Cinnamon Spice Masala Chai

I decided to start with the tea that everyone associates with India. Masala chai. The ingredients are listed as black tea and cardamom. That's it. Pretty simple. The black tea looks like the black tea I bought at the Indian grocery store, and the cardamom looks like cardamom. It's kind of surprising that this box of tea was so cheap given the fact that cardamom pods are expensive in this country. Granted, it could be cheaper in other parts of the world.

I don't have any liquid dairy in the house, so I have to drink it straight. Aldi only sells cream in giant containers now, and coconut cream has too much of a flavor of its own to use effectively in tea. Some of the other grocery stores sell cream in smaller containers, but they are usually within a week of expiration, and I don't really use that much. So, it's straight up tea for me. As you can see in the picture, I decided to brew by the cup instead of a full teapot of what I'm jumping into. It smelled strongly of cardamom, but I was guarded. The finished tea was actually pretty good. I have continued to drink this tea. I even brewed some this morning because I realized that I forgot to take a picture of it when I originally tried it 3 weeks ago.

Taking a risk on discount tea seems to have worked out, at least for this flavor. Now to go do all of the adulting crap. I haven't had time to work on art or lace this week, but a friend did find me a used 2 drawer file cabinet on the cheap for me. They picked it up in secret, and hauled it up the stairs for me (there was a dolly involved). They did this on the day that my new refrigerator was delivered. They were really glad that they didn't have to haul the old refrigerator down the stairs or the new one up the stairs.

The old refrigerator was 26 years old. According to my friend, it was the oldest refrigerator the delivery men had ever seen. They had heard of RCA brand refrigerators, but they had never seen one until then. The old one was acting strange in the days before it left. I put some water bottles in the freezer to have extra ice for the switchover. When I checked them 10 or so hours later, all but one of them was frozen. Then I found that some extra tea that I had put in the refrigerator had a chunk of ice floating in it from getting too cold in the warmer compartment of the appliance... This one is much quieter than my last one. It's also bigger as you could probably guess from the picture. Why do they keep changing the "standard" size for appliances? Is this a back door way to make people remodel their kitchens because they can't find appliances to fit the spaces where they go?