Iced Peach Tea

 (These are peach blossoms.)

While shopping at Whole Foods, I was caught by that wonderful floral smell of ripening peaches and ended up buying three.  I'm always wary of buying peaches at supermarkets as they never ripen, or if they do, they just become mealy and tasteless.  (Avocados too.)  And sure enough, while these peaches continued to produce an amazing amount of fragrance, they never properly ripened, wizening and drying out instead of softening.  I tried tasting one, but the tannins nearly bit all my taste buds out.  So what to do?  I couldn't throw them out.  In desperation, I peeled and cut them up and threw them in a pot with water and tons of sugar.  The stewed peaches were OK, but the resulting sugar syrup was phenomenal.  I knew instantly what to do with the syrup — make iced tea!  Using my favorite jasmine green tea, of course.  If life gives you hard peaches, make iced tea! :)

BTW, I'm really not liking how these large fruit producers are now breeding fruit just for smell.  A pretty nasty way of tricking us shoppers.  Why I'm buying most of my fruit at farmer's markets.  Although, I have to say, I've been very impressed by the fruit that's on sale at Trader Joe's.  Their small watermelons have been real winners, nice and sweet with good texture, and I was very happy with the avocados that were on sale in May.

Fuchsia Dunlop's Chicken With Tea Leaves

One of my favorite cookery writers is Fuchsia Dunlop. An English woman, she trained as a Chinese chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. Her recipes are rarely too difficult and are always interesting. Like Junshan Chicken with Silver-Needle Tea (from Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province). She says the dish is a banquet delicacy in Junshan, and it incorporates the area's famous "yellow tea". I'd never seen a recipe with tea leaves in it so I thought I'd give it a try. The resulting dish was flavorful and delicate, which surprised me because, unlike so many Chinese dishes, there was no garlic or green onions. The dish is simply sliced chicken breasts that have been marinaded in a simple solution of salt, Shaoxing wine, potato starch and egg white. The breasts are quickly fried and then boiled in a tea infusion, leaves included. The key, of course, is having really high-grade tea leaves which are infused at a very low temperature beforehand (I didn't have Junshan tea so I used a silver-needle white tea). Even so, I still found it remarkable that you can achieve such wonderful, complex flavors with so little. Chicken and tea leaves — who would have thought?