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.