Items
topic_interest is exactly
tea
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2020-04-07
Rediscovering the tastes of my childhood
Some of my earliest memories are of the sights, sounds, and tastes of my grandmother’s kitchen. She passed away almost exactly one year before the stay-at-home order was put in place in Washington State. At that time, I was already an online student working from home and my partner was driving across the state every weekend to work and come back home. When lockdown started, I didn’t realize how cooped up I would feel. I decided I needed to revisit the feelings of my grandmother’s kitchen. Around the same time, my family got a trailer full of boxes of my grandmother’s things. In this box was a handwritten cookbook filled with the recipes and stories from my childhood. There were handwritten letters from my great-grandfather to my grandmother, recipes she had clipped out of newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s, and family recipes I thought were lost when she passed. One of which was a Spiced tea, also known as friendship tea, recipe. For me, this tea is the epitome of Christmas time spent with my grandma. This recipe exists on the internet, but it was never as good as the one my grandmother made. When I found these recipes, I set out on cooking my way through them to pass my time during lockdown. My partner was working remotely so he was home to try them with me. It was an emotional experience for me after the loss of my grandmother and it reminded me how much food can bring people together. This recipe no longer represents Christmas and my grandmother, it now is something that makes me think of lockdown with my own family and how it brought us together. If it wasn’t for the stay-at-home order, I probably wouldn’t have connected to these recipes again and I definitely would never have had to buy tang. The pandemic has brought a greater connection to history and sensory history. The pandemic has also changed the way we experience our senses and even changed those senses for some people. Sensory history shows how people experienced the world around them during the pandemic. If you try this recipe, don’t be afraid of adding more or less of what you like. I don’t know what measurement a scoop is, but as my grandmother always told me, we don’t measure to be perfect we measure with our hearts. My best guess is that there are about 2 tablespoons in a “scoop”. Ginther’s Spice Tea 1 ½ cup Tang 6 scoops lemonade ½ cup instant tea ½ cup sugar ½ teaspoon cloves (or fresh whole cloves) 1 tablespoon cinnamon (or fresh sticks) Combine the above ingredients. Add 2 Tablespoons of mix per cup of hot water. -
2020-12-01
Tea Time Together
I am very close with my mom, and used to regularly visit my grandmother, but I moved across the country right before Covid-19 and was unable to visit this year. I was feeling extremely homesick during the fall, as my grandmother and I have birthdays near each other and usually celebrate together but we were unable to do so this year. While my grandmother and I did send letters and cards to each other and I facetime with my mom fairly often, I was still experiencing a feeling of loss and a lack of connection. To bring us together, my mom proposed that the three of us all use the same tea advent calendar to celebrate the holidays. We all got the same mug, the same tea set, and spent the month of December enjoying tea from three different places, which allowed us to feel a sense of togetherness, even when we are apart. -
2021-01-16
Becoming Boba Experts
One of our family’s favorite treats is boba and in our area, boba shops are as ubiquitous as Starbucks. Even though transmission of COVID through food is seen as a minimal risk, the process of going into a tiny boba shop to order and wait doesn’t seem worth the risk for an item that is not really essential. After years of vowing to never make boba at home (too much stirring), my husband caved in and ordered instant boba online. We were skeptical - would it really taste as good as the boba shops? Would the texture be right? Making it is a little time consuming, but we were surprised that the taste and texture are exactly right, even at home. My husband, who has always liked brewing different loose leaf teas, has gotten much more into perfecting the “perfect tea.” He has had a fun time experimenting with different teas and sweetness levels, and although I miss the different jellies and other flavors that you can get at a boba shop, I have to admit I am impressed at how easily we were able to conquer making something we never would have attempted without COVID. Added bonus - over the past two plus decades, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the amount of plastic that is wasted with a boba drink (the plastic cups, lids, and giant plastic straws). Even with straws technically outlawed and the growing popularity of reusable boba straws, loopholes and lack of enforcement allowed most people to still use disposable plastic straws and the plastic cups and lids. When we make boba at home, there is no plastic involved, nothing is thrown away, and we use our reusable straws. An upside of COVID will be that it hopefully helps us to make small changes (like making our own boba and tea) to our lives to lessen our carbon footprints.