![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneI've talked before about how our kitchen is still packed. Many of our own pots and pans and implements and most of our dishes are packed in boxes which are piled up along one entire wall of the living room (to the ceiling) (and in front of it are stacks of more boxes and suitcases, and the bed, because we're also sleeping there, and in front of the bed is the bunny play area, because that's the only room where they fit, and you can barely walk around it and it's impossible to clean ahahahahahahhah. hah).
MIL's one-person kitchen has a miniature dishwasher that we have to run twice a day if we want to keep the counters clean enough to prepare food suddenly, a miniature sink that a single silpat cannot fit in and a faucet that is too high and mounted wrong so it can't run without splashing everywhere, two bits of counter that are about adequate for one regular and one miniature cutting board plus one pan on a trivet, and completely inadequate storage. We're eating mainly off of her dishes, which are fine but plain white where ours are fun turquoise.
One of the things we haven't found and put in her kitchen are our tea things. Our favorite flavors of loose leaf tea are there and can be brewed in the french press pots in a pinch, but we've mostly been using teabags since coming here because everything is Just So Hectic, and I have no idea where our stash of teaballs and single-use strainers are.
So making the year's first pitcher of iced tea this year was a thing.
I grew up in Alabama, but I do not drink sweet tea, which is a prepared sweetened beverage made with tea and does not just consist of tea with sweetener in it. My dad's favorite beverage is black tea (which he comes by honestly, from his paternal grandmother, the badass Welsh-English WWI nurse and flapper who was known to send tea back to a US restaurant kitchen because it wasn't boiling when they poured it from the pot to her cup) and he serves it chilled over ice in the summer, with no further additions. He's been making iced Earl Grey and Darjeeling by sun brewing my whole life, and I have a fuzzy early memory of being allowed to taste his drink and liking it when I was a toddler.
Now as an adult I know that sun brewing doesn't taste better and provides an opportunity for bacterial growth, while chilled/diluted hot-brewed tea easily becomes bitter, and the scientifically best way to make iced tea is to put ~a tablespoon of loose leaves in a liter of water in the fridge overnight.
The lack of tea balls and cup-size strainers delayed the first pitcher this year, but yesterday I realized I could just brew the tea in a jar and then pour it through a sieve into the pitcher the next morning, so that's what I did. I also prefer cold-brewed oolong and green tea, but of course Earl Grey and Darjeeling are also nice.
MIL's one-person kitchen has a miniature dishwasher that we have to run twice a day if we want to keep the counters clean enough to prepare food suddenly, a miniature sink that a single silpat cannot fit in and a faucet that is too high and mounted wrong so it can't run without splashing everywhere, two bits of counter that are about adequate for one regular and one miniature cutting board plus one pan on a trivet, and completely inadequate storage. We're eating mainly off of her dishes, which are fine but plain white where ours are fun turquoise.
One of the things we haven't found and put in her kitchen are our tea things. Our favorite flavors of loose leaf tea are there and can be brewed in the french press pots in a pinch, but we've mostly been using teabags since coming here because everything is Just So Hectic, and I have no idea where our stash of teaballs and single-use strainers are.
So making the year's first pitcher of iced tea this year was a thing.
I grew up in Alabama, but I do not drink sweet tea, which is a prepared sweetened beverage made with tea and does not just consist of tea with sweetener in it. My dad's favorite beverage is black tea (which he comes by honestly, from his paternal grandmother, the badass Welsh-English WWI nurse and flapper who was known to send tea back to a US restaurant kitchen because it wasn't boiling when they poured it from the pot to her cup) and he serves it chilled over ice in the summer, with no further additions. He's been making iced Earl Grey and Darjeeling by sun brewing my whole life, and I have a fuzzy early memory of being allowed to taste his drink and liking it when I was a toddler.
Now as an adult I know that sun brewing doesn't taste better and provides an opportunity for bacterial growth, while chilled/diluted hot-brewed tea easily becomes bitter, and the scientifically best way to make iced tea is to put ~a tablespoon of loose leaves in a liter of water in the fridge overnight.
The lack of tea balls and cup-size strainers delayed the first pitcher this year, but yesterday I realized I could just brew the tea in a jar and then pour it through a sieve into the pitcher the next morning, so that's what I did. I also prefer cold-brewed oolong and green tea, but of course Earl Grey and Darjeeling are also nice.
