I’ve made two delicious rice-based dishes recently that I want to tell you about.

First, I was invited to a Southern food party. Since I’m incapable of following rules, I thought about bringing a southern Thai dish, like massaman curry or fish maw soup. Nah, too much work. Then I remembered the Lee Bros’ Saigon Hoppin’ John. Perfect!

Hoppin’ John is black-eyed peas and rice. (I’m going to try really hard to get through this without making a joke about “My Humps.”) It’s a traditional New Year’s dish in the South. It’s usually made with bacon, but the Saigon version omits the bacon and adds coconut milk, lemongrass, and ginger. I made it with your basic long-grain S&W rice, and it’s an extremely satisfying vegetarian meal. (Okay, I used chicken broth and fish sauce, so it was an extremely satisfying almost-vegetarian meal.)

[Here’s the recipe](http://www.culinate.com/books/collections/all_books/The+Lee+Bros.+Southern+Cookbook/saigon_hoppin_john)

Next, I made myself this lunch that was so good, I took a picture:

That’s _dokbokki,_ Korean rice cakes with hot sauce. It’s from the [Momofuku Cookbook](http://www.amazon.com/dp/030745195X/?tag=mamstesgrubshack). The rice cakes are the Korean equivalent of mochi, pounded and molded glutinous rice. Super-chewy and satisfying, the savory equivalent of [Hi-Chew](http://www.gourmet.com/food/2009/07/hi-chew-candy-better-than-a-real-mango). They’re sold in every Japanese and Korean market, frozen or refrigerated. For this recipe, you want the hot dog-shaped ones. They look weird but are a completely natural product made of nothing but rice, water, and salt.

In order to make Momofuku’s dokbokki, you need to make a couple of condiments: Korean Red Dragon Sauce, which is just a mixture of off-the-shelf chile sauce and a couple of other things you probably already have; and caramelized onions. (David Chang called them roasted onions, but they’re just totally standard caramelized onions.) Once you’ve made these things, you can make yourself crispy, chewy, spicy dokbokki in less than ten minutes. And you should.

[Here’s the recipe](http://www.inuyaki.com/archives/2495)

Have you ever wanted to hear what would happen if your two favorite bloggers teamed up? Assuming your two favorite bloggers are me and Molly Wizenberg of [Orangette](http://orangette.net/), you’re in luck:

[Spilled Milk](http://www.spilledmilkpodcast.com/)

The first episode (fried eggs) is available right now on the web site. Coming soon to iTunes. Second episode (winter squash) coming in two weeks. We live only to make you laugh. That means if you don’t laugh, we will die. Think about that.

**WARNING:** Philosophical, pseudo-inspirational words ahead.

I’ve written before about my torrid affair with the Coffee People Black Tiger milkshake. [Last time I mentioned it](https://www.rootsandgrubs.com/2006/07/16/tears-of-the-black-tiger/) was summer 2006, and I was up at 3am, having polished off one of these extremely caffeinated milkshakes about seven hours earlier.

Coffee People, which was one of Portland’s original espresso chains, is now [mostly defunct](http://portland.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2007/01/22/editorial2.html). The brand’s last outpost is a few stands at Portland International Airport.

Sort of.

I was out in Portland today and came across [Jim and Patty’s Coffee](http://jimandpattys.com/). Jim and Patty are the actual coffee people from the Coffee People logo. They’re like the local band that hit it big, drove around in a tour bus for a few years, then went back to playing at the bar down the street. They sell Black Tiger milkshakes and all the other old CP favorites (lemon cheesecake, espresso mocha, Velvet Hammer).

More important, however, they had an exhibition of Road Tour mugs. As the Portland Business Journal put it:

> In this age of Starbucks ubiquity, it’s worth remembering there was a time when the unveiling of Coffee People’s annual “Road Tour” mug was close to a genuine cultural event. Coffee snobs didn’t tote some stainless steel contraption with the Starbucks mermaid logo. The beverage transport device of choice for the coffee elite was the now quaint plastic “Road Tour” mug.

(I tried to get a picture of the display but it was behind very reflective plastic.)

I bought the Road Tour mug annually for several years in the early 90s. It was as important a part of my wardrobe as my Pearl Jam t-shirt. Apparently they were still doing them [as recently as 2006](http://www.vonglitschka.com/2009/08/05/brewing-creativity/).

When I saw the display, which featured maybe five mugs from my coffee-willing heyday, it was a big nostalgia sandwich. I remembered driving around Portland in my little Mazda, spilling coffee (no cupholders), and doing various stupid high school things. Seeing those mugs was great–I still have residual awesome in my veins, hours later.

