Green Tea and Genmaicha to replace the beans!

After a week of some of the finest coffee and coffee making in the world in Melbourne, it is probably a good time to have a break from the beans. I always over indulge in Melbourne and it's difficult to replicate it so I try and find a new fix, for a few weeks at least. I drink a lot of green tea anyway but I'm only just learning about how many types of green tea there are.

When I was in Japan a few months ago I brought back some packets of green tea from the supermarket. I can't speak or read any Japanese so I had no idea what I was buying. It turned into a sort of prettiest, most exciting packet, beauty contest.

There was one that I absolutely loved. It didn't imagine it could be healthy as it seemed to be quite sweet and have sugar puffs or popcorn through it! I got a Japanese friend to translate a picture of the packet and it is called genmaicha. I have since found it locally and buy it loose but it can also be found in teabags from Teapigs and Whittards amongst others.

It is the perfect healthy drink as it is sweet enough not to need anything to accompany it. Really, no biscuits required! 

Apparently it was a drink enjoyed by poorer people in Japan who couldn't afford to use too much tea so they bulked it up with puffed rice!

Sadly in this country it is not for the impoverished and comes with a reasonable price tag but if you can find it and are a fan of green tea, I implore you to try it. It's a great drink and perfect for my coffee free days ahead.

Thanks as always.

Lee x

Cafés and Coffees

I love nothing more than taking my notebook or ipad into a cafe and whiling a way an hour writing, getting a caffeine hit and relaxing.  I really struggle to find good places where I live though, both in England and in Scotland. I've even been driven to designing my own perfect cafe, which will provably live in the pages of my notebook forever more! It's a greatest hits, the best bits of every cafe I've been to. Think of it as a Lee Super Cafe!

Many of these best bits are taken from cafés in Melbourne, which is excactly where I am writing this now.  The atmosphere in most Melbourne cafés is a friendly, very relaxed atmosphere with a real rustic charm. Great, but sleep-deprivingly strong coffee is standard and the food is normally a pretty decent whether it be breakfast, lunch or a snack.

From Brunswick to St Kilda you can take a chance and walk into a cafe and the chances are it will be spot on and the perfect place to take the weight off your feet and enjoy a rest. And that's what a cafe should be. Maybe one day I'll be writing about the opening of my cafe but the likelihood is I'll keep writing in and trying to enjoy other peoples. The search for the perfect cafe isn't such a bad search to be in!

Lee x