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This is the final tea for this month’s sipdown challenge for me as I don’t own any yerba mate that I can recall. So a tropical tea, it is! And it is an actual sipdown – hurray!

It has been cloudy and fairly dark all day as the fringes of Tropical Storm Ian approach. It is a but windy but nothing spectacular, but still we must make preparations. I have made a big pot of soup and have filled several carafes from the water purifier and continue to filter in case flooding should take out water lines again. Honestly I think this is going to be a non-event for us, but it is best to prepare. That includes eating a lot. I mean, what if the power went out? Truly, I do not snack like this in the afternoons usually! We will not discuss evenings.

So my afternoon snack was Parle-G cookies, homemade cardamom and cinnamon frozen yogurt with graham cracker bits, and a small pot of this tea. I give these details because the food demonstrated the importance of being mindful in our pairings.

After a few bites of the spiced frozen yogurt, the tea tasted like…almost nothing. The tangy tartness of the yogurt with the lemony warmth of cardamom and rich cinnamon cancelled the tea out almost entirely. I could have been drinking warm water.

After a bite of Parle-G cookies (which taste like not too sweet waffle cone to me, the hard kind and not the styrofoamy kind) the tea was so much better. Now I tasted coconut and most notably, the base took on an extremely smokey flavor. I could hardly believe it was same tea I had sipped moments before.

The remainder of snack time was carefully orchestrated from that point on so that the order was froyo, cookie, ssssmmmokey good tea.