Friday Knows Tea

In the springtime I am inexorably drawn to steamed green teas. Genmaicha, matcha, sencha, bi lo chun, clouds & mist, and so on. If it's vegetal, mildly seaweedy and light-savory with a lingering umami profile, count me in! Just the other day, a friend mentioned the idea of matcha cheesecake in passing. I don't even remember the context, just that the idea seeded itself like the marigold and snap peas in my garden and I couldn't stop thinking about it. Anyone who knows me personally knows that compulsive baking is a long-running thing in my house. When I was a tween, my mother put a time limit on the kitchen (I was banned from 10pm to 8am) because the smell of fresh cookies, muffins and breads kept waking her up in the middle of the night. She was not amused. Especially in times of uncertainty and anxiety, I turn to the oven. I've done a lot of baking this week. It's been fun to flex my sleepy chef muscles and get creative in the kitchen again! Now, as I lo...

A fair number of you first encountered our tea company at NW Tea Festival , an awesome Seattle-based festival that launched in 2007 and has only grown bigger and better each year since. Newer to the tea festival scene is  Tea Fest PDX . This Portland festival only just had its third year, but is so put-together and well structured that I would have thought it was an event with 5-7 years under its belt already. I don’t have access to the attendance numbers, but we def got hit with a long line waiting to enter and it was tight moving between all the booths once we got in. I’m glad this was mostly an outdoor event, as the indoor booths were struggling to get folks to stop without completely blocking the pathway. I have to admit, being at a vendor fair/convention without working a booth of my own was a super weird feeling. We (my bestie Nat and I) kept running into people we knew and almost every person asked us “So where is your booth,” to which I gleefully replied “Nah, we’re ju...