Michelle joins Mary Janet MacDonald on Tunes and Wooden Spoons

This photo was taken for the first podcast recorded for Be Well with Michelle Greenwell – we even had to share the mic for this grand start. You can hear the podcast here – Nov 4, 2020!

Mary Janet and I go back over two decades. Our passion for stepdance began our friendship, and over the years we have weaved in and out of activities in dance, Cape Breton, kids, grandkids, and outreach. This Sunday, Jan 22 at 2 pm I will be joining Mary Janet for a special conversation over tea and Apple Spice muffins in her kitchen. What a joy this will be! Tunes and Wooden Spoons is on Facebook Live.

To add to the conversation, I had been thinking about how to honor Mary Janet and all that she inspires in others through her actions. Launching the new tea company: Cape Breton Tea Company in the coming weeks, it was an opportunity to think about Mary Janet’s love of black tea – King Cole – in a big pot on the back of the stove waiting for guests to pop by. Visiting family before Christmas, I started a conversation about Mary Janet and her accomplishments with the Live broadcasts and her cookbooks and book tour. This led to my mom, Yvonne, and my sister, Charlene, spending an afternoon tea testing and designing a special label for a tea that would honor dance, conversation, community, black tea, and beautiful smells from the kitchen. Merry Moments was created. Yvonne’s special drawing talents were put to the test and a set of stepdance shoes emerged for the label. Yvonne humored Charlene and I by asking us to draw too…hmmm, we didn’t get her talents in that regard!

It is an honor for Natascha Polomski, co-owner in the company, and for myself to have the opportunity to create tea blends for people, families and special occasions, and have tea bring love into the mug, a conversation, and an activity. Our company, Tea with Intention, began in 2015 and on March 18th we will officially launch our new company, the Cape Breton Tea Company. With a soft launch before Christmas, our blends sold out. It was amazing. Restocked and ready to bring the tastes, smells, and visions of Cape Breton forward for the local people as well as the visitors or those from away, we hope your blends while bringing a little of Cape Breton into your hands and your heart.

Please check out our original blends at https://intend-tea.square.site and our new blends at https://cbteacompany.square.site. Be sure to check out the stories, inspirational photos by David Greenwell, and savoring descriptions of the tea blends. We have also paired our teas with special cheese blends from Brook Village Grocery. Our teas will be paired in the Cheese Club boxes that go out on Wednesday too! Cheese transforms with beer and wine pairings, but also with tea pairings. Consider expanding your experience with cheese and tea with your box from Brook Village Grocery.

To find Mary Janet’s gifts from the kitchen, check out her website at https://www.tunesandwoodenspoons.com, and if you don’t already have one of her cookbooks “Love without Measure” and “Recipes from a Cape Breton Kitchen”, you can pick one up from many of the shops in Inverness County, or online here: https://www.thecuriouscatteaandbooks.ca/tunes-and-wooden-spoons-recipes-form-a-cape-breton.html or from Amazon.

Well, it is going to be quite the week. Come along for a good conversation, and if you have a tea in mind, reach out to us, we would love to share the teas ready to go in our tea heaven here in Hillsborough – outside of Mabou, on Cape Breton Island.