Little Nut Tarts

One of my favorite holiday treats is pecan tarts. My mom used to make dozens of them every Christmas season. She made them in mini muffin tins—which is mighty dangerous, since it’s so easy to keep popping the tiny sugary treats into your mouth, one by one, until you’ve lost count of how many you’ve…

Banana Sesame Streusel Muffins

I still can’t believe I got to intern at America’s Test Kitchen. This was a dream opportunity to experience what it’s like to work in the most renowned professional test kitchen on the planet. While most of the ATK internship involves assisting test cooks and supporting the kitchen operations team (lots of mise en place,…

Holiday Cooking with Tea & Jam Class

I couldn’t be more thrilled to be teaching an upcoming cooking class with my good friend and favorite jam goddess Kathy Lee of Modern Gingham Preserves. Our favorite queen of tea Jessica Avery will host the class at her adorable House of Commons Tea Room in Denver. Hope those of you in Denver can join…

Cooking with Tea Classes: Summer 2015

Class schedule updated 3/26/15: I’m thrilled to announce my second series of cooking with tea classes at The House of Commons Tea Room in Denver, CO this spring! I led a fall/winter series in 2014 featuring some of my favorite tea-infused seasonal recipes, including Fresh Herb and Green Tea Pesto, Potato Pu-erh Curried Soup and…

Glazed and Infused: An Island Tea Dinner

What do you get when you combine a Puerto Rican surfing town, a Thai restaurant, a tea blender and a brother & sister chef team? A pretty awesome tea dinner, actually. My brother, Andy, invited me to kick off my two-week Thanksgiving holiday vacation in Puerto Rico by hosting and cooking for a tea themed…

DIY Tea Foodie gift ideas

I’ve been busy working the holiday market circuit this season, sampling and selling my hand blended teas. One of my favorite markets is coming up this weekend, the Denver Handmade Homemade Holiday Market. I love the community spirit and creativity at this market, which features a lot of local, artisan vendors making everything from food…

London. Paris. Tea.

If you follow me on Facebook and Twitter, you may have seen the tea adventure pictures I posted earlier in August during my trip across the pond to London and Paris. The purpose of our trip (in addition to celebrating a great friend’s 40th birthday) was to walk around both stunning cities in search of…

Cheater Sweetheart Scones

I started a new part-time job this month. A dream job, really. I was invited to join the creative team in the test kitchen of my favorite spice purveyor, Savory Spice Shop.  I still can’t believe I get to wake up in the morning and go grocery shopping (one of my favorite pastimes) for a…

Tea Foodie’s top 5 recipes for 2012

2012 commemorates the year I started my tea foodie blog. I’ve tried to post something once a week to journal my cooking with tea explorations and tea foodie finds. It’s fun to look back and see how much content I’ve built up in less than a year. It’s also fun to finally have my cooking…

Cranberry Ice (A Holiday Family Tradition)

For as long as I can remember, Cranberry Ice has been the traditional dish that has always started a Thanksgiving or Christmas meal at my family’s holiday table. Not quite a sorbet, but not an ice cream either, this frozen, creamy and tart treat is meant to act as a palate cleanser before a huge…

Rosemary-Infused Olive Oil & Roasted Potatoes

Not many plants survive the summer on my west-facing, desert sun-loving urban condominium deck. Every year, I experiment with new potted plants and herbs, and I’ve only found a few that can take the scorching heat. Rosemary is one plant that survived this year, and it was still thriving late into October. Still, my rosemary…

Chocolate Granola Tea Cookies

Remember the Goji Berry Granola I made last week? This week I turned what remained of the tasty granola into chocolate granola cookies to nibble alongside my morning or afternoon tea. These cookies are super easy to make and only require a few ingredients, including a new-to-me delicious discovery: chocolate nut butter. I used Justin’s…

The First Rule of Gourmet Club

Rules: The first rule of Gourmet Club is, of course, that you don’t talk about Gourmet Club. Well, I’m busted. I’m totally breaking that rule here. Gourmet Club is our monthly supper club that started more than five years ago and currently consists of seven die-hard members, all in love with and connected to food…

Thanks for the Illuminating Blogger Award!

As a newbie to the blogosphere, I’m still trying to figure out what to do with my blog – including how to balance my blogging time so that I don’t stay up until two in the morning reading other bloggers’ stories that sound way more interesting than my own. So I was touched that even…

“Hey, there’s chamomile in my beer!”

This is what Dan (my lover and in-house recipe taster) said when he was reading the label of a new-to-him beer and trying to figure out why the beer tasted so “weird”. I sipped it too, before the label reading, and it did taste pretty funky. At first we thought it was just a bad…