Healthier Cooking

Ever since lis­ten­ing to this pod­cast more than three years ago, I have wanted to throw our old non-stick pans to the curb¹ in exchange for a qual­ity alter­na­tive which would not con­tin­u­ally flake toxic shav­ings into our food. Since using at least two or three dif­fer­ent kinds of non-stick cook­ware since col­lege, I wanted my next invest­ment to be the last cook­ware pur­chase I would make for a long time.

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1. or rather in the recy­cle bin [↩]

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My Green Tea Recipe

I have been mak­ing my own tea for about one year now. I searched and searched for an alter­na­tive to our pre­vi­ous main bev­er­age expe­ri­ence which was a national brand of green tea sold in gal­lon quan­ti­ties using a cheap sweet­ener called high fruc­tose corn syrup. I have worked hard to remove this ingre­di­ent from our diet which is not a really easy thing to do because it is in just about every­thing. This was the last prod­uct con­tain­ing this ingre­di­ent on our weekly gro­ceries list. Then I found agave syrup in our local health food store. This is a great alter­na­tive sweet­ener and just the thing I needed to begin mak­ing my own green tea.

The recipe I have come to make almost daily is as follows:

• 2 TBSP (heap­ing*) Ban­cha Green Tea Leaves
• 5/8 — 1 cup honey
• 3/8 cup agave syrup
• 2 cap­sules pow­dered gin­seng or 20–30 drops of liq­uid ginseng
• water

Right now, I make tea using a 3 quart Mr. Cof­fee Iced Tea Maker how­ever, I would love to acquire this teapot some­time in the future to heat the water and steep the tea. I mea­sure the tea leaves and pour into the brew bas­ket. Fill the machine full of water. Pour the honey and agave syrup into the bot­tom of the tea pitcher. I do not mea­sure out the honey so the above amounts are esti­mated and will need to be adjusted based on your taste. Occa­sion­ally, if I run out of the agave syrup I find that just adding more honey makes the tea sweet enough to drink. I brew and steep the tea in the pitcher. When the tea leaves have cooled to a rea­son­able enough tem­per­a­ture to han­dle I squeeze the remain­ing tea out of the tea leaves and dis­card the leaves in my com­post pile. Be care­ful not to let the brewed tea cool down too much. You want the brewed tea to still be warm so you can stir the honey at the bot­tom of the pitcher so it blends with the tea; the honey is eas­ier to blend when the tea is still hot. Pour mix­ture into 1 gal­lon sized con­tainer or 2 half gal­lon con­tain­ers (prefer­ably glass or other pitcher made of inert mate­ri­als). Fill pitcher full with ice cubes and/or cold water. Enjoy!

If this recipe doesn’t make you want to drink some then here are 7 seven more rea­sons to enjoy a nice cup of green tea.

* I chose the amount of tea leaves to brew based on the fact that the tea syrup it brews can be mixed with enough water to make 1 gal­lon of very deli­cious “iced” or cold tea.

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Did I really try that?

About 15 or 16 years ago I went on a trip to Scot­land with my dad and step-mother which was their third suc­cess­ful home exchange with a fam­ily across the Atlantic and was my sec­ond euro­pean trip with them. My step-mother has always been big into explor­ing and try­ing new things and being that we were in Scot­land we just couldn’t be allowed to pass up the expe­ri­ence of try­ing the national dish, Hag­gis. If you have ever eaten at any local diner in the bible belt or shopped at a gro­cery store there, you might have noticed some­thing curi­ous called liv­er­mush. I would have to com­pare the taste of Hag­gis to some­thing like liv­er­mush. I have never tasted liv­er­mush but Hag­gis, I would imag­ine, is very much like it; a very grainy and crumbly meat. Ah, well you get the gist. I don’t think my step-mother fully explained to me what Hag­gis actu­ally was until after I had tried some but I remem­ber not want­ing sec­onds. Also, I think this at least one of the many rea­sons why I chose to be veg­e­tar­ian through­out high school and beyond. Slash­food has an arti­cle here about the national dish of Scot­land and while scour­ing for a pic­ture of this unique “camp­ing” food, I found this hilar­i­ous pic­ture. I won­der if veg­e­tar­i­ans actu­ally devour this know­ing they are nosh­ing on some­thing designed to mimic the very essence of food they loathe to ingest?

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