crazy cravings, so it's better to just abstain and Ukrainianize my diet. Borsch, anyone? But chai? That's irreplaceable.

It was a long walk to Starr's place. I went through downtown and through Freedom Square, where there was some kind of subdued demonstration going on with almost as many policeman as protesters. I passed the wedding palace and all the attendant dress shops with gowns modeled more after wedding cakes than actual fashion. Google maps (or my hand-sketched drawing) led me a bit astray at the end, but I got to see this awesome kvas advertisement while wandering the neighborhood.

Starr's apartment was like the featured article from a design magazine. It broke most of the typical Kharkov apartment commandments: it was in a new building, the building had more than 7 stories, it had a DISHWASHER (which I barely even recognized after all this time!), the elevators had a real digital display in the lobby, instead of a domofon there was a video screen, a stove you didn't have to light by hand, actual smoke detectors in the building.... need I go on? On top of that the place had a minimalist design that focused attention on the giant picture windows overlooking a nearby park. Even the refrigerator was subtly designed to look like a cabinet and had a freezer compartment on the bottom (oooooh!). No wonder one of the Metallist players lives in the same building! If Bruce Wayne had a penthouse it would probably look like this. And should I even mention the mini sauna in the bathroom??

Where is everyone?

D's cousin came to town on a business trip this weekend. "Where is everyone?" he questioned as we walked along the banks of the Lopan river. "The train station this morning- deserted. The metro- echoing. The streets- empty. Where are the people?" D and I shrugged. I hadn't really noticed fewer people out and about. "Probably in Crimea" D answered, "enjoying their summer vacations."

The French Bakery

There's a neat little French bakery near the Pushkinskaya metro stop. D's been trying to take me there for weeks. He enrolled in a weekend psychology class in that part of town and likes to stop in for a bite to eat afterwards. "Katya" he says, "they have the most delicious cake ever!" This coming from a man who prefers fruit to chocolate?!- obviously I had to go investigate the cake for myself.

View from the street.

This gigantic sign is in the entryway.

Look for the big Eiffel tower in the window.

The French bakery is very small and narrow. There's plenty of space to devour a pastry but you'll have to do it standing. This keeps the bakery pretty fast-paced because most people don't want to linger over a cup of coffee while standing up (but you're welcome to do so).

Here it is- the cake:

"Napoleon" cake. I have to agree with D- it is quite good!

The BEST thing about this bakery?

100 griven later....

Why yes, yes I did. Green tea w/ jasmine, strawberry (herbal), lemon (herbal), pomegranate (herbal), raspberry (black), strawberry dessert (black), black currant (black). Ukraine is great.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

An ounce of prevention....

This is what $22 USD of medicine looks like. D was sick and tired of the occasional pharmacy run...and all the cranky pharmacists. He recruited Timur's help to create an everything-you-might-possibly-need-at-home kit.