Mint Matcha Latte Recipe

My thanks to Sonoma Syrup for sponsoring this post. I only work with brands I personally use.  Growing up I loved pistachio ice cream, green marzipan covered princess cake, and shamrock shakes from you-know-where. Yes, green was my favorite color. I’m not sure I would have liked matcha as a child, but I certainly like it now. I usually make matcha with just water, but for St. Patrick’s Day I created a minty green matcha drink as a treat. Matcha is a Japanese green tea, ground into a powder. You can easily find matcha powder suitable for recipes at the supermarket nowadays. Matcha can be used in  cookies, ice cream, cakes and more . It has a lot of health benefits including antioxidants and is reported to help protect the liver, boost brain function, may help prevent cancer and even support weight loss . In many recipes matcha is combined with milk, if you combine it with cow's milk the calcium counteracts the absorption of many of the beneficial nutrients and ......

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Masala Chai Recipe

My thanks to  Sonoma Syrup  for sponsoring this post. I only work with brands that I personally believe in and use.  Hot, creamy, spiced, black tea is called masala chai in India. In Hindi chai means tea and masala means a mixture of ground spices. But in the US we often refer to masala chai as chai tea or chai tea latte. During Winter I crave masala chai. I first tried it in an Indian restaurant. It was rich with milk and very, very sweet, then in college, I discovered the pleasure of making it myself. I got the recipe long before the internet, from someone I met at a party. Calling it a recipe might be a stretch, it’s more like general guidelines. Funny that tea is not even mentioned in the recipe! But that ancient scrap of paper is the basis for my recipe, which is a combination of strong black tea and milk, flavored with cardamom, black pepper, cloves, cinnamon, and fresh ginger. I’ve tried many commercial versions of chai, but they often use flavoring......

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Teatulia

With more tea companies popping up everyday, it can be a bit of a blur trying to distinguish one from another, but earlier this year I got a chance to try tea from Teatulia and noted the brightness and freshness of the product. Not long after I met Linda Appel Lipsius, a co-founder and CEO of the company and was even more impressed by the lofty goals of the company. The reason the tea tastes so fresh? With tea there are generally lots of middlemen, but with Teatulia because it's all estate grown, there are none so you can be assured of the quality. The company is equally committed to environmental sustainability and the economic well being of their workers, in particular to the women who are growing the tea and managing the estate. Teatulia tea comes from a single estate in Northern Bangladesh, which was founded in 2000. They sell black, green, white and herbal teas, all produced and certified organic. Teatulia is a tea garden, but with the goal of being an enterprise that gives t......

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Tea-infused Hot Cocoa Recipe

I'm not much of a coffee drinker but I love hot chocolate and I love tea. I enjoy the richness of hot chocolate, but sometimes it's a bit too much. I certainly couldn't drink it everyday. I have tried quite a few chocolate flavored teas and while some of them are pretty good, I've discovered a more satisfying solution. I make hot cocoa with equal parts tea and milk. On the surface this might seem like a weird thing to do, combining cocoa and tea but it's really quite delicious. I learned from chocolate authority Alice Medrich that the fat in dairy products coats your tongue so the flavor of chocolate is sometimes muted in very creamy preparations. She said you can make cocoa with hot water, but I have found that tea provides an amazing addition of flavor. I like a little bit of milk to add some texture. The result is a beverage that is richer and more viscous than tea and milk, but not quite as cloying as hot cocoa can be. In the Winter, I could drink it just ab......

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