English Breakfast Tea Latte

I love tea, and lately I’ve really started enjoying English Breakfast Tea. I also really like lattes, though sometimes they’re a little too strong for me. I’m just not much of a coffee drinker. I only like the coffee or espresso drinks made with lots of sugar and milk, and even then they can sometimes be just a little too strong or bitter. So I decided to experiment with making a tea latte at home.

I decided on English Breakfast Tea since it’s currently my favorite hot tea, and I already like it with milk added to it. I like my tea pretty sweet (just in case you missed that from the name of my blog), so you may want to reduce the sugar if you like your tea a little less sweet. I think it’s delicious exactly like this:


English Breakfast Tea Latte:

1 English Tea Bag

1 cup water

1/3 cup milk

2 and 1/4 tsp sugar

Put sugar in the bottom of a large mug. Pour water and tea bag into a small sauce pan; bring to a boil over High heat. Boil for 90 seconds. Pour tea, with the bag, into the mug (over the sugar), cover and allow to steep for 1 - 4 minutes, depending on how strong you like your tea (I steep mine for four minutes). Meanwhile, pour milk in sauce pan over Medium heat; whisk the milk just until it begins to boil. Remove tea bag from mug and pour in milk. Stir well.

Enjoy!

Daisies

Daises are one of the flowers for the month of April. I really, really like daisies. They just seem like such a happy flower, and there are so many different kinds that there really seems to be a daisy for everyone’s taste. My favorite daisies are these purple ones.

I’m still pretty new to gardening (I wanted nothing to do with it until a few years ago), but my grandmother-in-law (GrandMommy) is an incredible gardener. She knows all of the good places to go, and helps steer me toward things I can actually keep alive. Last year we went to a specialty garden store and I fell in love with these purple daises.

They were just so pretty and looked so happy. I bought them (a GrandMommy approved purchase) and they did really well. Now I can’t wait to go back and get purple daisies to plant this year. I like them so much that I think they’re going to be part of the garden every year.

So what about you? Do you like daisies? Do you have a favorite type or color?

Cooking

That’s a pretty broad title for one word isn’t it? But, it’s one of my favorite things. I absolutely love to cook. I have enjoyed cooking for as long as I can remember, and based on the pictures on Facebook and stored on the laptop, it’s still something I do quite a lot of. If you’ve visited much before you’ve probably noticed that pictures of food feature pretty heavily here in the land of sweet tea.

Cooking for me is necessary (you’ve got to eat, right?), fun (I love trying new recipes and ideas in the kitchen), a way to say I care (my Love Language is Acts of Service, so I cook for people I care about when they’re having trouble), and stress relief (a bad day probably means I’m going to come home and do a lot of chopping and dicing!). So between all of those things I do A LOT of cooking.

Last summer a local Mediterranean/Middle Eastern restaurant started offering some cooking classes, and I’ve really enjoyed those. I’ve learned a lot about spices and techniques that I wasn’t at all familiar with before, and the food is absolutely delicious. It’s also really fun to invite friends and family over to try something new.

I really enjoy exploring other culture’s style of cooking and use of spices. I think I learned this from my paternal grandmother. My grandfather was in the Air Force, so they lived all over the place, and she always embraced local cooking techniques and flavors. I learned a lot about cooking from her, so it’s very natural for me to experiment with different things. 

Being a good southerner, southern comfort food features heavily into my cooking repertoire as well. There’s nothing quite like fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and collard greens. And of course sweet tea. Lots of sweet tea.

I also love creating my own recipes; sometimes with major southern flavor, sometimes with other influences, and sometimes an unusual combination. I’ve been working, off and on, on writing a cookbook for a few years now, and I’d really like to finish it. I’m always trying new things, scribbling notes on various papers in the kitchen, and recruiting people to taste things. (My husband Nick and my best friend are Crystal are very tolerant when it comes to letting me try out new recipes on them.) I love the feeling that comes with getting a new recipe just right and watching people enjoy it.

So what about you? Do you enjoy cooking? What are your favorite cooking styles?

Birthdays

Yesterday's Surprise Birthday Gift!

Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to celebrate birthdays. My parents adhere to a religion that strictly forbids the celebrating of birthdays. My first experience with a birthday party was at my first job after technical school when there was a birthday party every month for anyone whose birthday fell in that month. Each month had a committee to plan the birthday party. It was great fun, and the beginning of my love of all things birthday. It’s where I learned that birthdays are fun.

Eleven years later a lot has changed; I’ve moved to a different state, gotten married (to a man who’s a Christmas Eve baby), and have a different job. However, I still love all things birthday, and have the fortune to be around people who really get into celebrating birthdays.

Yesterday at work I walked into a lovely early birthday surprise from some of my co-workers. They took the time to choose my favorite flowers and candy. One of the things I love about my job is the fact that we celebrate co-worker’s birthdays. I always bake a cake of the birthday person’s choosing, we all go out to lunch together, and sometimes small gifts are given. It’s really nice because, let’s face it, a lot of us spend more time with our co-workers on a daily basis than we do our families. It’s nice to know that the people you spend 40 plus hours per week with are glad you were born.

Of course, co-worker birthday celebrations don’t replace birthday celebrations with family and friends. I love the traditions and fun that go along with birthday celebrations for my friends and family by marriage.

Since Nick is a Christmas Eve baby I always make sure he has a birthday party that has nothing to do with Christmas. It’s usually chili and a cake that in no way resembles anything Christmas-related. The cake has been everything from Star Trek to frogs.

My best friend Crystal almost always chooses grilling out for her birthday celebration. Her birthday is in early May, so the weather is usually perfect for being outside and grilling. We usually try new marinades or grilling something new.

Because I dislike the cold weather so much and my birthday is in early April, we almost always drive down to South Carolina to go to Riverbanks Zoo. It’s always warm there by then, and the garden is in bloom. I love it.

There’s always cake, too. This year Nicks’ mom and step-dad, Alan, (whose birthday is late March) were in town close enough to celebrate our birthdays together with a chocolate cake with an antique truck for Alan and an adorable white cake with pastel flowers and butterflies for me. I don’t like chocolate at all, so it means a lot that they go out of their way to get white cake for me.

So what about you? Do you love birthday celebrations? What are your traditions for celebrating birthdays with family and friends?

Angel Oak

My parents both grew up around the Charleston area. They got married there, and lived there for several years. Then, for reasons I will never fully understand, decided to move away before my sister and I were born. (We’re still South Carolina natives, we just don’t have the privilege of being Charleston natives.)

I love the Charleston area, and have for as long as I can remember. Though we very rarely went there, my parents talked about it a lot. Hubby and I vacation there more than anywhere else. Every time we’ve gone my mom has said we should see the Angel Oak while we’re there. We always meant to, but somehow never got around to it. Until last year.

We finally drove out to Johns Island in November of last year to see the Angel Oak. I’m not really sure what I was expecting. I’d heard my parents talk about it for years. I’d looked it up online; I knew it was supposed to be a huge, beautiful old oak tree.

I wasn’t prepared for how enormous or how breathtakingly beautiful it was. Angel Oak is basically in a state park, down a little dirt road next to an old church. Your expectations aren’t raised as you get closer. But then, it’s magic.

The size and beauty of the tree take your breath away, and it just fees like a magical place. All of the numbers about the biggest branch, how much area it shades, how old it is, go right out of your head. You walk under the canopy of the tree, and you feel like you’re in a different world.

So what about you? Have you been to see the Angel Oak? Did you think it was magical?