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Grandma’s Tea

June 10, 2016 By Deanna Piercy 4 Comments

If you know me at all you no doubt realize that I’m crazy about tea. My grandmother is responsible for this. She gave me my first sips of sweet tea in my bottle at about six months of age thereby curing me of an intestinal illness that had my mother frantic with worry.

 Grandma's Iced Tea

Obviously I don’t remember that first taste in my baby bottle but I do have early memories of drinking Grandma’s iced tea. This will probably sound really strange unless you grew up in my family but all of Grandma’s grandchildren drank what we referred to as “tea milk”. In an effort to get us to drink our milk, Grandma mixed it with her super sweet iced tea. As toddlers it was mostly milk but the proportions changed as we got older so that we were eventually just adding a splash of milk to our tea. Well, at least those of us with lactose “issues”.

Yeah, I know. But think about it. It’s not considered weird to add milk to hot tea – that’s the British way – so it really shouldn’t be such a stretch to add it to iced. The key is that the iced tea needs to be very sweet and properly prepared. Don’t even think about putting it in instant tea. (You don’t drink that nasty stuff anyway, do you?)

Amongst my fondest childhood memories were early mornings after spending the night at my grandparents’ house. Our backyards adjoined so this was something I got to do pretty often, usually with my cousin who lived next door. Sue and I were best friends and loved to have sleep-overs. When we got up, Grandma would fix us cups of hot tea served in Melmac cups (and saucers). Sometimes we sipped our tea at the table but if it was a chilly morning we would sit on the floor in front of the wall furnace.

I don’t know where the saying came from but as Grandma handed us our cups of tea she would tell us to “soak awhile”. I’ve never heard this from anyone else but we understood it to mean that we were to sit quietly and sip our tea, taking our time to fully awaken. To this day, that’s my preferred morning routine.

Grandma’s Sweet Tea
 
  1. Fill a small saucepan with fresh, cold tap water. Grandma had a tea-stained aluminum saucepan which was her dedicated tea pan. The lid had been missing as far back as I can remember so she used a small plate on top when steeping the tea.
  2. Bring to a full boil, remove from heat and add approximately 1/4 cup loose leaf tea. Grandma used nothing but Lipton’s.
  3. Cover pan and allow to steep about 5 minutes.
  4. Meanwhile, fill 2 quart glass pitcher about 1/3 full of cold water and add sugar. Grandma used a LOT. Probably a cup and a half. Stir.
  5. After tea has finished steeping, strain into pitcher, stir and fill the rest of way with cold water.
  6. Pour over ice and serve as is, with lemon, or if you’re one of her grandkids, milk.

I still use this basic method although I use far less sugar these days and I usually use 6 teabags rather than loose leaf. However, I have to admit that loose leaf is better. I also use organic tea (affiliate link) rather than Lipton’s.

Grandma’s Hot Tea
  1. Fill tea kettle with tap water and bring to a full boil.
  2. Pour over tea bag in cup.
  3. Add sugar to taste. (1-3 teaspoons generally, depending on taste and size of cup)
  4. Steep about three minutes and remove tea bag.
  5. Pour in a little milk.
  6. Soak awhile and enjoy!

 

Grandma's Iced Tea

 

This is the tea I use:

Choice Organic Tea

Disclosure: This is an affiliate link.                  

If you purchase via this link, I receive a small portion of the purchase price. Thank you for supporting Life With Dee. 

Filed Under: Dee's Kitchen, Dee's Life, Friends and Family, Memory Lane Monday, Recipes Tagged With: Grandma, hot tea, iced tea, Lipton's, Memory Lane Monday, sweet tea

A Day in the Kitchen

November 19, 2011 By Deanna Piercy 3 Comments

I’ve been meaning to bake bread for ages. I got lazy over the summer and bought bread from the little organic bakery not far from us or sometimes from the grocery store (although I made sure it had no trans-fats or HFCS). Still, neither of these options are as satisfying as my own homemade bread. I’m determined to get back into the habit of baking all of our bread.

Bread baking is a somewhat messy task and while the process doesn’t take continuous hands-on attention, it does require a couple of  hours total. I decided that as long as I was going to be tied up that long, I might as well work in some other kitchen tasks as well.

I started by making a pitcher of iced tea. I’ve heard that people in other parts of the country do not *get* the concept of iced tea during cool weather but here in the South, it’s a year-round thing.

Iced tea

Then I started a batch of yogurt. I make all of our yogurt. It’s so easy with a yogurt maker:

Making yogurt

Next up: Laundry soap. I pour boiling water over several soap nuts and allow to soak several hours. I then strain out the nuts and pour the liquid in an old Perrier bottle which I then keep in the fridge.

Making soap nut liquid laundry soap

Below is a picture of my bread-making equipment. I grind wheat into fresh flour and then use the Bosch to mix up enough dough for 5 large loaves of bread. Oh, by the way, it’s VERY important to make sure that the lid is securely fastened on the container which receives the flour via the grinder. Very important. And it’s also important not to turn off the grinder with wheat still in it because you’ve failed to fasten the lid and flour is going everywhere. This will jam the grinder and trip the little breaker-thingy thus shutting off the machine and making one think that an expensive piece of equipment may be ruined. Fortunately, after 10 minutes or so of digging out impacted flour and restarting several times, it finally cleared and began to work properly again. Whew!

Grinding the wheat

I keep my bread recipes handy by taping them inside one of the cabinets in the baking center. The one on the left is my regular wheat bread recipe like I made today. The one on the right is for sourdough. However, I let my sourdough starter dry up in the refrigerator so I’ll have to start a new one.

Bread recipes

While the bread was rising I made chocolate chip cookies:

Chocolate chip cookies

And then baked the bread:

Homemade bread

You have no idea how marvelous my house smelled! For dinner I steamed artichokes as a first course and then we had bowls of fresh green beans and new potatoes. Then we each had a slice of the fresh bread with butter and some of my strawberry preserves. It was all so delicious.

But there were a few dishes:

Dishes!

And that’s why we deserved cookies and hot tea after the kitchen was clean.

 

Filed Under: Dee's Kitchen, In My Kitchen Tagged With: cookies, homemade bread, iced tea, soap nuts, Thankful November, yogurt

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I’m Dee, a Francophile with a hippie heart, trying to create a beautiful life in the country while dreaming of Paris. Click here to read more.

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