I had a minor pang about the fact that I’d gotten rid of my (dirty, plastic) road tour mugs. Why hadn’t I held onto them and created my own little shrine?

Then I had a flash of insight. Maybe even an insight sandwich. Here’s what would have happened if I’d kept the mugs. I would have them stashed in my closet. I would know they were there, but they would have stopped bringing me any joy years ago, after they got too gross to drink out of. Periodically I’d waste time moving them from one apartment to another and stashing them in a new closet. Then, today, at Jim and Patty’s, I would have seen the mug display and shrugged at the same old mugs moldering in my closet. They would have been robbed of their awesome.

This, I think, is a part of why I so enjoy getting rid of things–even irreplaceable things of the greatest sentimental value. I didn’t mention this aspect of decluttering in [my recent column on the topic](http://www.mint.com/blog/saving/get-rid-of-useless-crap/), and perhaps the idea sounds deliberately inflammatory, but today is not the first time I’ve gotten considerable and unexpected pleasure out of getting rid of something of sentimental importance. In fact, now I try not to accumulate anything like this at all, stuff that will play my own life back to me until I get bored of it.

(Another hypothesis is that I do this because I’m a guy.)

By the way, I didn’t order the Black Tiger shake, because–call me old-fashioned–I feel like sleeping tonight.

The other day my colleague Maggie Savarino [posted on Twitter](http://twitter.com/wineoffensive/status/6474946956) to complain about poor tea service:

> Tea service in Seattle SUCKS.

So in the spirit of that New York Times blog post about [100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do](http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/one-hundred-things-restaurant-staffers-should-never-do-part-one/), let’s come up with a tea drinker’s bill of rights. I don’t have all of the amendments, so I need you to come to my constitutional convention and help out.

I also recognize that tea service poses some problems. There are many kinds of tea, each with its own brewing parameters, and tea attracts picky customers. But you could say the same about the standard menu of espresso drinks–compared to regular and decaf drip, it seems impossibly expensive and complicated. Why, you’d have to charge $3 for a cup of coffee!

Exactly. So along with these rights, I’d like to offer a couple of rights to cafes: the right to charge as much for a cup of tea as you charge for a latte; the right to make customers wait until the tea has properly brewed; and the right to serve a streamlined menu of teas. My favorite teahouse, [Remedy Teas](http://remedyteas.com), serves 150 teas. Your coffee place doesn’t have to. For that matter, there’s no reason a cafe can’t serve good tea and cheap teabags, drinker’s choice.

TEA DRINKER’S BILL OF RIGHTS (Beta)

1. The right to filtered water at the proper temperature. Especially for green tea, which needs much cooler water than black or oolong tea.

2. The right to fresh, loose-leaf tea. I carry teabags with me when I travel, and it’s certainly possible to find good tea in bags. (A shout-out to [MyGreenTea](http://www.mygreentea.com/) and [Sugimoto USA](http://www.sugimotousa.com/).) But the best tea doesn’t come in bags, and they’re kind of janky in a way that jars with the cafe experience.

3. The right to not be responsible for determining how long to brew the tea. If you’re having tea to stay, the cafe can furnish you with a digital timer. If you’re having it to go, they should time it for you, because you have…

4. The right to take tea to go without a teabag in it. Otherwise you get oversteeped tea, unless you take the lid off and drop the teabag into a trash can on the street and splash hot tea on your wrist and cry in public.

What else? Please weigh in.

The other day I was at Uwajimaya buying ingredients for homemade kimchi, about which more later. Near the chef demo counter, they had a big display of shincha tea.

This struck me as odd, because shincha is first-harvest tea, lauded for its fresh, clean flavor (and priced to match). The first harvest for tea is in the spring. And this shincha was only $8. Was Uwajimaya trying to snooker people with leftover spring tea markdowns?

No such subterfuge. This tea was from a place where it’s spring now: Brazil. It’s made by Yamamotoyama, a large Japanese tea brand, grown on their Brazilian plantation. Here’s the package:

The tea looks and smells like deep-steamed sencha. And I’d love it if the punchline of the story was that it was just as good as the shincha I paid $25 for last spring. Unfortunately, it’s pretty mediocre. I’m not sure if this is because it’s from Brazil or because all of Yamamotoyama’s cheap tea is mediocre.

Anyway, interesting experiment, and presumably we’ll all be drinking Brazilian tea from a box next year.