Drinks

I made this tea blend as part of the care package I gave to my family to conclude Christmas diner. The blend consists of black tea, dried orange peel, dried rose petals and crushed cinnamon sticks. Instead of searching for ready dried orange peel I made my own from organic navel oranges. It costs a few days before you can use the dried peel but it is so worth doing. The orange smell is intoxicating...yum! Especially when the peels are drying. The oranges themselves were the best I've eaten in years. I have a sort of love-hate relationship with oranges. I love pretty much anything orange flavoured, I can even say it's my favourite flavour but when it comes to eating oranges I'm very hesitant. As long as I can remember oranges have been disappointing many times. They usually turn out either dry, not sour enough, not fragrant enough or with seeds (I hate that). After many disappointing oranges I sort of stopped eating them a long time ago. When I was very nauseaus whilst pregnant with my oldest son I tried eating oranges. We lived in Tel Aviv so the only oranges you could buy were locally grown and they were fantastic! Maybe they tasted even better because I didn't like eating anything besides yoghurt with banana ;) Well the organic oranges tasted as good as the ones I ate back then. So whenever I buy oranges in the future in the Netherlands I will buy organic. They were so much better than regular ones. Probably because they were picked at the right stage of ripeness.
I'm degressing, I was talking about tea...so you dry your own orange peel. Chop them up and add them to the black tea, crushed cinnamon and rose petals.
The first blend I made didn't have enough rose and orange taste so I added more. Unfortunately the tea didn't taste very rose-y but I already doubled the amount and didn't feel like buying more. Visually it does look very rose-y though. Maybe a different type of rose petals would have worked better but these were the only ones I could find.
The smell of this blend is so very good that you could just use it as a potpourri (if you are a potpourri kind of person) I couldn't stop sniffing it and loved opening the cupboard my private little stash was in.



Dried orange peel

makes about 35 g (1 ¼ oz)

about 4 organic oranges

Cut of the peel, try cutting off the oranges part only (a little white pith is ok though). Let the peel dry on a cooling rack until dry. Can take up to a few days.

Winter tea

makes a lot ;)

500 g (1 lb) black tea
50 g (1 ¾ oz) dried rose petals
35 g (1 ¼ oz) dried orange peel, finely chopped
15 g (½ oz) cinnamon stick, crushed

Mix everything together and keep in an airtight container.
Steep the tea for about 5 minutes to get the best taste.

Today is World Nutella Day but for lots of people every day is Nutella day. I love Nutella but the problem is that my hips love it too. And eating Nutella by the spoonful seems to make the hips grow, and like most women I want them to shrink instead of grow ;) So I just don't buy it any more. But for World Nutella Day hosted by Ms Adventures in Italy and Bleeding Espresso I made an execption and bought me a jar. By the time I made these Nutella espresso's it was already nearly half empty :)
I came across this drink when we were living in Tel Aviv. It was on the menu of one of our neighbourhood cafe's. The combination of pure Nutella, a shot of espresso and some frothed milk was delicious! And such an easy recipe too. Have been wanting to recreate it for two years now but as I don't own an espresso machine I never did. Still don't own one so I'm afraid the Nutella espresso you see in the picture was made with instant espresso...I know....shame on me ;) but it was very good despite it!
You can adjust the amount of Nutella to your taste. If you would follow the recipe you would have an not too sweet espresso with a good chocolately-hazelnutty taste. If you like your coffee sweet and more Nutella-y I'd add an extra half tablespoon of Nutella.



Nutella espresso

serves one

1 tbs Nutella
45 ml (3 tbs) espresso
frothed milk

Spoon the Nutella into a small glass (if it is too stiff, pop in the microwave for 10 seconds). Pour in the espresso and top it off with some frothed milk.
Stir well before drinking.

This month was the first time I read about HotM. For those of you that don't know what HotM is, details can be found here on Ilva's lovely Lucillian Delights. The theme for this month's HotM is fruit and berries. The recipes you post for HotM should be heart healthy. I thought being a (trained, not practicing) dietician I should enter HotM (even though most of the recipes on this blog don't exactly fit the description 'heart healthy').
When paging through my cookbooks I came across a nectarine ice tea recipe in Entertaining by Donna Hay. It is ice tea with the addition of pureed nectarines and is flavoured with basil and mint. I made some adaptations by replacing the darjeeling tea by vanilla rooibos tea and omitting the mint. The result is a very tasty, silky smooth, refreshing nectarine beverage with a hint of basil. The amount of sugar called for in the recipe was exactly right, making it sweetish but definitely not too sweet. The sugar could be substituted for artificial sweetener for people who want to cut back on sugar ;) Use good ripe nectarines to get a good nectarine flavour.

Vanilla rooibos nectarine ice tea (from Entertaining by Donna Hay)

makes about 1 ½ l (6 ½ cups)

2 tbs of vanilla rooibos tea
1 cup basil leaves
125 g (½ cup) sugar
1 ¼ l (5 cups) water, boiling
5 medium size nectarines, pureed and sieved

Put the rooibos, basil and sugar in a heat-proof bowl. Add the boiling water and allow to steep for about 7 minutes. Remove the rooibos and basil. Add the nectarines and allow to cool down. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours before serving.

While doing Christmas grocery shopping in the Tiv Taam I stumbled across a very peculiar drink: Birch rosehip juice...I didn’t even know that you could get juice from a birch.





After googling birch juice I learned that in some parts of the world birch juice is a very ordinary drink (eg Belarus, Russia, Finland, China).
It tasted really nice and fresh, not a very intense taste. Even though the one I bought had some added sugar, it didn’t taste very sweet. It is a great thirst drencher! Certainly something I would buy again.