Turn on the tea and let it brew: Michael Hurley, Breakfast Bánh Mì, and more

Rec Center #9: May 2025

Welcome to the May edition of Rec Center, my miscellaneous recommendation series! You can find recommendations from previous months in the Rec Center archives. Otherwise, the Lillian Review of Books publishes book reviews, mainly of classic and/or Jewish and/or speculative literature.

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As of mid-May, summer has more or less arrived in Virginia. Stifling humidity, an explosion of greenery, syrupy sweet lilacs and honeysuckle blooming, obscenely plump and abundant strawberries, intense thunderstorms that come and go in the space of three Townes Van Zandt ballads, a plague of mosquitoes. 

As one who is much beloved by mosquitoes and prone to overheating, summer has always been my least favorite season from the standpoint of physical comfort, but I’ve come to find beauty in its Mid-Atlantic incarnation. I just prefer to admire it from an air-conditioned vantage point. This week, heavy rains have kept the worst of the heat at bay, but don’t be deceived: Summer Is Coming.

Strawberries

I have a love-hate relationship with the strawberries my husband planted in four different patches around our house. We started with a couple of plants three years ago, and now they’ve grown like weeds, sending out runners all over the garden. The wide leaves hide the ripe fruit, so it’s easy to miss a few when they’re ripe, only to have your fingers find a grossly decaying berry, shot through with slug holes. And the slugs don’t limit themselves to the overripe fruit, either. I’ve lost count of how many otherwise perfect, plump, just-ripened berries I’ve had to toss because the slugs have bored tiny little holes straight through them. Not to mention that the patch with the sweetest berries is also in a mosquito hot zone.

On the other hand, there is something immensely satisfying about eating jewel-like strawberries you’ve grown yourself. Their flavor is exquisite. Store-bought berries rarely have the concentration of flavor I’ve found from our strawberries. So, if you have some outdoor space, consider planting some strawberries. They’ll give you more berries than you know what to do with for 3-5 years.

Because my entire life is revolving around strawberries this month, I was delighted to find this tray at an estate sale last weekend. Yes, I bought it, and plan to use it to serve iced tea on the porch all summer long.

Cold Brew Hojicha

This might be obvious, but I like to steep my own cold brew green tea in the spring and summer. I used to buy those bottles of chilled Ito-En green tea all the time until I realized I could save myself a ton of money by making it at home. I use one of these giant mason jars (I think it holds 10 cups) and steep either 3 tea bags or 3 heaping teaspoons of loose tea in a strainer overnight. My favorite is hojicha or genmaicha. Once it’s at the intensity of flavor you want, keep in the fridge and serve over ice. So refreshing. This is also exceptional with some yujacha (Korean sweetened yuzu jam concentrate) mixed in. 

I’ve been using a rotation of loose teas that my husband brought back from a trip to Japan earlier this year, but if that’s not an option for you, my go-to tea bag brand is Yamamotoyama. It’s available in many grocery stores.

Breakfast Banh Mi from Le Bledo

My husband and I are breakfast sando enthusiasts, so we were thrilled to discover the all-day breakfast banh mi menu at Le Bledo in Springfield, Virginia. 

This has got to be the best deal on breakfast in the DMV. For $7.50 you get egg, cheese, and one meat on a 6” homemade French roll with all the typical fixings: homemade mayo, pickled daikon and carrots, cilantro, cucumber, and jalapeños. We tried one Spam sandwich and one Cha (Viet pork roll) sandwich. On the pork roll banh mi I added a schmear of pate for 65 cents. The meats were nicely griddled. The bread was light, fluffy, and the perfect amount of crispiness (the roof of your mouth is safe). One sandwich was substantial and filling. With a Vietnamese iced coffee to wash it down, it was one of the all-time great breakfast sando experiences in recent memory.

The banh mi is already the perfect, well-balanced sandwich. I usually order the classic cold cuts version or the grilled pork or Chinese BBQ pork. The pickled daikon cuts the richness of the meats, the cilantro and cucumber bring freshness, and the pate gives it all a creamy, funky, addictive umami. 

Giving a typical egg, meat, and cheese breakfast sando the banh mi treatment is a stroke of brilliance. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one on a menu except at Le Bledo. If you’re local, find your way to Le Bledo. They have a robust grab-and-go section (sweet and savory), plus I’ve enjoyed the pho and banh mi. They have a wider selection of dishes that I intend to try. So far, everything I’ve tried there rivals the best you can find in Eden Center, the commercial heart of the Vietnamese community in Northern Virginia. If you’re not local, see if your local Viet deli will make one of these for you. 

Do I have any Vietnamese subscribers? Can you tell me if it’s common to have a bacon egg and cheese banh mi with all the toppings? Have I just not been paying attention? 

Swimming as Cardio

I have been a committed (non-competitive) powerlifter for the last 7 years. Until my mid-20s, I was more or less sedentary. Every so often I’d do a yoga class or swim a few laps, but otherwise I kept slim through a combination of smoking cigarettes and disordered eating. Then I met my now-husband, quit smoking, and started powerlifting-style training. I love it. I’m utterly hooked on the dopamine hits that come from completing a challenging set, the sense of mastery and accomplishment of adding five more pounds each week, and the delicious ache of tired muscles.

