An excellent sandwich is grilled cheese with Nueske’s bacon and pickled jalapeños, don’t you think?

I drink a fair amount of tea, but I’ve managed not to be insufferable about it the way I am about chocolate or Iris is about bacon. Mostly I stick to PG Tips, a mass-market English brand of black tea. Occasionally I’ll read an article about Darjeeling or something, and try some fancy tea, but I always end up going back.

Temperatures were in the 90s most of last week, so the last thing I wanted was a steaming cup of tea. I wanted iced tea. But I didn’t want to make a pitcher of iced tea and wait for it to get cold. I guess I could have made it extra-strong and then diluted it with ice, but it was 95 degrees and my brain wasn’t working, so I went to the store and bought some Cold Brew.

Cold Brew is Lipton tea bags you can brew in cold water. How does it work? I assume they grind the tea leaves to a powder. How does it taste? Not great, but fine for a hot day. And like all Lipton tea, it’s cheap.

I noticed this sage advice on Lipton’s web site:

> Hydration is key to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Tea is a great tasting way to get your necessary daily fluid intake.

It reminded me of something I saw at the supermarket, a bottle of water with the tagline, “No water hydrates faster!” I’m sure this is true, just as I’m sure it’s true that no water hydrates slower.

Rustic fruit tarts are easy to make, look impressive, and taste great. You should probably be making them. But when I say they’re easy to make, I don’t mean to underplay Laurie’s estimable pastry skills. Examine the evidence.

We’ll be eating that in about an hour, if you’re in the neighborhood.

My mom gave me a thoughtful gift:

It’s the third edition, issued by the American Meat Institute in September 1941. It begins like this:

> The biologist states that life is built about hunger and love. This book has nothing to do directly with love.

I’m completely serious.

The pamphlet includes recipes for favorites such as Boiled Icing, Prize Winning Ice Box Cookies, Hamburger Corn Loaf, Chop Suey Surprise, and Codfish Balls. According to the signature on the front, this copy once belonged to Helen McDowall.

I wonder why she got rid of it.

In September 2001, I was hanging around Vientiane, Laos, with Laurie and three of our friends. Despite abject poverty, an autocratic bandit government, occasional terrorist bombings, and festering wounds from being used as a punching bag by the US during the Vietnam war, Laos is the most relaxing place I’ve ever been. You can sit by the Mekong river all day yawning and drinking fruit shakes.

One day I had breakfast outside the morning market. Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:

> The market doesn’t sell food, but vendors just outside the grounds do, and a woman making tiny summer rolls caught my eye. She spread rice flour batter on a griddle, then covered it to steam the skins. Each skin was spread onto a work surface (a banana leaf, actually), topped with minced pork and herbs, and rolled up. I bought a dozen, which she placed on a china plate with some slices of tofu and began to mix a dipping sauce.

> Into a dish went fish sauce, ground peanuts, and a squeeze of lime. She asked, by pointing, whether I wanted minced chiles, and I must have nodded vigorously, because the sauce came out quite spicy. I took a pair of chopsticks and sat at a nearby table with the rest of my party, who were already engrossed in pineapple-lime fruit shakes. The summer rolls were fifty cents (which, thanks to hyperinflation, is 5000 Lao kip), and I supplemented them with a few sesame-studded doughnuts.

At the time I had no idea what this dish was called, and I’ve never seen it again. Then, I was reading Austin of RealThai’s report from Hanoi, and there it was. The Thai name is *khao kriap paak maw*, so I assume the Lao name is similar. I’ll have to remember this next time I’m in Vientiane.