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I'm working on a rather brutal investigation for the day-job (brutal in the extra-work-and-deadlines sense) and haven't had enough of a break to make tea, much less post about it, most days. But today I needed some ritual to slow my brain down a little and I pulled out another of the samples from TeaVivre. This one is Silver Jasmine Green Tea (Mo Li Yin Hao).

The sampler packets are 5g and recommend 2g per cup. I normally make tea by the pot but have been skimping to make the samples stretch by using half a packet per pot. This time I decided to go all the way and used the whole packet (and will be doing a second brew tomorrow, per my usual practice). Steeped at 190F for 5 minutes, using a strainer.

The dry leaves smell ... well, jasminey. More jasmine than the underlying tea scent, which can either be a plus or minus depending on how you feel about it. It's like a hedge of star jasmine on a cool summer evening. I've always tended to associate jasmine tea with rather generic American-Chinese restaurant tea, so I'm working hard to erase that association for this tasting. The scent is very pleasant, but has associations.

When brewed, the aroma is still very predominantly jasmine. Light, but very flowery. Very flowery in the mouth as well. The tea comes through as an underlayer of slight bitterness. I may try the 3-minute steep for the second go.

I like it, but it's not my favorite. I'm not getting a "tea bliss" moment like I do with my favorites.

About a week ago, I started working on setting up Universal Book Links to use on my website and social media, using Books2Read.com. Previously,in a balance between philosophy and efficiency, I'd put two links on each book page: one to the publisher's site and one to the Big River. (That's for the newer stuff, the older stuff like all the Sword and Sorceress stories I just used a Big River link because they're out of print anyway.) But just as I've been trying to move away from defaulting to A*****n for the podcast book links, I wanted to put my urls where my mouth is on the website.

So a bit of poking around indicated that Books2Read seemed to be the popular choice. The theory is that (after you set up a free account) you paste in one known bookstore link to a book and B2R will identify a vast array of links to the same book appearing in other bookstores. Then it gives you the master Universal Book Link that you can use as you like. Clicking on that UBL will go to a page that lists all the identified sources for the book.
So that's the theory.

The practice is that B2R seems to be extremely irregular in its efficiency of finding links. Or it clearly has identified the book correctly (because it displays an image) but then tells you that it's having trouble identifying the book and did you make a mistake? I guess you'll have to enter all the bookstore links manually.

You know, if I wanted to enter a dozen bookstore links manually, I could just code the thing by hand on my own website and what do I need them for?

B2R is also much worse at identifying print links than ebook links. The focus on ebook links can be seen in the fact that your "starting master link" *must* be an ebook link. So you can't set up a UBL for a book that has only appeared in print.

So here's the second thing I find annoying (after the amount of manual data entry that I felt bait-and-switched into). Book UBLs are specific to the account of the person who set them up. I ran into this previously when shifting the podcast notes over to a non-Amazon-centric mode. There's no way to go to the B2R site and say "is there a UBL set up for book X?" If you find one on the author's website, you can use it, but there's no centralized way to look.

The other thing this means is that all of the promised interconnectedness promised on the B2R site only works *within* a particular account. If I want to set up a bookshelf with all my books on it? I have to set up a UBL within my account, even if someone else has already set one up. If you're visiting a UBL page for a book and you want to know what else that author has published? Clicking on the author link only gives you links for books created within the same account. So Queen of Swords has set up a UBL for The Language of Roses, but if you go to that UBL page and ask "what else has Heather Rose Jones written" you get nothing else. And if I want The Language of Roses to shop up in author links from the UBL pages that *I* set up, I have to create my own separate UBL for the book.

One of the things B2R promotes is the ability to set up "bookshelves" where you can group your favorite books, or books you're mentioning in social media, or whatever. But *you* have to create a UBL in *your* account for each book you want to put on a shelf. Not worth it.

Evidently the B2R functions integrate very smoothly with the ebook publishing side of the company, Draft2Digital, which is an option I've looked at for my plans to dip my toe into the self-publishing field. But now I'm inclined to give it a lot more scrutiny before committing, to see whether that function will be as full of infelicities as the B2R function.