Alas, one cannot rely on slamming heavy weights alone for perfect health. The cardiovascular system needs its own challenge. 

I hate running. Everything feels wrong about it. Even when I am running consistently, multiple times per week, it never feels easier.

This spring I had planned to run a 5k, but an injury interrupted my training. Instead, I’ve been swimming at least three times a week, usually between 1500 and 2100 yards per session. For me, swimming is an infinitely more pleasant form of exercise than running, rowing, or cycling. Even while engaging in effortful intervals, I seldom get the oh-god-please-can-I-just-stop-now feeling that kicks in after ten minutes of running. It’s not that it isn’t challenging—after swimming ~2000 yards in an hour, my legs and arms often feel jelly-like—but it just feels nice to glide through the water.

I know some of you psychopaths love to run, and I’m happy for you. But if, like me, you’d rather die than gasp your way through training for a half marathon, find your local rec center with a pool and channel your inner Katie Ledecky or Michael Phelps.  

First Songs by Michael Hurley

I just learned that Michael Hurley died on April 1, 2025. He was never a big star, but he was a legend to many.

That Michael Hurley’s debut album, First Songs, was recorded by Folkways Records in 1963 when he was only 22 is proof that the Muses have favorites. I first listened to this album when I was also 22 and had created nothing of consequence. I was an intern at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and explored the label’s back catalogue while I worked.

This music captured my attention right away and gave me goosebumps. They are bare, unadorned, raw gems in the rough. Hurley’s voice somehow conveys both the melancholy and wisdom of a much older man and the quiet swagger of a shit-kicking young kid. His voice cracks as he yodels. He misses a few notes on his guitar. And this all adds up to a perfect record.

It’s great music for this transitional springtime weather. I like folk music year-round, but something about these kinds of twangy singer-songwriter songs feels especially right for sitting out on a porch with a glass of chilled green tea and a bowl of fresh strawberries (which is how I’m writing these words).

I think the most famous song from the album is The Tea Song, which is about heartbreak and drinking lots of tea. 

Turn on the tea and let it brew
I don’t care that she’s left me
Just so long as the cupboard’s full of tea
My nerves are shakin’ and my heart is breakin’
That’s just because of all the tea I’ve taken

I love The Tea Song, but my favorite track on the album is You Get Down By the Pool Hall Clickety Clack, a song warning away a predatory drifter from the narrator’s younger sister. It features possibly the best rhyming couplet in all of lyric poetry:

Now you wrote my sister a twelve line sonnet
There’s a train leaving here and I want you on it
I don’t want you hanging round my little sister no more
You move along, you rolling stone
You move along, you rolling stone

Now you tell me that you’re misunderstood
But I understand that you’re no damn good
I don’t want you hanging round my little sister no more
You move along, you rolling stone
You move along, you rolling stone

Hurley later played with members of the Holy Modal Rounders, the drug-addled weirdos of the Greenwich Village folk revival scene. His early years, culminating in a 6-month hospital stay at Bellevue prior to the recording of the album, are recounted in the liner notes to First Songs:

Like many other members of the generation born into the early 1940's (his birth date is December 20 , 1941, 13 days after Pearl Harbor), Mike had been traveling too hard and too long and too young. His physical breakdown followed months of debilitating scuffling in New York's Greenwich Village, where, he confessed, he had come into contact with a gang of youngsters "with some pretty bad habits." His adventures in Greenwich Village had been preceeded by adventures on the road, when he and a friend, Robin Remaily, had hitch-hiked to New Orleans, in 1960 --he was nineteen then. On their way down the two had been jailed in York, Alabama, "on suspicion of being suspicious, " as Mike put it, because they had hobnobbed with a Negro guitar player living in the back country out of York. After being held and questioned, the two youths were lectured by the mayor, sheriff and parson of that town, then put on a bus to New Orleans. Arriving in New Orleans, they were jailed on "vagrancy" and "suspicion." Mike, who carries a brown spiral notebook, had it dangling from his pocket; the police thought it was a gun handle. The police added that the two appeared doubly suspicious because Remaily had been carrying a large object "resembling a sub-machine gun" wrapped in a black blanket. It was a guitar. When it was finally discovered by police that neither youth was either a dangerous assassin (they missed the real one) nor a member of a Sicilian underworld syndicate (still operating in most cities), Hurley and Remaily were released. After a number of experiences -- Hurley got a job pushing a hot tamale cart through the streets all night long; he later sang and played for a French Quarter sybarite who needed music for Pontchartrain sail-boat outing's-- Remaily and Hurley had returned to their home territory, the countryside in and around Bucks County, Pennsylvania and Hunterdon County, New Jersey.

This had not been Mike's first trip to New Orleans. At seventeen, after a summer of brooding and restlessness, he had taken off in August with $35 in his pocket and hitched all the way to Mexico, stopping at New Orleans along the way. Thus he had set out, at seventeen, on the road that took him, eventually, to a hospital in New York City.

In the words of Woody Guthrie: I’ve been having some hard travelin’, I thought you knowed. 

Rest in peace, Michael Hurley. 

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Thanks for reading, and please let me know what you think if you give any of these recs a shot!

-Lillian