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Needed something to pick me up this afternoon, so zingy Electric Lemon it is!
I followed the instructions and brewed it at 82 degrees, but that always throws me off, because I’m used to letting my tea sit before I drink it, and if I let this sit it becomes too cold to drink!
I think I’m getting sick~ (I’m a little sniffy, anyways), so this lemon green tea with lemon honey in it should absolutely do the trick.
Smells good (not like NeoCitran) and lemony, obviously. Brews up a really nice almost tan colour. Like a sage olivey beige. I wouldn’t mind having some egyptian cotton sheets this colour.
I always forget there’s ginger in here until I taste it. You can’t really smell it, but when you sip, it just bites the sides of your tongue! Nice and warming. Like a hot water bottle for my mouth.
But tastier than a hot water bottle, of course.
Yum!

Every time I go to David’s, I intend to buy this tea.
And I usually walk away with something else and regret it when I get home.
Today I went for Forever Nuts. They were out, so I requested Goji Pop. They were out.
SO the stars finally aligned for my favourite spicy treat: Cinnamon Rooibos Chai!
The smell of the cinnamon is like an assault to the face; a slap to the sinuses. This, of course, is absolutely a good thing.
This is only the second time I’m brewing it without having little floaties in it, because none of my steeping balls were fine enough to trap the tiny little shards of rooibos. The T-Sac disposable tea bags sure are though!
Looking out the window, eve in the dark I can see the branches of my weeping birch whipping back and forth more horizontal than they have any right to be; it’s a blizzard, you see. They told us all yesterday and today that it was coming, but it was so beautiful and temperate and WINDLESS today that I didn’t buy it. Shut my mouth for sure.
So I’m expecially thankful that I have this cinnamon-infused delight in my cup tonight. I would be ultra-disappointed had I been left to the more springy- and summery-tasting teas in my cupboard.
The cinnamon makes you feel as good as cinnamon gum or cinnamon candies~. It’s warming and comforting and delicious and it smacks your mouth awake. So, so right for right now.
Thank you, Tea Gods, for having me pick up some Cinnamon Rooibos Chai today.
~ Or, rather, as good as they USED to make me feel. I over-over-over-indulged as a girl and now whenever I try to enjoy something synthetic with cinnamon in it, I wind up with strips pulling off the inside of my mouth and along my tongue like a hundred disgusting little hairs. It’s truly awful. Especially considering how much I love cinnamon gum.

I can smell this tea from across the dining room table that I currently call my office. Baked apples were a frequent treat in my childhood home (core the apple, toss some butter, brown sugar and cinnamon in the hole, nuke it for however long), and this smells EXACTLY the same, down to the buttery tones.
I’m always surprised by how clear this tea winds up steeping, even though I pretty much doubled the dosage to nearly 1tbsp and steeped it for the top end of the suggestion (7 minutes).
Ooh, that’ll do. You can taste the spices almost individually. And they stay powery on your tongue in the aftertaste. Steeping this one stupid-heavy makes it very, very nice.
Me likey!

Time for an afternoon treat!
This tea smells like the Jelly Belly brand buttered popcorn jellybeans (which I LOVE), and doesn’t really require much sugar or milk. I put in too much milk today, but whatevs, eh?
The butteriness is almost like a feeling in your mouth as much as it is a smell, but it isn’t so much a taste.
I can’t discern coconut at all, but it’s probably hiding with some other flavour, all coy and sneaky.
I can totally see dumping some Captain Morgan Special Reserve in here, but not while I’m working. That’s for later.

