Easter Tea Surprises

This Easter, I will be mucking about with tea. Quite a lot. After all, my family and friends expect it.

In South Australia; it will be a slightly bizarre schedule. Good Friday is a holiday. I usually do a roast beef on Good Friday – as an atheist I have real problems being told what to eat by the Vatican.  As it’s roast beef, I’ll be serving Daintree tea with it.

Saturday is not a holiday. It’s a massive shopping day, as the shops are then shut the NEXT THREE DAYS! What? Three days without a supermarket??? Frightening stuff. I normally shop twice a day, minimum. I ask Mrs Devotea about 3.30pm what she wants for dinner, and then go buy the stuff to cook it for her.

So Saturday, I’ll be laying in food as though preparing for the Siege of Troy. Might wing it a bit for dinner.

Sunday is of Course Easter Egg day. I have made some chocolates up for Mrs Devotea with glacé quince, mango and coconut, which I’ll slip inside the egg mentioned in my last post. I’ll have to serve a nice Golden Yunnan with it – it is simply the very best tea to serve with chocolate. I am planning to serve a Vegetation feast for two on Sunday night, I’ll be making some Palak Paneer – easy cheese you can make at home cooked with home-grown spinach – and I’ll do a Navratan or Nine Jewels Curry. That should do the trick. I’ll be serving a robust Assam with that.

Then Monday. That’s the big one. In case you didn’t know, the 25th of April is very special in Australia – ANZAC DAY. It commemorates the time in World War I, where idiotic (British) generals sent an Australian and New Zealand contingent to attempt to invade Turkey in the wrong spot at the wrong time. What followed was a bloodbath that over the years has come to symbolise a lot about our country, the idea being bravery in the face of supreme adversity.

On Anzac Day, I like like to cook Australian and Turkish foods, to symbolise that there are two sides to every conflict, and that our countries are now freinds. The good news is, it’s also my belated birthday lunch. Some of my friends are Greek, and they fought with the Turks at Troy, of course, before Greece or Turkey even existed, and still have quite hard feelings. Happily, both sides never seemed to notice that their food is almost exactly the same. So it will be marinated lamb spit roasted, Damper, roast vegetables in thyme & oregano and some chicken and pine nut sausages (because I like them) and tea smoked fish. I will probably smoke the fish over Lung Ching, as it’s light, slightly bitter and I have a bunch of it I don’t care for. I also have an Arya Green Darjeeling, so if I end up with an oiler fish, I could go that way.

Dessert will be roast quinces in an alcoholic chocolate sauce with Vanilla Ice Cream. And that will be followed by a pot of ‘Two Tigers’, one of my own blends which works well with chocolate, mainly as it has a stack of the aforementioned Golden Yunnan as part of it.

I’ll break out the home-made chocolates after that, but I imagine my guests will take those with them.

We’ll skip dinner that day, so that takes me to Tuesday. That’s another holiday here, because of Anzac Day and Easter Monday being the same day. I have created some tea eggs, and I plan to slice them and serve them with a tea-oil dressed cold roll (coriander, mint, lettuce, carrot etc). I’ll probably serve ‘1001 Nights’ or some other mint tea that night.

So, I have a big shopping list for both food and tea.

The ironic thing is that, as I am dieting, I’ll probably only eat half the things listed on this blog, and even then, small portions. In between relentless trips to the Gym.

I have never been shy about expressing my love for family and friends with food. Recently I decided I would also do so by living to a decent age.

After all, the longer I live, the more tea I can consume.

Happy Easter to everyone!