Turtledove is a white tea—soft and a little sweet with a pleasant, lingering fragrance and a beautiful finish. It landed in a busy interlude during the holidays: right between the time for the scheduled dog walk and some frantic last-minute cleaning, and I have to admit the only reason I took the time for this tea was because I was running behind on my tea newsletter.

 

Tea is sometimes said to be medicinal. There are some documented health benefits (mild), but a lot of the modern studies on it are usually something like “gave subjects 200 mg of green tea extract for blah blah blah” (I made up the dosage, please don’t take this as anything real). But I wonder if the real medicine is not the things in tea (which I love—do not get me wrong) but the act of taking a break and holding something warm in your hands.

 

And that brings me to…

So anyway let’s go back to the rushing part mentioned above. The actual rushing was that we were going to drive to meet up with my family for New Years and I was going to finish writing this in the car and then use roaming on my phone to send it.

 

But just before I got in the car I reminded my husband to take a COVID test just to make sure and TL;DR we are going to spend New Years by ourselves this year. Boo.

I also made four batches of cookies intended to be eaten by everyone who has some kind of dietary restriction in my family and now I have a TRULY GIGANTIC NUMBER of gluten-free sugar-free vegan pecan cherry chocolate chip cookies.

Anyway! I know that may sound dire, but these particular cookies were adapted from Joanne Lee Molinaro’s The Korean Vegan cookbook, and they’re made with red bean paste as a binder (which gives an amazing, rich flavor) and measure-for-measure gluten free flour and Swerve in place of sugar. The only complaint I have is that they’re actually too sweet for my tastes, which means they’re probably perfectly suited to everyone else’s tastes.

 

Otherwise they’re amazing. 10/10 would recommend.

 

Anyway I went to get links to the cookbook and realized it was $1.99 in digital today. I don’t know how long that will last. Even if you aren’t vegan (and I’m not), the food in this book is amazing.

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