Nutratea

The oldest, stalest chamomile are always my favourite. Fresh chamomile is just too vegetal for my liking. This teabag was found at the back of my friend’s pantry and is at least several years old. Score!

It made an excellent cup. 300 mL hot water, steeped the teabag 4 minutes. It produced a delicious chamomile flavour with notes of hay/dried grass, bales of straw, lemon, and pollen.

This was a sample from Christina. Thanks Christina!

I enjoyed this tea at work yesterday. I reminded me of Honesuckle which I love too. It has that honey sweetness to it. After reading Christina’s review on this tea , now I will be on a hunt to find this one in whole leaf form. I ran across some on Mountain Rose Herbs.

Another tea from Christina!

It’s actually pretty decent. Nice mild herbal lemonish flavour. Reading her notes, it seems like this would be much better freshly dried and whole, instead of crushed bits in paper… but still! I enjoyed it tonight with the banana bread muffins I made.

http://greatist.com/eat/recipes/baked-banana-bread-doughnuts

I didn’t use walnuts, and I used a gluten free flour blend based on buckwheat. Forgot to add the chocolate chips too. Everybody knows that banana bread needs chocolate chips, not walnuts! ;)

Backlog from a few nights ago.

My mom and my husband like to joke about how much tea I now have (I went from having a few varieties in January to now having enough to warrant a separate goddamned cupboard. :D). So when my mom said a few nights ago that she wanted some tea in the evening, she made the obligatory “gee, do we have any in the house?” snarky comment we all know and love.

I love my mommy, but I have to admit that when she wants tea, I give her the stuff I’m not as fond of, because I know she’ll still be okay with it. (Actually, I fob off the sub-par tean on family members a lot. Ain’t I a stinker?)

We went with this tea a few nights ago because it was late and because I know that linden tea is something my mom’s okay with.

It wasn’t bad, but you really do have to be careful in steeping this – don’t do it for too long or it becomes a cloying, chamomile-ish mess. Much better to let this just get to pale gold in the liquor and then toss the bag.

Backlog from waaaaay last week.

Oh. My. God. Do you have ANY idea how hard it is to find linden tea in Toronto? It’s not in the tea shops. It’s not in the health food stores. It’s not in grocery stores.

The only reason I have this tea is that I decided, on a whim, to go to Honest Ed’s last week. I’m rarely in that part of town, the store is going to be torn down in a few years, and it’s a Toronto landmark and icon. Why not go?

People, they had not one, but two varieties of linden tea there. Granted, it was the cheap bagged stuff, but it will have to considering the relative rarity of linden tea on this side of the Atlantic.

Unfortunately, it’s not the greatest. I’ve tried Harney and Son’s Tilleul, which has gotten nearly universal negative reviews, and this tastes similar. To really get the good authentic linden tea experience, you’ll have to try it with whole leaves and flowers, like my uncle’s family back in Macedonia does – they dry it by hand from the rafters.

Anyways, this will stay in the cupboard out of nostalgia. My mom will probably enjoy the rest of this.