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.

Guess what I found! Fresh turmeric! If you look closely, the piece on the right has an "eye" growing on it. That means that my ginger plant is going to have a friend (provided I'm able to grow this piece of turmeric). According to the internet, I'm going to need a larger flower pot than what I have, and this is the wrong time of year to find large flower pots. I started it in the largest pot I have, and will deal with finding a bigger container when I need to. Hi ginger plant. Look how big it's getting! Apparently both types of plants are rather slow growing, and the fall/winter is not the optimal time to try to grow these, but I'm limited to availability, and the fall is when I found suitable rhizomes with "eyes". Heaven knows that I could use a little bit of the tropics during winter, and growing tropical plants is the closest I could feasibly get to somewhere tropical. I got both my ginger and turmeric at the local organic food ...

Today we travel to south central Asia. Bangladesh  is in the northeast of the Indian sub-continent. It is mostly bordered by India with a small border along Myanmar. It is a small country with seasonal floods. Their wildlife includes elephants, Bengal tigers, common leopards, cloud leopards, leopard cats, bears, mongoose, monkeys, and many varieties of birds. Bangladesh also has a very dense human population, and those humans like tea. The video I found about how to make tea in Bangladesh shows that they set themselves apart. We have the usual ingredients: water, milk, tea, cardamom... ... and an egg. Specifically, an egg yolk.  Nothing like a tea recipe with the potential of little bits of scrambled egg in it. I took my whisking seriously. Instead of using cardamom pods, I used ground cardamom and bagged black tea because I was afraid of what I would find if I strained the tea. In addition to what I used, sugar is a popular addition, and I was trying to fig...

Today we travel to Israel, a country somewhat secretive about their tea. I know that herbal teas are preferred (sometimes dried fruit is included), and that they sometimes add black tea to their herbal blends. However, I do not know what combinations of herbs and dried fruits are preferred. Prime among the tea influences in the region are Morocco and Persia. One resource recommended black tea with cardamom to start, but they also said it was one of the less popular flavors in the region. Spearmint was said to be very popular, along with mint, sage, lemongrass, lemon verbena, wormwood, and hibiscus with cinnamon. Another resource I looked at said that mint tea with lemon salt was popular. That of course leads me to the question of what exactly lemon salt is. The internet had 2 very different answers. One is that it is citric acid - commonly added to food as a preservative and vitamin C. The other is that it is salt that has been aged with lemon rinds so it picks up a lemony flavor. I...