I love cooking. The wonders of all these fish, meat, vegetable, grains, roots, beans, herbs, spices, fermented and processed produces fascinate me. Many years ago the new dean of the college I taught at invited some of us over for dinner. I don’t remember much of the rest of the dinner other than the main course that was lemon chicken and the salad. It was frozen chicken breast boiled in water and soaking wet lettuce taken out from a Zipbloc from the fridge. Fringes of the cut leaves were rotting. That dinner made me miss left over plain rice that I used to have when I was a kid. That sad woman had no respect for her nature dinner materials, let alone her guests.
Respecting the nature of things and making use of it make half the secrets in cooking. The other half is the understanding and respect of the “guests” — those people who are going to consume the food, including yourself — their taste requirements, their physical state, their emotional state.
Same for tea. Each batch, each quality grade, each variety, each origin, each cultivar, each processing style produces dried leaves of a distinctive nature, some almost no different, some extremely different.
That is why tea is infinitely engaging. So is food. And many other good things in life.
