Yeah, butter tea; it’s an acquired taste. The great thing about it is that is very warming in winter, gives you a lot of calories instantly and can be easily prepared. I learned to make mine years ago and my teacher was very much into soda. The basic recipe is incredibly simple and easy to make: boil tea and water until it is nearly black in colour, then strain into a large size french press; it should be able to contain at least a pint, even if you only make tea for yourself. Add more butter than you think is wise, add salt to taste and (depending on how you’ve been taught) a pinch of soda and a bit of milk or a teaspoon of milk powder. For butter I usually use ghee (clarified butter), but you can use sweet (fresh) butter as well. Ghee keeps better outside a fridge, so it also depends on circumstances. Using the plunger, churn the tea for a few minutes. Blenders and liquidizers also make great churns and you can also uses containers with a tightly fitting lid and shake the tea. Churning takes two to three minutes. If you want to have tsampa with your tea, you have two choices: either put the tsampa in your bowl before the tea or adding it to your tea. In either case, you want to avoid both the “mud bath” and the “snow storm”: it helps if you’ve taken pottery classes. Start stirring with a finger from the outside in. Once the tsampa has absorbed the tea, press it against the side of the bowl and turn the bowl, all the while pressing the tsampa. This is how you knead it. Once you have a neat ball of tsampa, you can put chili sauce on it and eat it. If you want to eat tsampa, use a larger bowl. Otherwise, tibetan teabowls are nice: they’re shallow, so you can drink many cups of tea from one pot. If you need to make large quantities, use a cooking pot and a liquidizer to churn it.
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Yes, the well-spring. What you say makes me sing (sotto voce, of course, I’m in my university office) the Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime:
Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/in the silent water
Under the rocks and stones/there is water underground.
I love how this comment ended up under “tea”. And now I have to go play Talking Heads on vinyl….
I’m not sure, either, how it got to “tea” but that is surely flowing underground, too!
I’m missing a navigation link in this new theme. How do I get to the comment thread for a given post, other than its RSS feed?
I’ll check it out. I messed with the page template a bit but i’ll try the “commentable” template instead. May take a while, because I need to go to the Source for this. Ah!
Hahaha! Well so much for my foray into the WP’s sandbox. Still, I had the template thing almost figured out, but i just didn’t want to inflict any more design pain
I still haven’t figured out the WP loop, which seems to get at the heart of the template business. I hope you didn’t change the theme on my account. I can use the comments RSS. I know you wanted black wallpaper for publishing photos.
The point about the “Infrared” theme was that it had a number of templates that would enable me to go around the loop as it were. So I made a page that published to the “magazine” template, and used the “dispatches” page for the loop, and a blank page, to the “default” template, for the photographs. I did some messing around with the “commentable” template, which organizes all comments in one page, apparently, but couldn’t make it work. It organized the comments to the wrong posts anyway, that’s how your comment ended up under “Tea”. And when I was logged in, I could see all comments underneath single articles, but obviously no one else could. And I was wondering why my stats were going downhill…[grin] I do want to be legible and accessible, you know. I broke my Odiogo plugin in the process, so that has to be repaired. I do pride myself on the fact that I do all this stuff by VoiceOver. Having a blog and doing part of the design myself is such a learning curve, but it’s great. Thanks for checking in, by the way.
Yes, doing the admin work on the back end is a hassle sometimes, but also very empowering.