Let’s Eat - Tea Thyme

Let’s Eat — A Writer’s Guide to Cooking
The tea I’m drinking at the moment is supposed to be made from oortz — or oorts, depending on which Armenian-English transliteration you choose. According to both of my pocket-sized Eastern Armenian-English dictionaries, oortz is thyme. In my Western Armenian-English dictionary, oortz isn’t mentioned. I enjoyed a small batch of oortz several years ago, and was looking forward to trying some again. Somehow, though, this oortz seems different. I can’t tell for sure, but I think it has peppermint in it. The tea is certainly green enough to be a mint tea. Then again, I would expect tea made from oortz to be green also. Anyway. Whatever it is, it’s good. I just had lunch: three scrambled eggs with two green onions, one clove of garlic, some bell pepper, and several mushrooms simmered in olive oil, along with a handful of chopped parsley, quite a bit of ground dry purple basil, salt, pepper, and cheddar cheese. We still have some of the lavash my brother brought recently from Armenia, along with the oortz and a few other odds and ends. Lavash is very thin flat bread that’s baked in large round sheets in a tonir oven, which is a round oven built into the ground. One of my fondest memories of Armenia is of women walking home with sheets of fresh lavash draped over their arms. The bread is ideal for wrapping cheese, fresh greens, scrambled eggs, fried eggplant, tomatoes, onions, roasted peppers, and the like. I just finished the tea. Originally, I was going to have Armenian coffee and a piece of my wife’s home-made fudge for dessert. She made two kinds: one with walnuts, one without. But after a cup of oortz tea, chocolate doesn’t sound good. Now, it occurs to me that mint and chocolate do go together. So that suggests that what I was drinking was indeed oortz. Obviously, these are complicated, serious matters. Furthermore, I would be happy to divulge our fudge recipe if I knew what it was. I’ve never made it myself. My wife handles everything that requires exact measurements. But I will say this: her fudge is so good that a single piece is enough to paralyze me for hours.	Also by William Michaelian POETRY Winter Poems ISBN: 978-0-9796599-0-4 52 pages. Paper. —————————— Another Song I Know ISBN: 978-0-9796599-1-1 80 pages. Paper. —————————— Cosmopsis Books San Francisco Signed copies available Main Page Author’s Note Background Notebook A Listening Thing Among the Living No Time to Cut My Hair One Hand Clapping Songs and Letters Collected Poems Early Short Stories Armenian Translations Cosmopsis Print Editions Interviews News and Reviews Highly Recommended Favorite Books & Authors Useless Information Conversation Flippantly Answered Questions E-mail & Parting Thoughts
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Let’s Eat — A Writer’s Guide to Cooking