All the tea in China

This was different. Someone gave Donna a specialist presentation box of China tea. She brought it home and it had remained in the cupboard, overlooked. We hadn't tried it.

Chinese green tea with a difference

Just today, she was tidying the kitchen and found the box of tea. The tea is formed into a hard, dried ball (front left in the photo). The foil packet that held it is in the background.

I dropped one of these balls into a mug and added boiling water, gradually the ball started to unroll, green leaves appeared first and then a pale 'flower' in the centre.

We transferred the tea 'plant' into a glass of cold water so that we could look at it more easily. It's very ingenious, extremely clever tea 'engineering'.

I drank the green tea infusion in the mug and it tasted good, lightly flavoured green tea, in fact!

And of course I had to take a photo for the daily toast. It's the finest thing to post that I could have imagined, and it was completely unexpected! Amazing that you can do this with tea. Bet there's nothing like this for coffee.

Unless, of course, you know different...

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)