Kombucha! or Kombu-what?

Tea is our ingredient of the season this winter. While we love a traditional cup of tea, we also enjoy spicing it up with a masala chai and adding rose petals for a floral touch.

Kombucha seems to be a drink that can divide a crowd. People either love it or hate it. Sarah and I are strongly in the love camp! I drank my first bottle about a decade ago, knowing nothing about it, but being drawn in by the cute bottle (and wanting to taste anything named “Wonder Drink”!). The flavor of that first bottle was odd, yet addicting, and ever since I’ve loved trying new flavors and brand.

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Fast forward all these years, imagine my delight when I was biking down the bike path in Boulder and sidewalk chalk signs pointing me toward’s Rowdy Mermaid‘s kombucha taproom! During Sarah’s first visit to Boulder, we stopped in to sample the goods. Fast forward a year, and during another of Sarah’s visits, we were introduced to Upstart Kombucha while walking down Pearl Street. We’re partial to Upstart’s rose bud variety, but will take any bottle in a pinch!  Needless to say, kombucha culture (haha!) is going strong here in Boulder. We’re lucky to have some many local brands at our fingertips and love them all! Even so, we couldn’t help but get in on the DIY kombucha craze, and the nudge to do so came when our mama gave us this book for Christmas. 

The internet is full of information about kombucha, including many sites and youtube videos that walk you through the process of making a batch at home. Consider this post an introduction to kombucha and a starter brewing guide. If you have questions and/or comments, please get in touch!

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Tea-Infused Vodka

Tea is our ingredient of the season this winter. Looking for another cocktail with tea? Check out our Garden Gin. And want to experiment with more infused vodkas? We love this hazelnut liqueur and this rosemary vodka.

Today we’re here to provide a warning : tea-infused vodka may be an acquired taste… and we haven’t quite acquired it yet, but we’re trying (I’m drinking some as I type!). On a scale of 1 to 10, we’re giving this one an “ehh”.

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So, the idea is simple, take some vodka, add some tea, let it sit, then strain, and then make a cocktail. But for how simple it is, and for how much we love tea and vodka, somehow we aren’t loving the results. And this isn’t some crazy idea schemed up by us, Absolut sells a tea-flavored vodka!

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Garden Gin

Tea is our ingredient of the season this winter. We’re using that as an excuse to sit down more often and relax over a cuppa’. Check out the entire tea archiveThis post, in particular, is another one that calls for the use of Earl Grey (in ice cream sandwiches!).

I can’t believe that it took us two months to combine tea and alcohol, but the day is finally here! Today we’re sharing our take on this delicious cocktail from Sugar & Charm. As you’ll see, this drink is a complex mix of a variety of botanical flavors. The Earl Grey tea provides a dark tannin-filled foundation, and then it’s layered with lavender, lime juice, and just a hint of citrus, both from the tea and a sliver of zest. Honey adds just a touch of sweetness. Needless to say, this drink is far from the Long Island Iced Teas we all had one too many of in college.

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I mentioned that the drink gets a hint of citrus from the Earl Grey tea. Traditionally, Earl Grey is a black tea that is scented with the addition of bergamot essential oil. The bergamot orange is an extremely sour fruit with a rind the color of lemons. It is not considered edible, but with the addition of sugar can be turned into marmalade. Earl Grey tea was first produced in England in the early 1800s in an attempt to reproduce the flavors of more expensive Chinese teas. Perhaps surprisingly, combining gin and Earl Grey, as we do below, is not a unique idea. Although it’s not as fashionable today, it was common throughout the UK, particularly in the late 1800s.

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Rose Tea

Tea is our ingredient of the season this winter. We’re using that as an excuse to sit down more often and relax over a cuppa’. If you’re looking for another way to spice up your black tea, check out our masala chai. Click here for our archive of Valentine DIYs.

Hey there, thinking about surprising your Valentine with breakfast in bed and a side of tea? No? How about just surprising him/her with an afternoon cup of tea? Either way, we have an idea for making that Valentine’s Day cup extra special ~ add some dried rose petals.

liveseasoned_winter2015_rosetea1-1024x768 copyDoesn’t that look beautiful? Think about letting your sweetheart add the dried tea and petals to the boiled water themselves, that way they can see the delicate pink petals before they go in the kettle and lose their color. #itsthelittlethings

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The rose petals will add a light floral aroma and flavor to any variety of tea. I prefer a black base, but this would also go well with the lighter flavor of a white tea.

All rose petals are edible, but not all are created/tended equally; be sure to purchase dried rose petals that were grown and processed without any pesticides or additional chemicals.

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So simple, but so sweet for your special someone on Valentine’s Day.

