Alright, alright – I confess. #8 was a
sham. What?! It’s hard to think of 50 interesting things to do all at once! And
I DID complete #8....I just completed it before I published the new list is all.
Like, a day before. Still counts.
Basically I just wanted a reason to show
off my wicked tea project. Don’t you judge me, you...you judgey judge.
Disclaimer over. Tea! Tea is lovely!
I’m usually down for some Earl Grey or Orange
Pekoe, but when I want to straight up herbify good old Mint Tea is my go-to
flavour. When I realized that Mint Tea is literally just mint leaves, dried,
and put in a bag, I says to myself, I says: “Why don’t I just make my own?
This seems crazy easy, yo!” And it actually was!
I already like to grow a bunch of different
flavours of mints in the garden – yes, there are different flavours of mint!
Last summer, I was able to find Chocolate Mint plants (my favourite),
Apple-Mint (pretty generic but with giant leaves), Pineapple Mint (....not so
great), Orange Mint (so-so), and of course regular old Peppermint. Whenever
there seemed to be lots of leaves, I would chop them down, and hang the stems
to dry above the sink in the kitchen.
Once dried, I just pulled off the leaves,
crumpled them a bit, and put them into labelled mason jars. From here, if you
have one of those tea pots that lets you just put in loose leaf tea, you are
ready to go! You need a solid 2 tablespoons or so for one big mug, and you need
to let it steep for 4-5 minutes.
I wanted to use my teas as Christmas presents,
so I went a step farther: I ordered some empty tea bags online, filled each one
with as much tea as would fit, then sewed them up one-by-one. I wrapped a few
individual tea bags in little brown paper packages, so I could give them away with
cards and such.
For the rest, I wanted to make a kind of gift box dealy to give as actual gifts. So at Michael’s I stocked up on some cheap Christmas
tins, (basically bought one tin per shift, using a 40% off coupon for each. So they were like $0.75 each) and spray painted them all a minty green. Then I put in one tea bag of
each different flavour. BAM! Home-made mint tea Christmas presents!
This year I’m doing it all over again –
with some new flavours found at the garden centre. We’ve got Spearmint;
Lemon-Mint; and ‘Mojito Mint’ this time around. I'm also trying to grow some chamomile. Should be fun times.
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