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Today's tea is another new one from the Chinese tea sampler: Yunnan Dian Hong Ancient Tree Black Tea; brewed as directed at 185F for 8 minutes. Using a basket to stop the brew, and measuring one heaping teaspoon of loose tea which is loosely equivalent to the 2.5 teaspoons they suggest, as long as they mean "level" teaspoons.

The loose tea smells strongly earthy and reminds me of a good alfalfa hay on a warm summer afternoon. In the cup, the aroma is more of a generic black tea smell. The color is a medium-dark brown, more into the gray range than the golden range. The flavor is mild, not particularly bitter, but with an elusive overtone that works around the back of my tongue that I'm not sure how to describe. It's mild enough that I don't feel drawn to sweeten it, though I might try that for the last cup out of the pot.

Since I used the strainer, I may try a second brew of the leaves tomorrow.

ETA: Didn't try the second brew until Monday 8/1. Brewed for 10 minutes. A little weaker but still good. That "elusive overtone" feels a bit more like bitterness this time around and after the first cup I decided to sweeten.

The zucchini experiments continue apace! I seem to have achieved a delightful "BBQ-flavor zucchini chip" product using the forced-air food dryer.

Flavor mix: equal quantities onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, and Trader Joe's mushroom/umami powder

Prep: slice zucchini crosswise (ideally using a mandolin-type cutter for uniformity) into ca. 2-3mm thick slices. Lightly oil the food dryer racks (run an olive-oil soaked paper towel over the upper surface). Place the slices on the racks and sprinkle with the flavor mix.

Dry: I used the "vegetable" setting of 135F. I did the first batch overnight because that's when I'd set it up, but the second batch I started in the morning and they were done within 3-4 hours.

Result: Crisp and crunchy and definitely have the "BBQ chip" flavor. I wasn't actually aiming for that specific flavor, just tossing together some spices that seemed likely to work. I may do a "sour cream and onion" batch using Ranch dressing mix. The zucchini itself adds a bit of tang, but isn't strongly present.

Evaluation: This is a definite success for "something to do with zucchini if you have extra." As a manual process, it's rather a bit of work just to create a lo-cal crunchy snack, but it definitely is a success for that too. It would definitely work as a way of preserving zucchini for later use, but is less efficient than pureed-and-frozen.

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Today's tea is a sample of Ippodo Hojicha, courtesy of Gurdymonkey. (I've never yet figured out how to get DW to do user tags.) This is a "toasted green tea". Per the suggestion, I used the whole 4g I was sent in one pot, in boiling water, steeped for 1 minute. (I used a strainer to cut off the steeping time.)

The dry aroma is very faint, hard to call it much of anything at all. When steeped, the aroma is definitely "toasted", sort of like those toasted rice brews. In the cup, it has the lightness of a green tea but a more solid body of "toasted flavor" -- don't know what else to call it. Very refreshing and more *umph* than an ordinary green. This may sound lazy, but I don't have to concentrate as hard to appreciate it as I feel like I need to for regular greens. (I think I'm intimidated by green teas. That's one reason I've been trying more of them.) Definitely no bitterness. I don't know what longer steeping might do, but I don't feel the need to try. Part of that may be that the particle size was fairly small (not whole leaves, I guess because the toasting makes it brittle?).

I'll definitely follow up and get more of this. Thanks, Gurdymonkey!

But if you want to ask it today, check out the Reddit AMA thread for Queen of Swords Press and crew. (Other days, you can just ask.) https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/vznu15/queen_of_swords_press_small_press_ama_2022/

I think it is just barely possible that this year I will have achieved More Than Enough Zucchini. Whatever the trick is to getting them to set and not shrivel up while tiny, I've stumbled on it this time. Replicating in following years is a toss-up. But currently I'm on track to get about one large (as in 12-15 inch) zucchini about once a week, which is hard to keep up with unless that's all I'm eating. Yesterday I froze three servings of pureed zucchini soup, and then harvested another zuke today. (Trying to catch them before the seeds harden.) Just for fun and variety, I may see what happens if I slice-and-dry in the food dryer. My usual zucchini dishes are: pureed soup, baked au gratin, cubed and stir-fried, turned into "vegetable noodles" and covered in pesto or marinara.