Masala Chai

Tea is our ingredient of the season this winter. We’re using that as an excuse to sit down more often and relax over a cuppa’. Also, if you find my talk of spices interesting, you may like this post where I use a karha mix to spice up our pumpkin popsicles.

I was stumbling over my computer keys this afternoon while starting this post because I keep wanting to just write chai, but I know that’s not correct, so let’s get some vocabulary out of the way and then get on with this post.

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Chai is the word for tea in India. Masala means spiced or spice mix. So technically, when we Americans are drinking a “chai”, we’re really drinking a masala chai, a spiced black tea, not just a tea. Somewhere along the way we shorted masala chai to chai, and so I’ll stick with that abbreviation throughout this post, even though I’m focusing here on the masala. Or is it the karha?…

There’s nothing I like more than a warm cup of chai in my hands on a chilly winter afternoon. In the past I’ve always purchased either the concentrated liquid chai from the grocery store or tea shop’s chai blend for brewing. Today I want to share a beautifully simple and delicious chai recipe that you can use as the base for personalizing your cup of tea.

Traditional Karha

Another new word: karha. It’s the name for the spice blend used for making the masala chai. Traditionally, the karha begins with a combination of warming spices. This is commonly cardamom with some ginger, cloves, cinnamon, star anise, or nutmeg; all spices that we are familiar with when baking. In addition to those spices, some karha may include black pepper, fennel seeds, or coriander. You can also add spices like tumeric for their medicinal value. And those lists are not exhaustive, if there’s a spice you like, it’s fair game!

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to the spice mixture. In India, the karha varies by region and even by the time of year. And likewise, outside of India, different regions of the world add different spices to their tea depending upon a region’s access to different spices and its palette.

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Three Champagne and Shrub Cocktails for New Year’s Eve

_DSC1436Happy New Year’s friends!  This morning we took a few minutes from our hectic, kid-wrangling schedule to create some quick and delicious shrub and champagne cocktails.  Shrub is pretty much our favorite mixer and champagne is hands down the alcoholic bevy of New Year’s so boom – this post was born.  If you’re having a dry New Year’s, no worries, just swap out the champagne for seltzer and ignore the liquor suggestions or stir up some of these delicious mocktails instead!  If you’re down to drink, read on!

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Tasting Teas : Pu’er Tea with Dried Orange Peel

Tea is our ingredient of the season this winter. We’re using that as an excuse to do a lot of tasting and to share our finds with you. Also, if you like orange-y things,  it was our ingredient of the season last winter!

When Sarah was in town last week, we made it a point to visit Boulder’s Ku Cha House of Tea. We’re excited to tell you more about the shop and its tea house in another post, today I wanted to share some photos and details about the Pu’er tea in a dried tangerine that we took home for our afternoon tea.

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To make this specialty a fermented tea is stuffed into the whole rind or mandarins or tangerines. The stuffed fruit is then left to dry, allowing the tea to absorbs the light citrus aroma. The tea leaves can be brewed alone or with broken pieces of the dried tangerine peel, thereby amplifying the citrus flavor.

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Ingredient of the Season : Tea

Every season we like to pick one ingredient and find a variety of ways to love it and use it. You can find our complete ingredient archive here.

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When Sarah and I were thinking about the long, dark, and cozy winter still ahead, we decided that tea would be the perfect ingredient to carry us through to spring. We’ve always been big tea fans, granted our tea selection can get a bit boring (Sarah has her favorite and I have mine), but we’re hoping that during our “winter of tea” we will learn more about teas, sample new varieties, and even discover new ways to incorporate tea into our lives through baking, cosmetics, and crafts. We’re also excited to use this selection as an excuse to spend more time in our local tea shops, maybe pop into Celestial Seasonings’ factory for another tour, and visit at least one tea house for a ceremony.

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Holiday Drinks

Happy Thanksgiving stateside friends!  No matter where you’re reading from, these delicious wintery drinks will be cause for celebration.  Gather your friends and family (or your cat) and start mixin’.

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Homemade Pumpkin Spice Latte

Pumpkin is our ingredient of the season. Today’s recipe is great for using up those last bits of pumpkin (just like this face mask potion!) when other recipes call for less than a full can.

We’re officially halfway through the fall season here on the blog, so it’s about time that we started crafting our own pumpkin spice lattes! Of course, in order to write this post, I had to do a little bit of research last week, stopping at Starbucks to taste the original before experimenting at home. Such. hard. work.

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The PSL syrup recipe I used is directly from A Beautiful Mess (hi there, we <3 you!). I just modified it slightly by halving all ingredients and upping the ratio of brown to granulated sugar. I made half a batch because I was worried about having more than I could finish, but fortunately, these are so good that I’ll have no trouble finishing the jar.

**Our dear friend Nicole provides a low-sugar version in the comments. Check it out!

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