pim

Thai iced tea has added coloring to give it the tint of red. The tea itself is probably regular black tea, likely of Broken Orange Pekoe or even Fanning grade. The traditional way of making it calls for condensed milk as sweetener (read: cheap), not milk or cream (read: expensive). The tea snob side of me told me to turn my nose at it, but Thai iced tea has sort of a forbidden fruit allure for me. Thai iced tea in Thailand is found only at street vendors--which means it is served with ice of questionable origin. I was hence never allowed to have it as a child, so now that I am an adult and can gorge myself with just about any food item I damn well please, I could hardly resist it. Vietnamese Iced Coffee is a culinary inheritance the French Colonialists left for the Vietnamese. The coffee is made with the old style french stove top espresso maker, the condensed milk and ice are definitely the Vietnames addition the classic.

It's not entirely clear to me that the whole "starvation mode" thing has ever been scientifically substantiated. It has always struck me as a hypothesis that some diet people came up with to explain why it is hard to lose weight and why rebound weight gain is so common after overly strict dieting. I beg to differ. Kindly see Keys A, Brozek J. Henschel A, Mickelsen O. Taylor HL. Human starvation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951. Or this abstract from an NIH workshop: http://www.healthy.net/asp/templates/artic...article&ID=1675 Incidentally Ancel Keys had a pretty big contribution to the food world. You know K-rations? Yes, that "K" is from this Keys.

Extremely interesting discussion. cGullet does get better and better everyday---mind you it's been like three days since I found you people. :-) This whole issue of fat and diet is extremely interesting to me. I'm definitely on the thin side. I eat anything I want and have never dieted even once. Yes, I guess I am blessed with good genes. But is that all? I don't think so. As Fatguy said in a few posts back, only a small percentage of obese people actually have glandular issues that cause the weight---and I've seen a number of studies that have the same assertion. I think we're pretty safe to assume that the surge in the number of obese people is a result of lifestyle. And I'm not saying that we should just all blame the stupid fat folks here. Lifestyle by no means imply deliberate choice. People don't choose the be fat. They are fat because they live in the kind of society in which it is difficult to stay thin. You can think of it as something akin to Bordieu's term "Habitus". Yes, he used it to explain high minded stuff like society and the question of free will and such, but in a way it is completely applicable here. A Habitus is a general set of disposition common to a class. Fat people in the US, for example, though exercising their free will, are bounded by what is available and economically feasible for them to eat. Not to mention the cultural propensity toward less activities, and larger portion sizes. Going into any restaurant or browsing in any supermarket, one has to concede that it is really difficult to eat "well" in this country. Yes there are lots and lots of Low-fat this, Non-fat that, but very little of these foods are in any way a balance meal. And I'm not talking of inherently good or bad food here, but food that are so proportionally high in fat, carbohydrate, sugar, salt, etc, as to throw any healthy body out of whack! And here I'm not speaking of us "gourmets". We, with our organic produce and artisanal cheese, are in no way a microcosm of the food world. Wonder bread and Hamburgur Helper is. And of course there are people who, despite their intellect and the lack of Hamburger Helper in their lives, simply relish the joy of food, perhaps a bit much, and so end up on the wee bit heavier side of the scale. As they say in Seinfeld--not that there's anything wrong with it! I mean, joking aside, there's a huge difference between being clinically obese and just plump, isn't in. Being plump is not a problem, being so obese as to be diabetic, in danger of heart disease, etc, is! This "Fat Habitus" carries into the ways in which we deal with food and with getting "fat". The culturally induced reaction to getting fat is getting on a diet--which or course is the worse thing ever to do to your body. When you suddenly deprive your body of food, our body goes into starvation mode--as in use as little fuel as possible, thanks to our evolutionary instinct to stay alive. And when a diet fails, as it inevitably will, your body is now inundated with excess calories, but it's still in starvation burn-as-little-as-I-can-get-away-with mode. And you know where this ends.

I had another tea/orange juice drink at a lovely brunch place on La Jolla Cove near San Diego. It came in a large clear glass, with about 3/4 inch of raspberry syrup at the bottom, then OJ up to about a half mark, the rest was darkly brewed black tea. It was called the Sunset, and stirring the three layers together did bring the image to mind. I've done it at home with dark-brewed Assam or Ceylon, and they both worked really well. pim

I signed up with Illy a Casa program the first week it advertised on the Sunday Times, and have been using it ever since. I'd had serious reservation about the pods before I got the X5, what with being a tea snob who's opinion of tea bags is that they are only good for scrubing oily residue off of tupperwares, I hesitated a long time before finally jumping in. The big push was of course the great deal, and heck, if the Illy pods are good enough for Jeffry Steingarten, dmmit, it should be good enough for me. So I jumped in, and have been loving the results since. I love how easy the pods are, no cleaning, no grounding beans (because frankly preground beans go stale in about a minute after you pop open the can), and I make pretty good espresso with more than decent crema *every* time. Though the shots are not the best I've had, they definitely beat what passes for espresso in an American restaurant any day---and I'm not even going to start on the whole Charbucks debate!

I am so inspired today. I thought I'd start my very first thread with this timely recipe. It's such an unusually hot day today in San Francisco. Mariage Frères, the delightful Paris tea salon, serves this refreshing take on the classic iced tea at their brunch service. (The recipe is mine of course, I couldn't wrestle it out of them) 32 oz water (about 4 cups) 5 heaping tsp of best quality Earl Grey tea--loose leaves of course, preferably Mariage Frères French Bleu. Should you only have tea bags, you might as well stop here. The only thing they are good for is to rid your plastic containers of the smelly oily residue. 3 tbsp of mild honey (or to taste) 1.5-2 cups of fresh squeezed orange juice, depending on how acidic the juice is. Bring 32 oz of water to just boiling temperature, brew the tea for exactly 5 minutes. Strain the tea into a large pitcher, mix in the honey, then the orange juice. Let cool in the fridge for a bit before serving with ice---if you pour immediately the ice will melt and dilute the magic from the tea. Cover it while in the fridge or the use of the aromatic and, bien sur, expensive tea will be pointless. A note on the tea pot: Make sure that there is enough room in your brewing basket for the leaves to unfurl properly. This means your tea ball, unless it's a giant one, should go the way of the bin. Most pots on sale in the US have brewing baskets that are too small, so be warned. The best thing to do is brew the tea loose in the pot and strain it into a pitcher after 5 minutes. This way your tea leaves will have all the room they need to do their magic. This is definitely my favorite summer drink, what's yours? Enjoy. Pim