The tomatoes have achieved "you do not need to buy tomatoes" level of production, but not yet "make marinara sauce to freeze" levels. Even though I'm not inundated, I may slice and dry some of the Romas simply because it's nice to have them around for seasoning in the off season. I've discovered that the combination of food dryer and then bagging them in the freezer results in a very crisp, almost freeze-dried, product that crumbles easily into small flakes, which is perfect for adding to savory scones, omelettes, and the like.

I may also be getting close to a good rhythm on planting successions of onions. My goal is to see if I can grow all the onions I use, since it seems to be one of the crops I do well at.

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Today's tea is another one of the "Trope Teas" from The Ripped Bodice. This one is named "You Look Hot in that Flannel" and is more of a fruity-spicy tisane than even what I'd call an herbal tea. The ingredients are: honeybush, cinnamon, licorice root, chamomile, "natural flavor" (???), dried apple, orange peel.

Ok, now I need to look up "honeybush". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopia_(plant)

So evidently it provides the "body" of this mix. But remembering that the last time I'd tried this mixture it had seemed very thin and watery, I decided to toss in a bag of ordinary English Breakfast black tea.

The loose tea smells very pleasantly fruity-spicy, with apple and cinnamon note predominating. Brewed, the apple notes are still quite strong in the aroma. Adding the black tea was definitely a good decision. Good body, with the spicy-apple overlay.

I'm not very fond of most "herbal teas" (see my previous post about mint tea) because a lot of the time they end up tasting like slightly flavored water. But I do like the floofy flavors of some of them, so maybe I simply do need to start working on my own tea blend workshop.

Although I started making a batch of blackcurrant/lemon curd, it will not be ready in time for today's tea break, therefore it has no effect on today's choice of tea.

The blackcurrant bushes are new this year, so I didn't expect to get much more than nibbling amounts (like when I combined several berry types to make a fool). But the blackcurrants mostly ripened later than the other front yard berries (other than the blueberries, which are going steadily all summer) so I collected them up in a cup in the refrigerator to see if I'd have enough to do something with. Then I scouted out recipes and settled on one for a curd. I've modified the original by making it more of a half-and-half currant-lemon curd, because I needed to up the fruit content to match the problem of not wanting to go smaller than one egg yolk. Currantly(ha ha) it's at the stage where I've simmered the berries with lemon juice and sugar and they're cooling before being pureed through a sieve.

In the mean time, today's tea is another from the sampler pack of Chinese teas from Teavivre: Fengqing Dragon Pearl Black Tea. "Pearl" as in, it's rolled up into balls about the size of a chickpea. The envelope has about 5 pearls in it, which the instructions indicate is the right amount for one 12oz cup, but I'm starting out with one pearl in my pot. 190F for 8-10 minutes and today I used a strainer insert so I could stop the brew at that point.

The loose tea smells like your basic black tea -- the smell reminds me of the taste of an excellent iced tea, but that might be my imagination pulling in the fact that it's a warm afternoon. The color in the cup is thin enough that I suspect a stronger brew is advisable next time. Rather than a golden-brown, it looks more brownish-gray? The aroma is delicate and pleasant (but again suggesting to brew it stronger next time). Taste is mild and not at all bitter. Hard to find specific descriptors -- pretty much exactly how I expect an excellent black tea to taste. I could easily drink this unsweetened. But I'll definitely try two pearls per pot next time and see what I get with a stronger effect.

Today's tea is courtesy of a gift basket (long story, not relevant). It is identified only as "Organic" (From "Davidson's Organics") but does not indicate the type of tea. The single-bag packaging has an image of some generic leaves on it. The company's website has a large variety of teas available, so we need more clues.

The tea bag smells minty, but a search on "mint" narrowed to "tea bags" only shows me the box packaging for 15 different teas with that keyword, and does not show what the individual teabag packaging looks like. So we are no closer to a clue.

Brewed at 212F for ... hmm, well, as long as it took me to write this up.

The aroma in the cup is pretty much what you get from a plain spearmint tea. It's a very pale gold, so if there's an admixture of tea proper, it's fairly small. Taste is pretty much like I'd expect from plain spearmint tea.

