Rose tea

I love the Tazo Rest Tea. It's primarily rose, with lavender, lemon, and valerian. All sorts of restful herbs, but no chamomile which always overpowers everything.

I have been making iced tea with 50% green tea and 50% this rest tea, and it's good. Today I scaled back the amount of green tea.

The Tazo tea hot is yummy by itself so I don't know why I'm hesitant to make a full batch of Tazo rest iced tea.

Sunshine and iced tea!

I'm brewing some tea to ice to go with this lovely sunny day. First day of spring. Haven't been to the backyard yet for a post-winter assessment but I bet my chives are growing.

I have a big mug with four tea bags in it, ready to make 2-3 quarts of iced tea. The mix today is 2 teabags organic green tea (purchased a long time ago from the warehouse club in a big, big pack), 1 tea bag Celestial Seasoning Sugar Plum Spice, and one Celestial Seasonings Wild Berry Zinger.

Brought to you by the letter P: Pork with raspberry sauce

I didn't intend it, but dinner became "brought to you by the letter P."

I got home from work and prepped some peas by thawing them in the microwave. Then I sliced about two tablespoons of fresh spearmint from my garden and added it to the peas. I stirred it up, covered it, and set it in the fridge. (Great picnic item, originally from Eileen Breslin's vegan cooking class at Northampton Community College.) Serve the peas chilled.

Then I made some green tea, also with loads of spearmint and poured it over ice in my Princess House glasses. I also got out a bottle of Italian sparkling raspberry wine. I even allowed by daughter to have a small taste for a special post-birthday toast. That was our apéritif.

First course was canned pears (packed in juice, juice reserved for recipe) with some of the sauce from the meat, served over yogurt. (See below for recipe.)

The pork recipe is a variation of Pork Chops with Raspberry Sauce from Allrecipes.com.

Pork with Raspberry Sauce, Angel-style

4 thin pork chops
Mysterious herb seasoning packet from Aldi spinach rigatoni

pinch of fresh ground course sea salt

pinch four-color peppercorns

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon olive oil

4 tablespoons juice, reserved from a can of pears

4 tablespoons champagne vinegar, a gift from my mom at Christmas

3.5 tablespoons Chambord

almost 1/4 cup organic raspberry jam from Wegmans

1. Preheat oven to 200. In a skillet, melt butter and olive oil.

2. Combine seasonings, salt and pepper. Rub on pork.

3. Cook pork in skillet on medium, about four minutes per side.

4. Place on plate and keep warm in oven.

5. In warm skillet, with meat juices still present, combine the juice, jam, vinegar and Chambord. Cook until the sauce reduces significantly. It will thicken when it cools. I put about have the sauce on the meat right away and left in in the oven as I served the first course. Then when I served, the sauce had thickened and I placed more on each.

My daughter ate TWO.

For dessert, we had some pumpkin roll. I didn't make that, Gayle brought it for my birthday. Her friend makes it.

Asian tonight

I opened my freezer in shock to find it was mostly empty. No homemade bread, no baked goods, no frozen meals left for me to heat in an instant.

So tonight, I took the last of the frozen chicken egg rolls from the warehouse store and I mixed up some oriental style sauce: about a teaspoon garlic powder, a teaspoon honey, three tablespoons sesame oil, one teaspoon sugar, about three tablespoons water, a 1/2 teaspoon ginger, and a half teaspoon oriental five spice.

I poured the sauce into a skillet with lots of frozen mixed vegetables (the kind normally for soup) and added a couple tablespoons of sesame seeds. I cooked the mix on high for about five minutes to thaw the veggies, then I turned the heat down and let it simmer.

Meanwhile, I started some instant brown rice with some butter. I also thawed the egg rolls in the microwave. When they finished, I tossed the egg rolls in the skillet with the veggies.

Finally, I started the tea pot and made some green tea with honey.

I made iced tea with the green tea. I piled rice into bowls, topped it with vegetables, and added the egg rolls to each bowl. Normally, when I make random stirfries without a formal recipe, they come out bland and I have a boatload leftover which nobody wants to eat. Today, it was incredible. And everybody wanted more. But there wasn't any.