You put what in the tea? (again)

Today's post is a bit late. I went to the grocery store this morning (first time in 3 weeks). The good news is that there was food. There was also a little TP left, along with paper towels, and several bottles of dish soap. Liquid hand soap, rubbing alcohol, regular hand sanitizer, hydrogen peroxide, and sanitizing wipes/sprays were still nowhere to be seen. There were little bottles of 80% alcohol from a local distillery that were being hawked as hand sanitizer. It was just plain alcohol being sold at double the price... The pictures on my stored post were also gone, so like last week, I had to go in and add them back, so the formatting is a bit wonky again.

I got this recipe for tea in the British Virgin Islands from an advertisement. It wasn't an advertisement for tea, rather an advertisement for soy sauce. Yes, you read that right. I was a little skeptical myself, but decided to give it a try.

Here are the ingredients. Earl grey tea, ginger, lemon peel (and lemon juice), and tamari because I had it instead of soy sauce (and they are rather similar).

So I start by simmering ginger and lemon peel in some water.

Then I added the tea leaves and a few shakes of tamari. It had an interesting smell.

This was also supposed to have honey in it. I'm staying away from sugars, so no honey here. It also talks about serving this iced. It is still cold here, and I didn't feel like putting that much work into this drink. I did add the lemon juice per instructions, and took a sniff. Odd. I took a sip.

It mostly tasted of ginger. I did notice a strange undertone in the flavor, and a few minutes after tasting it, I had the urge to eat something just to take the taste out of my mouth. I don't know if this was a common way to drink tea, or if it is more of one of those recipes that people see in ads and roll their eyes at.

The territory consists of 4 large islands, and 32 smaller islands in the northern part of the Greater Antilles island chain. The pictures of tropical island paradise are so enticing given my current state of being cooped up in the house. I'm not particularly worried about getting COVID-19 from going for a walk, but it is allergy and asthma season for me, and I have a more acute reason why I would not be able to breathe well if I went outside. Sigh. The islands are actually stated to be in a subtropical climate, but I live in a place that had ice quakes that time when it rained, then the temperature went down to -20F. While I didn't feel the shaking (a friend who lived in a trailer said everything was falling down constantly when the ice quakes were going on), I did hear them. I thought they were gunshots in the distance. I live in the country, so loud sounds like that don't startle me.

Anyway, back to topic. Instead of ice quakes, they do have some occasional light earthquakes. Fresh water is in great shortage on the islands, and most buildings have ways of catching rain water for future use. They have an interesting collection of plants listed for the islands - mangoes, coconut palms, breadfruit trees, along with acacia trees (whoa, they grow outside of Africa?!), I'm most interested in the cacao and wild orchid plants.

Their main industry is tourism, which I'm sure is making for hard times right now. About half of their economy is based on tourism. There is some agriculture on the island. It is described as including a lot of livestock, and food for local use. They do grow sugarcane there contributing to exported goods. Apparently they have a large off shore finance industry as well. Hopefully that will be enough to help everyone there get by until tourism picks up again.