Tidbits
Sleepover at Ikea - Maybe this is the only way to get to the $1 early enough…
A ramen bath - Japanese spa with special baths resembling instant noodles. I wanna play!
Old age homes for dogs - 1) Old dogs don’t like to be abandoned at strange places. 2) Playing with young puppies will probably cause the older dogs to die faster due to exhaustion.
A remote-controlled pigeon - Oh the poor thing…
An article on a brilliant method of teaching grade schoolers about bats and rabies. I smell a lawsuit.
Will trade beer for Crumpler bags. Tempted by the beanbag and messenger bags…
Photos
Welcome to Matcha
April 24, 2007, 1:47 am
The weather this past weekend was awesome, and I’m happy to say I was actually outdoors enjoying the sun for most of it. On Saturday, I went hiking with Mike at Rattlesnake Point. We were there for most of the afternoon, and I already got a tan from it afterwards. I’ll upload photos later.
Sunday was spent hanging around downtown. We went to MEC, and then a blotched attempt at attending the Green Living Show, which Mike thought started last weekend, but instead starts NEXT weekend. Sigh. It was fun learning that the street car don’t go into the Exhibition grounds during off-season, and we had to take the bus. Traffic as a whole around the downtown core was horrendous.
So we ended up walking West along Queen Street from Bathurst in search of the Crumpler store, but there really is a lot of other interesting little stores along that street.
Morba is a strange store jammed packed with weird and fun knickknacks, alongside an odd mix of modern and vintage furniture pieces. It’s just all over the place, I really don’t understand it.. I was tempted by the clear playing cards…
Tealish and Matcha
The gem of the day’s exploration, however, is Tealish, which bills itself as a modern Tea boutique. It carries over 130 different types of loose leaf teas, grouped into green, black, herbal, and Rooibos. I really need to find out what Rooibos taste like one day. However, unlike other tea shops, most of the customers are not buying tea leaves, but purchasing prepared beverages ala Starbucks, as they also advertised themselves as having Toronto’s only tea-based drink menu. I’m not sure how the tea menu works, but it seems like you can try any types of tea available there, prepared in a number of ways including iced, latte, smoothies.
They also served Matcha drinks (pronouncecd Maat-Cha; ‘cha’ as in tea in Japanese). Matcha, at it’s core, is essentially powdered green tea. It’s being marketed as the “next big thing” in fancy beverages because of it’s health benefits. And all this time, I thought powered green tea was just a cheap substitute to real leaves.
I first heard of Matcha from some random article about how the craze in North America was started by two business students from Queens who created a business plan for school, and with support from parents, executed the plan after graduation. They secured North American distribution rights from Aiya, one of the biggest manufacturer of Matcha in Japan. They opened a teashop in Vancouver called the INFUZE Tea House, serving loose tea leaf-based drinks, and introduced matcha to the general North American public.
They’ve since rebranded themselves as a fancy tea brand called muzi. You can order tea from the site, but at $30 for 30g of traditional matcha, it’s way too rich for my blood.
Anyways, I tried the Iced Matcha at Tealish, a medium for nearly $4, and it was pretty good. I’ll take that over Starbucks any day at least.
Kit Kat Singles
So today at work, I was introduced to Kit Kat Singles from our vending machine. There’s also Aero Singles, “Your favourite brands in the perfect sizes”. Riiight, so basically you get 1 stick of Kit Kat for $0.60, compared to the full 4 bar size for $1.00. Talk about taking advantage of poor people with sweet tooth cravings and a guilty conscience.
And me, of course. Cause I just can’t resist new things like this.
Tagged: Food
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© Maggie Tam 2007-2009 www.onechopstick.ca
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