Recipe

Written in September 2012 At Chinese restaurants during our childhood, my sister and I consistently refused to drink tea. We were the fussy Americans that demanded icy glasses of water—happily gulping a cold liquid that traditional Chinese believed to upset the yin and yang of […]

Written in September 2012 Lemongrass?? Bubblegum??? Not typically served AND hard to find in the States? Being the hipster that I am, it was the latter statement that made sure I would drink a lot of Inca Kola while in Peru a few years ago […]

Written in September 2012 On the early morning after my late-night arrival to Bangkok, my eyes opened to a hazy rising sun. It was 6 am—an ungodly hour. My body was stuck in the California timezone and sleep was not an option. “Are you awake?” […]

When I traveled alone in Europe last February, every morning I started the day with tea. It became a ritual. Every day I woke up and declared, “TEA! PLEASE!” Now mind you, I never needed a caffeine fix in the morning. Typically, I rolled down […]

After college, I became fascinated with Boston. A few good friends moved there for school and work. To me, a Californian, Boston was the smaller version of New York. It had everything of an East Coast city—the excitement, the winter, the changing color of the […]

When I first visited Thailand, I learned the ease of making Thai iced tea in cooking class. To my surprise, the concept consisted of tea flavored with various milk…and dye. DYE. The natural tea itself did contain a reddish hue. In fact, the comforting orangey […]

The morning of a flight from New York several years ago, I visited the Momofuku Milk Bar for my first time. The prior night, my sister and I had visited the Milk Bar at a ridiculous hour of 10 pm. Of course, to our naive […]

“Ok, we can slice it up!” I said, eyeing the two halves of the watermelon. “No!” he declared. “I show you!” As we started the movie, he placed one half of the watermelon on a single plate with a spoon. He held the spoon downward […]

When I was in Berlin, my local friends took me to a Vietnamese restaurant in Mitte. There was the standard Westernized Vietnamese food…but it was the tea that gripped me in delight. Somehow I had missed this kind of tea in Vietnam. There were three […]

Like many of us, I have an inherent love of strawberries. Particularly the kind that’s bursting with childlike juicy flavor. A strawberry drink? I am there. A dessert laced with strawberries? Oh yes. A patch of strawberries for the picking? Sorry, it’s going to be […]