Sunday, January 18, 2009

The delights of tea....

I am a creature of habit, it is true. Being a Brit, I adore my tea but always with white sugar and milk. I'll admit, sometimes I mix it up a bit and switch out the soy milk for rice milk and once I even used the the last dribble of Silk EgglessNog (or whatever it's called) in my early morning cuppa. It made the drink super sweet, but not altogether unpleasant now that I think about it.....Hmmmm.....

Anyways, My Beloved and I were in NoHo this weekend having brunch at our favourite little place, the Green Bean. We'd taken the boys (bundled up in multiple fleecy coats against the sub-zero temperatures) to the forest for a run and felt righteously entitled to a big brunch. Well, that was my excuse anyhow....So ambulating around the town after lunch, and not wanting to admit defeat in the face of windchills around -15 degrees celsius and run home to sit in front of a roaring fire, we went into one of the cooks' shops and I discovered tea. This tea, in fact:



It's called Caribbean Breezes and it was the smell that initially stopped me dead in my tracks - a beautifully sweet yet tangy mix of hibiscus and coconut. I was instantly transported back to the islands, out of the cold and into tropical temps - I just HAD to buy some!

So this afternoon as I did some baking - a top secret project that I dare not discuss right now lest 'someone' read this entry (all will be revealed later) - I brewed up my first pot.




It made 3 cups of a garnet-coloured ambrosia and I enjoyed each one - fantastic!! A touch of agave nectar in place of the refined white sugar sweetened it delightfully and actually making a pot instead of throwing a teabag in a mug lent the whole affaire an element of civility on this frigid, hard-scrabble Sunday afternoon in arctic-blasted New England.




Stay warm...and vegan...friends! :)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh man, I LOVE LOVE LOVE tea!! You know, before I went vegan..I always had my breakfast tea English style (with milk and sugar). Then I caught a summer cold and tried out my morning tea without any milk (since with a head cold, the last thing I wanted was dairy). I really liked it - I still sweeten, but I don't feel the need for my go-to hemp milk. But that tea sounds so delicious! I love using hibiscus in making teas - typically I'll put it in combo with apples and rose buds (I need to go ahead and post the recipe I have stashed away) for a sun tea. I love the idea of coconut!! I feel an experiment coming on!!

Anonymous said...

Hey Sara!

Please, please post your recipe as I am dying to try it out! Yum!!!

Anonymous said...

Hey Amanda..don't know if you saw it, but I posted the Apple-Berry sun tea the other day - I forgot to let you know when I posted it, but I suppose better late than never huh ;) If you test it out, let me know what you think!