Global Tea Time

Just as the allergies and asthma were calming down to a manageable annoyance, and I thought that I could get back to my normal blog, I got the stomach flu. What's a girl to do? Thankfully, I realized that my friends came to the rescue with a Christmas present. A sampler box of tea! The World of Tea collection includes 9 different kinds of tea representing Italy, England, India, South America (Brazil/Paraguay/Argentina), China, Taiwan, Egypt, Morocco, and South Africa. So, for the next 9 weeks I will post a review of one of the bags of tea. Hopefully by the end of that I will have had some time to get caught up in life and feel better.

Since it's just 3 days before Christmas (and I'm still moving a little slowly), I decided to see if I could find anything on the internet about Christmas tea. At first, I found some recipes from the US about using lemon and orange zest, spices, and black tea. For the UK, I found a lot about special foods being served at tea, but nothing about the beverage itself. I also found a suspicious number of posts about "Russian tea" all written by people in the US. I knew it wasn't real Russian tea when I saw references to dry lemonade mix and tang. One of the first few links on a Google search gave away that this was really from American church lady cookbooks. I've read enough retro recipe blogs to know that this was most likely true. In desperation, I went to the Twinings of London UK website, and checked out their special holiday blends. I was pleasantly surprised to find a wide variety of flavors, and one was very close to me already. Caramel flavored rooibos tea. ...

Technically this isn't tea, but it intrigued me, so here it is. This is a recipe from India. After seeing all sorts of recipes for chia seeds (and realizing that they are little calorie bombs), I was intrigued to see that there were other seeds used to make drinks. According to the package, 5 grams of these little seeds have 25 calories. That's a big difference from chia. Here's the foundation of our drink. I'll admit, I've had these seeds for over a year before I finally got around to trying this out. Kind of like the allspice berries I used in Armenia's post.  Here's what 5 grams of seeds look like. I have to admit, I really like my food scale. I've learned that our dry measuring cups really don't measure much of anything accurately, so now I weigh out my cereal, my servings of almonds, stuff for recipes sometimes... But anyway, I soaked my seeds in water for 5 minutes.  Don't they look neat with their puffy, white coats? T...

I haven't been feeling well for the last month. Something about late season rains causing widespread mold (especially in farm fields), and me having a mold allergy. After a lot of prescription and over the counter medications, a sinus infection, and a lot of house cleaning, I'm feeling better. While I have a couple of blog posts started, they are not finished, so have a cup of raspberry green tea for this week, and I'll be back with more international tea posts next week. I love this tea for tasting like a cup of summer. I also think that it is beautiful while it is brewing.