Office drinks brought to you by Facebook

It all started with a Facebook post by my former boss.

I shared it with a co-worker who had long been daydreaming about instituting "tea time" in our design group's office. A concept stolen from our previous stint on a design team at Microsoft. You know, certain Thursday afternoons after 4...

So, starting Friday, tea time it is at the office. Cute story, but that's just part of it. 

Thanks to the power of Facebook to create truly strange happenstances, my mother is now ordering Armenian brandy online and having a geography-independent tasting with my former boss who — if I recall correctly — she's never met.

One of the much-touted attributes of Google+ is that your mother is not there yet, and I love me some Google+, but I don't want to live in a world where this doesn't happen:

French honey & Vermont maple cream

Two disclaimers: My childhood was spent in Vermont. I am a little iffy on honey in general.

Another pantry thing I picked up at Garagiste the other day is a jar of Maquis Honey, something I had never heard of. It's got the consistency of a paste, rather than a viscous liquid. It has crystallized regions of the jar.

It is usually made in Corsica, but this one's from Haute Languedoc (let your browser translate from French for you if you follow that link), near the southern central coast of France. I am reading here and there that its savory flavor and lack of the usual sweetness is the result of herb-ridden and scrub-brushy terrain where the bees forage. It's said to taste like lavender, myrtle and whatnot.

A taste test was proposed, pitting this lovely honey against my beloved maple cream — spreadable maple sugar!

What happened was surprise: On a nice Macrina  ficelle toast, this pasty honey made the maple cream seem too sweet and simple in comparison.

I can see having the Maquis honey with cheeses. In fact, one of my favorite recent-ish dining-out dishes was a really amazing cheese and honey pairing at Hitchcock.

The maple cream is still up there in my pantheon of foods, though.