senoritafish | Tea and mooncakes...

Saturday was my garden club's membership tea, where we are supposed to invite friends and potential new members. We usually have it at a member's house, and it's an excuse to haul out all the teapots and cups and saucers that seldom get used. When we have it at Carole's, I love to see her delicate porcelain cups she got when she lived in Japan; they only hold maybe a quarter of a cup of tea, but they are so delicate, painted with a landscape in brown and black on the outside. When you finish your tea and hold the bottom of the cup up to the light, there is a portrait of a Japanese lady, intaglioed into the bottom.

We sample a bunch of different kinds of tea, and everyone brings a salad or a dessert. I made banana bread - the Moosewood recipe; even though half the bananas weren't as ripe as I'd've liked, it turned out well except it was very crumbly. I forgot you're supposed to sift the flour before you measure so there may have been more flour than intended.

We had it at Greta's house this time - her backyard looks like it was professionally landscaped, I swear. She always fusses that "oh, it looks terrible, nothing's blooming right now," when we would all kill to have ours look a quarter as nice. My friend ML from work was supposed to come but she must have gotten lost - I waited out front for her and she never showed. Ah well, life happens - I'm sure something must have come up.

After we'd had a nibble, Laurie shared some bits of "Diary of an Edwardian Country Lady" - really she was quite an amateur naturalist, and then, since the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival was in a couple of days, Carole shared some stories about the holiday and then brought out several different versions of traditional mooncakes for us to try.

These were the first kind. The outside was kind of doughy, and the filling was yellow. I believe it was lotus seed pasted with several different kinds of nuts included. Sort of reminiscent of marzipan, though not as sweet. Most everyone thought this one was nice. These appeared to have been hand-made at a local Vietnamese bakery .

The second kind came in a pretty metal tin, with four slightly different kinds of moon cake. These had a thinner dough shell that was slightly more baked (or at least browner) and were filled with either red or mung bean paste with different flavorings, and all of them contained a whole egg yolk (representing the moon, one story says).

This one says "Orange rose red bean 1 yolk."

This is what they looked like on the inside (although slightly different colors, depending on the ingredients). And I neglected to take a picture of a whole one without the wrapper, duh! Some people liked these and others didn't - I don't think many Westerners really think of beans as a sweet. The egg yolk was a little salty.

The final type was very pretty. Made of two layers of rice flour and sugar with a thin layer of taro paste between them, it was very stiff and would have made a nice plaque to hang on the wall. I didn't mind it, but most of the garden club ladies thought it tasted like cardboard. It took quite a bit of effort to get it cut into bite size pieces.

Carole gave me the rest of the ones in the tin and the "cardboard" one to take home. The kids liked all of them, but the doughy one was their favorite. I had one left over which I took to work. It disappeared, but VT took one look at it and said, "I can tell right now that's something I won't like." When I mentioned to IT than ML had missed the mooncakes (he's her husband, and I haven't seen her yet), he gave me a strange look and told me "Ecch! I hate mooncakes!" AL, whose family is Chinese, wrinkled her nose and said,"Ya know, moon cakes are the Chinese version of fruitcake. Some are ok and some are awful, and every once in awhile you find some that are really really good, but mostly, it's just something you have to put up with at this time of year."