I bought this for my Swampwater-addicted daughter so that we could share a cup of tea in the afternoon or at bedtime. Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to like it all that much at first, so I’m experimenting with how to make it taste more delicious.
We’re trying it today with no milk, just a little bit of sugar.
Full disclosure: I do not like papaya. Like, not even a little bit. It’s not quite down there with cilantro, but it’s pretty low on my list of likes.
The smell is friendly enough. The papaya is there, but it’s really low. I’m getting a delicious candied fruit vibe from this tea.
Ooooh, wow, I put way too much sugar in here!
But it’s delicious.
The fruitiness is almost like a mouthful of grapes, strawberries, apples or some other juicy fruit. (Not specifically those flavours, just the feeling each of them evoke.)
I’m sure this would be tasty iced, but I’m glad I’m drinking it hot. The juiciness is kind of cooling with a very warm after-effect. Quite nice. I’m thinking my problem the first time was steeping it at the higher end of the recommended range. The low end leaves me with a lovely tea; not overpowering like the last one tended to be.
I think I’ll brew this up for my toddler to enjoy while I’m preparing her dinner. (My dinner is a lovely dinner out at a simple italian restaurant here called Dacquisto, to be preceeded by appliance shopping with the husband. First date night since dinner and White Christmas at Manitoba Theater Centre just before Christmas! Woo!)

Feeling pretty pretty this evening, and didn’t want to pull out any of the usual suspects, so I dug deep and found this hiding in my Summer Collection box. (It isn’t part of the Summer Collection, but I drank most of those teas down to nothing and the box makes for good storage.)
The tea itself smells like those containers of sugared dried fruit that I can eat in one sitting. (Yeah, we’re talking the enormous 2L Archer Farms container. I loves me some sugared dried fruit.) And in the BREWED tea, I usually don’t smell much of anything but the fruit, but tonight I’m getting an amazing push of marzipan! It’s so potent that I can feel the grainy, clutching texture of the almond paste in my empty mouth. It is really quite nice.
I’m worried I’m going to be disappointed by the flavour. I dumped in a little bit of whole milk (it’s so nice having a toddler around; you have a great excues to buy the 2L boxes of whole milk!), but no sugar. UNFORTUNATELY, while it was steeping I also dumped two freshly-made peanut crisp cookies in my mouth. Those cookies involve 1 cup of flour and 1.25 cups of brown sugar, so all of the sweetness of the tea might be spoiled by the sweetness already in my mouth. We’ll see. Fingers crossed.
Mmmmm, no. No, it’s good.
The lack of sugar lets me taste the actual TEA in this tea. It just tastes like a really excellent, lightly sweet black tea. The ingredients list just says “black tea”, so I don’t know what kind of black tea this is, but more disturbingly, I can’t find this tea on the David’s Tea website.
What the living will? WAS THIS TEA DISCONTINUED??
Well, nuts to soup. Now I’ll have to hoard it.

Sitting here getting ready to work, watching videos I shouldn’t be~ (the leaked 17 minute 9/11 video shot from a helecopter that shows footage of the towers complete with real-time videographer reactions), I decided to cheer myself up with some Cocomama Lime with a touch or so of lemon honey in my World’s Best Mom mug.
Smells limey and coconutty enough! More like a summer drink than a spring drink. Something you’d ask for in broken spanish at a swim-up bar in the Mayan Riveria. It feels like I should be tossing some long island iced tea mix in there. Maybe a little cheer-up paper umbrella or a slice of lime on a little plastic sword. It certainly wouldn’t hurt!
Even though I’m trying to chase away a chill that started this morning, it’s almost disappointing that this tea is hot. Don’t get me wrong, it’s DELICIOUS hot, but I want it to be in a sweaty tumbler and hear the tinkle of ice clinking against glass and ice. I will certainly try this iced later on in the week when the temperature is supposed to venture into the more moderate just-below-freezing point instead of the morale-crunching -27 degrees I woke up to.
The honey brings out the body and sweetness of the coconut, but the lime is really the star of this tea. It sneaks in and runs through sprinklers in your mouth; it invites its friends over for an impromptu back-yard hot dog BBQ pool party when it is still FAR too cold to be semi-naked outdoors; it goes on slurpee runs when all of the short-order cooks are having difficulty coping with the increased levels of heat and humidity and could really use an icy treat~~.
A little bit fun, a little bit bad, a whole lot of good.

~I don’t know why I do it; am perpetually upsetting myself by seeing things I can’t un-see. It started in high school and just hasn’t gotten any better. Some kind of psychological auto-masochisma.
~~When I worked at Applebee’s and Chili’s, the most popular person/manager of the day would offer to run to 7-Eleven during a break or between split shifts and pick up slurpees for everyone once it got too hot outside to feel good about working for 12-16 hours over a deep-fryer or flat-top grill.

