yrmencyn | Cooking, with tea and otherwise

I'm excited! I was wandering around the Adagio Teas website just now, and I saw a new (at least since last I was there) feature they have called TeaChef. You request a sample of their monthly tea, then devise a recipe that uses it and submit the recipe. Other users vote on the recipes, and the writer of the top-ranked recipe gets a tea-related prize. I just signed up, and this month's featured tea is one of my favorite kinds of teas ever, Lapsang Souchong (a.k.a. Russian Caravan tea). It's a delicious smoked tea from China; it tastes like tea drunk around a campfire, delicious smokey and woody. I already have a number of ideas on how to use it effectively, and I can almost guarantee a delicious meal out of it, even if not a winning recipe. This is my kind of food competition.

In other news, I did end up making the beans, and they are tasty. Not my best work ever -- too much paprika, and the beans never quite properly 'creamed out' -- but still quite satisfying. I've always made this for a large group of people, but this time it's really mostly for me... sweet Christ but that's a huge recipe. I went ahead and froze two margarine-tubs-full (my standard unit of food portioning), and I still have a big Ziploc bowl full (the big ol' 7-cupper bowl, not the 3-cupper). I'll be eating red beans 'n' rice until next January! (No, seriously, I might: I sometimes lose tubs of frozen foods in the freezer, and then I'm pleasantly surprised to find them (and eat them) months later.)

I have so many other food projects on the horizon it's not even funny. I've got some great ideas for a green curry-based yogurt marinade [for either meat or prawns, haven't decided] now that I've got some kaffir lime leaves (currently residing in the freezer, since I noticed some were starting to go brown), I want to try this kaffir lime aïoli I found, I've got some kaffir lime salsa (base recipe) [theme? what theme?] sitting in the fridge that needs a little pureeing to be quite right, I've got the remnants (read: bulk) of that whole chicken to do nefarious things to (like soups, frittatas, stock with the picked carcass), I've got its schmaltz and drippings to play with, I've got a ham bone with attendant meat scraps to make stock of (thanks Bierschenk Family Christmas!), I've got some poblanos I bought in Nac on a whim... my plate, both physical and metaphorical, is full. Shucky darn.