I once fell in love with a young lady because of her love for tea.

It’s true. After all, I can’t think of any other drinks that are as passionate as a cup of tea. Just think of the sensual and sensuous words that are commonly associated with the beverage: steaming, blended, spicy, vibrant, aromatic, playful, hot, soothing, among many others.

People that are passionate about tea are generally passionate people in all other parts of their lives; tea is a subtle manifestation of their intensity and exuberance. A passion for tea is a passion for life.

DavidsTea

I met a few such passionate individuals today at DavidsTea in Toronto.

My friend Sherren insisted that I check out the new tea shop after our brunch on Queen Street, and I happily obliged. The woman has excellent taste, after all.

Inside, I found a group of people not only willing to share their knowledge and love of tea, but also extremely eager to learn more about their customers, slowly exploring their interests, tastes, activities, and of course, preferences in teas. They know all their repeat customers by name, and are quick to learn those of new customers.

The teas themselves are aromatic and flavorful, and beautifully-presented and packaged. I picked up some organic silverback white tea and cinnamon rooibos chai, and grabbed a cup of melon white to go.

I’ve been to a lot of tea shops in my time, and while most offer an extremely pleasant and personable experience, very few tea shops exude the passion for tea that I felt as soon as I walked into DavidsTea.

Is DavidsTea the best tea shop in Toronto? It may only be a few months old, but the answer is very intense and passionate yes.

Toronto has the best hot dog vendors in the world.

Bold claim, I know, but everyone I know that comes to Toronto and has our street meat is always thoroughly impressed.

I’ve always wondered, however, that if we can do such a good job with hot dogs, why can’t we make other types of culinary masterpieces on our streets?

In New York, I’ve bought gyros from street vendors.

In Mauritius, I’ve eaten dhaal puri from guys pushing carts in the street.

In Hong Kong, I’ve had everything from buns to dim sum to satay on the street.

Well, it turns out that in Toronto, there are some serious restrictions on street food vendors, meaning our choices for a quick bite from a cart is pretty much limited to hot dogs and sausages. A lot of people are working hard to change that, but until now, the situation remains grim.

Early last week, I asked some of my online friends what they’d like to see being sold from street food vendors.

As you can see from the graph below (click on it to see the larger view), people have a lot of appetite (no pun intended) for new types of street food in the city.

Samosas, skewered meat, and roti are definitely crowd favorites, as are things like fruits and vegetables. All of them seem relatively easy to do from a street vendor cart too, so let’s hope we see some of them come to Toronto streets soon.

Thanks to John Dupuis, Richard Akerman, Alexa Clark, Michele Perras, Moira Fogarty, Catherine M, Krista Janicki, Mark Raheja, Joyce T, Colin Chan, Iris Ng, Justin Whitaker, Marya, and lots of other people that answered for their input.

Do you have your own thoughts? Share them here!

Just found out, through a post on Buzzfeed, that Google Trends shows that the world is far more interested in “cupcakes” than “financial crisis.”

Cupcakes FTW.

It’s no secret that I’m a huge cupcake fan. Recently, on GigPark, I decided to recommend my two favorite cupcake-makers in the world so that more people can revel in the wondrousness of their baked goods. Here’s a quick look at them:

Sugar Baking (Toronto, Canada)
Cupcakes are definitely the “in” thing right now, and nobody in Toronto does cupcakes like Sugar Baking. (Trust me, I’ve checked.) Catherine is not only one of the most pleasant people I have ever met, but she has immense skill in blending exotic flavors to make every cupcake delectable — all at a great price.

Lola’s Kitchen (London, UK)
Tasty cupcakes and an easy-to-use website ordering system aside (and that’s a lot already), the people at Lola’s are wonderful. When I had a problem, they not only answered my question immediately, but they fixed their entire ordering system to meet my needs. Plus, you really can’t go wrong with the delicious pastel icings they use on their cupcakes.

If you order cupcakes from either of those two places, let me know — and more importantly, recommend them on GigPark. We need to spread the cupcake love.

Mighty Leaf Tea is an artisan tea company that sells regular and specialty teas in handcrafted tea pouches. Their tea is available for purchase at stores across North America and also via a very easy to navigate website.

The Experience

The first thing you notice about Mighty Leaf Tea are the very pretty and perfectly woven silk tea pouches. Intricately hand crafted, the pouches let the hot water seep into the fresh herbs and leaves within in order to create a five-minute pouch brew experience that rivals most steeped teas. The leaves and herbs themselves are fresh and aromatic — whether you buy them in the pouch or loose — so that every different kind of Mighty Leaf Tea (and there are several!) packs a ton of flavor into your cup.

The quality of the tea aside, one of the other strengths of Mighty Leaf Tea is the diversity of leaves and herbs that they have for purchase. Their website arranges all their teas by region, caffeine content, and type, and each tea has extensive information about its ingredients, history, flavor, and use.

The Mighty Leaf tea pouches are biodegradable and environmentally friendly, and their loose tea blends — while flavorful on their own — are perfectly suited for mixing with your own herbs before steeping.

The Gotchas

It is hard — actually, almost impossible — to say anything negative about the tea itself, so I’ll focus on the web ordering experience. While the website is easy to navigate, the shopping bag is still a clunky application and doesn’t allow for payment by PayPal. Other than that, there is very little to say about Mighty Leaf Tea that isn’t complimentary.

