Matcha Addiction: An Introduction

Yes I am starting a new, RIVETING series: Matcha Addiction. (Mine.)

Basically 2014 has been a big 'get back in shape' year, after my 2013 sports injury. And part of this has been to ditch my staple love: coffee (in all its forms). I have done this by replacing it with matcha. Matcha creations are not always healthy, but probably healthier and less-abrasive than caffeine. (Pure matcha is very healthy, and full of antioxidants, but of course its modern variants and recipes are also interesting!)

What is matcha?
Matcha 抹茶 (also spelled maccha) is a very fine, powdered form of green tea, from Japan. It is more concentrated and flavoursome than regular green tea, and as a result finding the good stuff can be both difficult and expensive! There a different grades and blends of matcha. But one of the best factors is that matcha is added to make distinctive ice-cream, desserts, drinks and other foodstuffs.

It's damned hard to find decent matcha products served anywhere in the UK (in my price range, at least) and I strongly suspect the best stuff is still found in Japan. But there are quite a number of matcha-selling outlets popping up in Singapore at the moment. So over the course of this series, I will selflessly be going around trying them all and giving you my recommendations! 

Tarrah for now! 


Image courtesy: choosingraw.com

We Have Lift Off!

After months of grappling with the tech for this, the final solution was actually to upload and use a completely new browser. I didn't want to have to do this (Explorer served me fine!) but it seems Blogger simply won't upload photos any more through Explorer. In fact I suspect this is a ploy to try to force us to switch to Google Chrome (Blogger, YouTube etc are all owned by Google). Which makes me even more strongly against using Chrome than I was before! (I was pretty against it before this problem - don't like all the forced 'shared information' across platforms they do 'for us'!) 

Anyway I'm now having to use Firefox for this blog. And when I have time, I think I will switch away from troublesome, pushy, Blogger altogether, to a different format.

In the meanwhile, please enjoy the Blog and comment if you like! :)

Devon Scrumpy

This was inspired by another conversation with a Japanese friend, while we were drinking cider. I grew up in a part of the UK where they are famous for making cider (usually from apples). But there is another local brew, which is a bit more lethal, and it is called Devon Scrumpy.

Scrumpy is traditionally the cider that the local farmers would drink. It is less refined than cider and it has a higher alcohol volume. And whereas refined cider is a clear amber colour, Scrumpy is cloudy. As far as I know you can still buy proper Scrumpy locally in Devon, in fact it might have been packaged and more widely distributed by now! (It has been 20 years since I had Scrumpy in the West Country!)

The name derives from the apples that are used to make the drink - not the posh apples from the tree, but the windfall and shrivelled apples, which were called 'scrimps' in old West Country language. 

Apparently today the word Scrumpy is also used to describe regular ciders from micro-breweries, as opposed to the mass produced brands. This is not the traditional meaning, which definitely refers to unrefined farmers' cider.

Cloudy real Devon Scrumpy