Snuggle up, kiddies. It’s storytime.
When I lived in Whitehorse, Yukon, there was a coffee place called Midnight Sun Coffee Roasters. I didn’t care much for their lattes or their coffee, what with working pretty much full time at a very large competitor, but they had one option on their menu: the Chocolate Chai. I think it was either a chai latte made with steamed chocolate milk, or just regular milk with chocolate syrup, but MAN, OH, MAN, I could slam those things back.
One morning, on my way to work, there were a lot of sirens, a lot of smoke and a lot of flickering orange light coming from the vicinity of Midnight Sun*. The second-hand furniture store it was attached to had had an electrical shortage and the whole building burnt to the ground. The joke at my work became that their only blend of coffee after that was House Blend. Ha ha.
A lot of people asked me, jokingly, if I was the arsonist.
Absolutely not! I was a certifiable Chocolate Chai addict!
And I tell you what: there was absolutely no recreating that beverage at my coffee shop. No, sir.
It was something special to Midnight Sun Coffee Roasters and Midnight Sun Coffee Roasters alone…
Until now.
The smell coming off of Chocolate Chili Chai is almost EXACTLY the smell that you’d get off of that perfection of a beverage. But with something a little zingy, a little bit stingy. A tiny aspect of danger in the nose. Chili! Who would have thought that you could take this ambrosia and include one simple unusual spice and make it so much better! I’m desperate to make this with steamed milk one day, and let it steep for like 10-15 minutes. Then I’ll froth the living daylights out of it and hide in my garden shed where people will only be able to find me by following the sound of Mmm… mmm… mmm…

Made 2lbs of salt water taffy this week. Gave 1lb to my grandpa for his 80th birthday. The other 1lb is quickly being reduced to nothing from its bowl in my kitchen.
So today? It’s The Skinny. (Or, en français, La Svelte, which I prefer quite a bit!)
With the taste of root beer, vanilla and peppermint taffy (read: sugar, sugar, sugar) in my mouth like a coating, I feel confident that the gingery KA-BAM of La Svelte will be able to slice through to my tongue, throat and stomach and gently show me the error of my ways.
I hope so, at any rate.
Dude, you know… there’s something about the smell of this tea that makes me think of mop water. This one and Detox both. Maybe it’s the dried ginger? I’m not sure.
I mean, the TASTE certainly isn’t mop-watery at all. It’s just the smell. It’s not like I put the mug to my lips and inhale and go, “Mmm…”
The flavour isn’t amazing, but the AFTERTASTE is where it’s at.
Hot! Ginger! No more taffy for you, greedy little girl!
Okay, La Svelte.
I’ll stop. I promise.
(Now to chug my tea while it’s appropriately hot so it can cut some of the garbage in my tummy!)

An Ode to Goji Pop

Winter has been injudicious in its application of alabaster;
No definition is left between earth and sky.
An endless apocalypse of white on white;
No ocular delight to be taken from the hard black lines of the front street hinterland;
Uniformity pressing its weight against what’s left of the summer soul.
Hard months of cold, dim light, wind, snow, cold, dim light and wind.
Out in the open, air too sharp to enjoy;
Inside has become a fishbowl, which we are forced to endlessly circle.
Hope gutters flame-like, preparing the ghost to be surrendered.

But what is contained in this resplendent, zippered pocket?
An emanation akin to a fanfare;
A phenomenon of festivity in its appearance.
With cautious application of freshly kettled water, winter finds itself cast out!
The world is become an exposition of spring;
A new reality contained in new bone china.
A detonation of honey dew melon;
Marigold filling in as an ersatz sun;
Hibiscus and rose assist one another in revival of a memory of gardens both secret and revealed.
The completeness of the crippling contempt and whiteness of the season is dashed when viewed through rose-coloured tisane.
The cold will break;
The snow will disperse;
The wind will be put to better use bearing ribboned kites aloft.

Spring will come as it always has.