What It Costs

If you’re used to buying the cheap Tetley Orange Pekoe boxes, Mighty Leaf Tea might seem a bit expensive. For those of you that have purchased good tea before, Mighty Leaf is moderately priced and provides tons of value for the money. If you decide to purchase a pack of 100 pouches, you’re looking at spending just under $60 Canadian. You can also purchase loose leaves for a good price.

Recommended If You Like

Tea, hot beverages, silk pouches, fresh herbs, great packaging design, a great way to spend a solitary weekday evening.

This Unsolicited Testimonial has been inspired by (shamelessly stolen from?) Anil Dash’s series by the same name. Please see that post for more information and background.

Even though we live in a relatively affluent society, there are still many people in our own city that are still going hungry every day. Second Harvest is an organization that helps bring food to people that don’t have it, and on February 21, they are holding their 10th annual Lunch Money Day campaign:

On Lunch Money Day, February 21, 2008, Second Harvest asks Torontonians to brown-bag their lunch and donate the cost of a bought lunch to Second Harvest. Every $5 provides 10 healthy and nutritious meals to people in need, including children, men and women in different programs across the GTA, including at women’s and homeless shelters, school meal programs, food banks and more.

If you want to do more than just simply donate money, Second Harvest is also looking for volunteers:

Volunteer teams are stationed across the city in specified public places, including 15 subway stations, 2 GO Stations in Mississauga, as well as several downtown PATH concourse locations, collecting donations from people and spreading the word about Lunch Money Day and Second Harvest.

For those of you in Toronto, join me in packing your lunch on the 21st and helping the needy this month.

I would like to apologize to all of you for missing National Peanut Butter & Jelly Day yesterday. Do know that in honor of the glorious day, I made myself a PB&J sandwich for breakfast and savored it thoroughly. Next year, if someone can send me a quick reminder the day before, I promise a post about the best PB&J memories I have throughout my life. It might not sound exciting right now, but trust me, a significant chunk of my life has revolved around this simple yet delicious sandwich.

All that being said, Serious Eats was much more astute and observant than I was, so they had a full range of coverage regarding National PB&J Day. In fact, I think they covered the day better than most major news networks cover Election Day, so kudos to Serious Eats. One of the best reports they had was their scientific analysis of how to craft the perfect PB&J sandwich, a method I then used to craft my sandwich this morning. Here’s a quick excerpt:

Armed with measuring spoons and a knife, I discovered, much to my surprise, that the suggested servings printed on the peanut butter (2 tablespoons) and jelly (1 tablespoon) jars were perfect when spread on two slices of the Pepperidge Farm white bread. As you can see here, we were using classic scientific techniques in our serious PBJ experiment.

Adam and Meg pointed out that the Pepperidge Farm bread we had purchased was sliced thinner than many other brands. If thicker slices of bread were used instead, they cautioned, the same volumes of PB and J would not produce comparable results. They advised me to measure the relative thickness of all components with a ruler to determine a ratio that could be used with any bread thickness. That ratio is 1 : 0.6 : 0.3 : 1, as seen in the illustration here.

And there you go. The secret to the perfect PB&J sandwich is revealed. Needless to say, I had a wonderful breakfast.

(Infographic taken from Serious Eats, without permission. If you guys want me to take it down, let me know, but hey, I really do love your site.)

There’s something about throwing some charcoal on the old-fashioned grill, dousing it with lighter fluid, and then burning the hair off your hand as you throw the match in, that makes me feel good about summer. I mean, summer isn’t my favorite of seasons — scratch that, it’s my least favorite season — but there are a few key things that you can do during the summer that have more of an impact in the hot sun than in the cold snow; barbecuing is one of them.

That being said, everyone these days has one of those fancy gas barbecues where all you have to do is press a button and throw on the meat, which is great when you’ve got company over and all you need the grill for is to make some quick burgers, but when the focal point of your gathering is a barbecue, nothing really beats slapping some meat on an old rusty grill with the charcoal slowly ashing up as the smoke fills the air. Barbecuing at its best.

So for those of you in the southern hemisphere, I apologize, but for us up here in Toronto, it’s not summer. It’s barbecue season.

On a very awesomely related note, Greg Story of Airbag just wrote an amazing weblog post on the charcoal barbecue. Check it out. Also, there’s no real better thing to have after a barbecue than ice cream. For those of you who have trouble scooping it, here are some tips, via Lifehacker.

Inspired by this post at green LA girl, I decided to take the Starbucks Challenge and see which location will actually serve me fair trade coffee as indicated in their company policy.

I visited three locations in Toronto, each with varying results:

Bathurst & Wilson (October 30, 2005)
The barista at this location had never heard of fair trade coffee. She didn’t even know what fair trade was. So after a 30-second lesson on the concept, she went to the back to ask her manager. The verdict? Starbucks “doesn’t sell that kind of coffee.”

King & Yonge (November 1, 2005)
The barista informed me that they only serve one blend of coffee that was “certified” fair trade, but Starbucks ensures that all their coffee blends are obtained through fair trade practices. That being said, they didn’t have any of their “certified” blend available, so I settled for a cup of Sumatran.

Yonge & Eglinton (November 3, 2005)
When I asked for a cup of fair trade at this Starbucks location, the barista blurted out, “yeah, I should have some now too, I’m about to go on break.” Whether she was flirting or not, I can’t say, but she did look around and realize they had none in the back. The problem was solved when another employee went around the counter, grabbed the bag of fair trade whole-beans they were selling in packs on the display, and asked me if I could wait for a few minutes while he “grinds the beans and brews a fresh pot.” And wait I did, and then joined the lovely barista for a cup of fair trade coffee on her break.