Tea Bricks and Lazy Sushi 🧱

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to slurp coffee noodles, cook heretical pasta, and learn that to be scheduled is to be loved

Hi there!

Interesting idea by Tanya, I've found around: To be scheduled is to be loved.

As in:

To be scheduled is to be considered amid the logistical chaos of adult life.
It means someone looked at an overcommitted week full of workouts,
errands, social obligations, unread texts and the general rigmarole of existing, and still decided to make room for you. I suppose that is devotion.

Personally, the idea of someone managing MY time has always felt... wrong.

And yet this one stayed with me. Maybe I've been looking at it from the wrong angle.

Or maybe not. Still thinking.

Piero

✹Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. That quote just fits a food newsletter. Limits are part of cooking: seasonality, the missing ingredient, the technique that doesn't quite work. That's exactly where something real gets made.

But consider this: the encyclical is full of sharp insights on humanity and its relationship with technology and AI. I haven't read it all yet, but Leo XIV already sounds like the kind of freedom-minded, anti-system thinker I tend to like. See him like an antagonist professor, not just a religious figure.

Extraordinary veg

Giulias's follow-up to her first - five stars for me - Cucina Povera carries the same premise: Italian home cooking is mostly about vegetables, and Italians are quietly excellent at them. Eggplant Parmesan, Panzanella, Caponata, Braised Artichokes, Fennel Gratin. Simple things done right. Her website is a gold mine of excellent recipes you should already know. Remember: Italian cooking, where the ingredients do most of the work, but you must be smart enough to not to spoil them.

Vegetables the Italian Way: Turning Simple and Fresh into Extraordinary by Giulia Scarpaleggia, photos Tommaso Galli
→ Shortplot: 🍅 🥬 🍆 🍞

Disclaimer: I did receive a complimentary copy from the US by the publisher Artisan (which is a little absurd given that Giulia is cooking a few hundred kilometers from where I'm writing this).

Tea as a Brick

I had no idea brick tea was a thing until a post showed up on my feed on the Fediverse (via Chris Trottier).

Pressed into dense cakes or bricks, Pu'er comes from ancient trees in Yunnan, southern China, and has been traded along the Tea Horse Road for centuries — compact enough to carry, valuable enough to use as currency.

What makes it unlike any other tea is time.

Raw Pu'er, called sheng, is left to age and ferment slowly, growing more complex year by year, the way a good wine does. The other kind, shou, is artificially fermented to speed the process: earthier, softer, some say "less interesting".

You brew it in a gaiwan, a small lidded cup that lets you control every steeping second by second, and you drink it in rounds, not in one long mug.

I happened to have a tea-specialized shop a few minutes from home. I walked in, asked questions, and walked out with a 2020 Lunan Sheng Pu'er: stone-pressed, ancient trees, 100 grams for around $50. (Yes, I know. It's a lot, but you use 3 grams per brew, and one brew can be renewed about 8-10 times; plus the paper package is super-cool)

You can spend less on younger leaves, but you'd be buying a different experience. What I got in the cup was nothing like what I expected. Floral, peachy, mineral, shifting with each infusion. Less like tea, more like a tasting. Closer to opening a bottle of Chablis than to anything that happens at 5pm.

If you are even mildly curious about tea, this is where to start a new journey.

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FoodTok has replaced traditional restaurant reviews. Are we forgetting how to really describe food?

Maggie Hennessy / Slate

Food criticism has flattened into "fire" and "bussin". Slate looks at what gets lost when food language stops describing and becomes pure reaction. Does a shared vocabulary for talking about food still exist, or are we reinventing it every time?