I'm not all that fond of plain mint tea. Though I have memories of having tea parties as a child with mint tea because my mother didn't think regular caffeinated tea was good for children.

I have several child's tea sets that I think date to my grandmother's childhood rather than my mother's (though it may be some were new to my mother and some older). One is so tiny it isn't good for anything but display. One is made from some sort of metal and only involves the serving vessels and no cups. The only set that is complete for serving tea is a lovely pink-flowered design, with teapot, creamer, sugar bowl, and two cups with saucers. There's also a set of dishes with teacups + saucers, plates, and a serving platter and bowl, but with no beverage service items, in plain white with a blue rim design. All of these are actual china and some show the ravages of their fragility, mended in various ways.

Do children still hold tea parties? Is it a thing? Or are these yet more of the generational detritus that someone, some day, will need to make decisions about?

Anyway, back to the mint tea. I think it's drinkable when sufficiently sweetened, but like most herbal teas, it isn't really my thing. (The one exception being Celestial Seasonings "Tension Tamer" which I drink under certain specific ritualized conditions.)

Had a great time at the revived in-person BayCon. Smallish, as expected, but high quality and with good Covid controls. I enjoyed all the panels I was on, especially two on fairy tale themes that let me sneak in plugs for The Language of Roses.

I got invited to participate in a cooperative book-selling table in the dealers room and, as an experiment, took some selected Queen of Swords titles as well as my own books. Sales were good, and the combination of spreading out the table fee and table-sitting duties among multiple authors, as well as having an extensive selection of titles seems to work fairly well. I'd never bother with being a vendor on my own at a con, but this was a good balance.

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Today's tea is "Immortality blew until you", one of the "trope tea" blends from The Ripped Bodice bookstore. Green rooibos, ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, clove, black pepper, brewed at 212F for ca 5 minutes. I used a strainer (primarily because this has a fairly small particle size and wouldn't be caught by the filter in my teapot) so it didn't continue steeping after the initial time.

The loose tea smells quite spicy, with the pepper being most prominent (not a favorite of mine, but...). Brewed, the aroma is more mild, with ginger predominating. Since it's a chai-type, I went ahead and drank it sweetened.

Milder than what I think of as a "true chai" and the pepper is noticeable. It's ok, but I'm not fond of black pepper except in specific circumstances and it overpowers the other spices for me. Very "warming" to the mouth, overall.

So when I mentioned that I'm attracted to "floofy flavored teas that betray my lack of culture" this is the sort of thing I'm talking about.

Bingley's Teas (the one that does the Jane Austen themed blends) - "Aphrodite: A gift from the Goddess of Seduction". Assam black tea, almonds, sugar, cardamom, rose blossom, vanilla

212F for 5 minutes (as recommended) but with black teas I don't use a strainer so the steeping goes on and on

The loose tea has a strong almond scent, less strong on the rose and vanilla notes. I usually sweeten black teas, but since I noticed that this one says it has sugar already in the mix I tried it plain today. In the cup, the almond aroma is still predominant, though it's less so when drunk. The added flavorings are very faint in the steeped tea -- it's basically an ordinary black tea. But you still get a nose of almond if you breathe in prior to drinking. The added sugar in the tea blend is unnoticeable, so I went ahead and added sugar as usual.

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I stopped posting birdwatching notes when the number of new species dropped off. So I may not have mentioned that I regularly get nuthatches at the feeder, which isn't a species I think of as a "bird feeder bird". I've currently let the feeder get low, since it's high summer and there are plenty of food sources. The hummingbird feeder gets the occasional visitor, but I don't seem to have any "regulars" this summer.

My most recent backyard naturalist addition is the discovery of several carpenter bee nests. The first one I noticed was in one of the logs in my outdoor firewood pile. This perfectly round hole "drilled" into the end of the log, with a trail of sawdust beneath it. I'm a bit less enamored of the nests I noticed a couple days ago in the cross-beams of my grape arbor. I may go ahead and stop them up to see if I can discourage the practice, since structural integrity is a bit more important there. They can chew up the woodpile to their heart's content!