Thanksgiving on a budget

Thanksgiving is the type of holiday you want to spend with your family or friends.
Even if formally you don’t give thanks for anything in particular, it’s still a warm feeling to have people you love around you.
Having a potluck Thanksgiving is the best idea, budget wise and not only. You spend more time chit-chatting with your friends than cooking and baking.
All it’s needed is a good coordination; making a list ahead of time obviously is helpful.
The host normally ends up with the most time consuming task: baking the turkey. That’s the downside of being the host. Other than that, all is nice and dandy.

These are my potluck ideas:

- Decorations: Choose the natural way: apples, squash, pumpkins, fallen leaves. Add some interesting candles and voila, you have the setting done in no time.

- Food: Think about colour, texture and flavor to brighten up the table. The turkey may be accompanied by: caramelized sweet potatoes, chive and garlic mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts with pancetta, green bean salad, cranberry and mandarin oranges sauce (yummy!)

- Dessert: Spanish Coffee (double yummy!) and any traditional pies: pecan- apple and pumpkin. If my memory serves me well, Costco has a pretty good deal on both of them.

- Beverages: Red wine: almost any Australian Shiraz will do it

Looking to buy good green tea?

Everybody seems to know the benefits of drinking green tea. According to some evidence, green tea may prevent the occurrence of some forms of cancer, but the mechanism of action it’s still poorly understood.
Each year, about 2.5 million tons of teas are manufactured from the dried leaves and leaf buds of the shrub Camellia sinensis.
Green tea, black tea, and oolong tea are all derived from this plant.
The growth bud and the first two or three leaves at the tip of the shoot produce the finest tea.

Tea varieties reflect the growing region (Ceylon, Assam, etc), the form (pekoe is cut, gunpowder is rolled) and the processing method (black, green, oolong).
Green tea- the preferred drink in Asia- is produced from leaves that have been withered, rolled, fermented, and dried; in other words it’s not crushed and oxidized.
Black tea- the preferred drink in Europe and Americas- is crushed, allowed to oxidize in heat for a few hours, then fully dried.
Oolong tea is in between green and black in term of oxidation.
Green tea and black tea are having different chemical properties.
As like anything else, with tea, you get what you pay for.
There are many green tea brands around, but not all of them are equal. Serious companies, offers green tea for ‘connoisseurs’ and the price is accordingly. Over there you are not going to find tea in other way then loose leaves.
My favorite tea store ‘Herbal Republic’/is located in Vancouver, BC; they carry absolutely awesome fine teas.
An on line store I consider investigating is O-Square

BlackBerry catching on in China

I have a BlackBerry-8800 and I must admit that I like it very much. The problem with it? it’s addictive. Having a smartphone like BlackBerry, makes you work longer hours.
A study done recently, showed a typical increase of working hours from 40 to 70 a week.

Going back to BlackBerry in China: the rumor had it that it would be available for sale in China for $700 at the end of August 2007.It did not happen.

China Mobile, the Research in Motion’s partner for Chinese market, does not sell BlackBerry, just offers service packages for it. So people are told to buy one from Honk Kong or other foreign countries.Once in the possession of the precious toy, they can buy a service package offered by China Mobile for prices between $57 and $85, pretty expensive for an average income of $350 per month.

Although the RIM is not selling yet on Chinese market, somehow they are sold on Taobao, the Chinese-language equivalent of EBay. The suspicion is that some of them might be knockoffs; the selling price is between $75 and $800.

The problem is that without China Mobile, the devices will not send or receive e-mail, but they will work as a cool cellphone and can access Internet.
Interesting fact: there is a Chinese copycat of the BlackBerry: it’s called RedBerry.