Monday, February 19, 2007

Perfection


I went out for lunch with my parents’ yesterday, we went to Pizza Express which was nice enough. My father did his usual thing of coming up with totally irrelevant things in the middle of a conversation. Mum and I were talking about a place I lived a couple of years ago being up for sale and that it having been on the market a couple of months now. My father then suddenly said “The other day I found out what the difference is between white and black pepper” and then went on to explain it. Very odd. He also asked if I would go away on holiday with them after Easter. Dad wants to go to Cologne but he thinks he might not want to do much while he is there, so in order for mum to have someone to do things with he was wondering if I would go as well. It would be a complete nightmare and we would just spend the whole time arguing so I declined.

I had a cup of tea at the end of the meal. I had assumed that I would be given a pot of tea, but actually the waitress brought over a coffee cup (it had names of different coffees written on the outside) that had hot water in it and there was a tea bag on the side for me to dunk in it. I was also given some milk which was actually in a small cup rather than a jug. I was really surprised by this - I try and avoid drinking tea when I am out because it is normally so horrible and this was no exception. Pizza Express might wish to note that to make an even vaguely decent cup of tea, you *have* to use boiling water. Using hot water doesn’t let it brew properly, so if you bring out a cup of hot water then it has already dropped well below boiling and will never make a decent cup of tea. Do people know nothing?

I had a look on YouTube to see if anyone had made a video about how to make the perfect cup of tea. There are various videos, all of which had various flaws in them. The main one being most people adding tea to their cuppa. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Why ruin a beautiful drink by putting sugar in it?

The good news on the tea front though is that PGTips are currently giving away free small monkeys with packs of tea. I will have to go in search of these now. Which reminds me, here's the latest PGTips ad:

2 comments:

o said...

I try to let the kettle almost boil but never let it go into a roaring boil. I have been told a roaring boil "flattens: the water, making a flat cup of tea. Isn't that so?

Random Reflections said...

Hi Sally - I don't think I have heard that advice before, but I know that you shouldn't keep reboiling the water because that is bad for a decent cuppa. I'll have to follow your advice and see what happens.

Thanks for commenting.