Cooking with Tea

Cooking with tea can be an exciting adventure. Just like spices, the tea leaves can add interesting, exotic, and unusual flavors to your favorite dishes. Try adding your brewed tea to broths for soup or sauces. Or add tea leaves to baked goods to make savory breads and cookies. Tea can make an ice cream or yogurt dance with flavor. If you like the tea, then you will like whatever you cook using the same tea leaves!

If you aren’t sure what the best way to brew your tea here is a previous post that can help get the flavor from your tea leaves.

https://www.bostonharbormt.com/brew-great-cup-tea/

I encourage you to use the tea leaves just like you would any herb or spice in the kitchen. I have included a couple of my favorite recipes for you in this post.

Montana Gold Tea

An orange flavored tea with hints of cinnamon and clove, this tea is wonderful for adding to rice. Brew the tea as usual and use instead of water. When the rice is cooked, add raisins and walnuts.  It is also great for steaming vegetables particularly beets, carrots, and broccoli by placing the loose tea leaves in the water. By using the leaves while steaming, it infuses the food with the elements of the tea. It is absolutely fabulous for steamed fish as well.

Himalaya Tea

Again this green tea with essence of jasmine and pineapple lends itself well to the method of steaming as you can brew the tea and use in place of the water when cooking rice or vegetables. Add pineapple tidbits, walnuts, or other favorites to the rice. This can be served with a teriyaki sauce.

Lapsang Souchang

This tea has a smoky characteristic that is great for all kinds of meats. Parboiling the meat with the loose tea leaves gives the meat a wonderful taste like it has been smoked. Another use is by smearing your fish, especially salmon, with olive oil and then using the leaves as a rub before broiling or grilling. An additional treat is to use while preparing hard boiled eggs. Crack the shell lightly and boil the eggs with the tea in the water for 15 minutes. When you peel the egg, you have a marbled effect. The taste is outrageous!

Damiana

Damiana is kind of like oregano and is a medicinal herb tea. Rub it on a roast (pork, beef or other) before cooking. It is great for any tomato based dish such as goulash, spaghetti, soups, or Sloppy Joes. This is also a wonderful addition to any stir fry. Although I haven’t tried it, others have recommended using this herb in scrambled eggs.

Okay, now you have the idea! Get to cookin’!

Herbal Remedies

Herbal remedies: fiction or fact?

Herbal remedies do their job because of the properties they contain. They are not magic potions. In the roots, leaves, flowers, berries, bark or seeds, herbs have specific biochemical properties that are healing and restorative for our systems. We’ve come to the point in our high-stress lives where we need all of the healing and restorations we can get.

Being a natural resource, they have no additives, preservatives, or dyes. They aren’t sweetened with sugar or sugar substitutes, and they are not mixed with other ingredients that could compromise the herb’s effect or give you something you don’t want or need.

The water in herbal teas plays a vital role to increase the effectiveness of the remedy. The water diffuses the potency of the herb and delivers its properties in a manner that is harmonious with your natural body processes.

Confused? Where to Start

There are hundreds of herbs with healing properties, and each herb has its own unique qualities. This can be very overwhelming and can become “a garden of confusion”. One of the remarkable qualities about many herbs is the fact that they can do more for your body than merely treat symptoms. In many cases, they can treat the symptoms and the underlying weakness. When you take herbs as teas, you get the benefits of the herbs and some delightful drinks, too.

Start very simply. Seek out one herbal tea that might be useful for your current needs. If you find two herbal teas to help you, that alone would make your discovery of herbs worthwhile. Over time as you learn to trust the gentle relief and healing benefits that herbal teas bring, you’ll find more teas to help you resolve everyday disorders. Then one day you’ll realize that you’ve made a break-through. Plain and simple drinks. Plain and simple healing.

How Much – How Often?

You don’t need to take handfuls of herb capsules, or drink the same tea ten times a day to reap the benefits of an herbal remedy. One great tea, once a day, is a positive step forward. Two great teas a day can be a real health advantage.

If you are just starting to use herbs for their healing properties, I would recommend that you begin with moderate doses, like the dose in one cup of tea in the morning. When you are using teas for healing treatments, a good rule is to take the tea as you need it, once or twice a day, and use it for one week.

* Taken from the book 20,000 Secrets of Tea by Victoria Zak. This book is available at Boston Harbor Tea and has an informative list of herbal teas for various health conditions.

Rest & Relaxation for Us All

R & R (Rest and Relaxation)

Hey, all you awesome Boston Harbor Tea fans. I wanted to give you all a heads up. We will be CLOSED from September 17, 2017 to October 2, 2017 for some needed time off. So please get stocked up on any teas or herbs you might be needing. THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING!!!

CLEANSE: R & R ( Ream out & Rejuvenate )

This time of year is a good time to cleanse as well. Come in for your cleansing teas and herbs for the full 22 days. Fall is a great time to cleanse in order to get rid of harmful toxins in your body especially before we head into the holiday season. This can be tailored to your specific blood type or just a general cleanse package if you aren’t sure of your blood type. Certain blood types work differently and so the herbs are chosen according to what works the best for your body.

Cleansing of your body’s organs can be an effective way to help improve the body’s way of functioning properly along with relieving and possibly eliminating ailments that can become troublesome to you. A cleanse is a process of cleaning the blood by removing impurities and toxins from the liver and lymph system which play a large role in processing what is put in the body. When these two organ systems get backed up, other organs like the kidneys, gallbladder, and intestines have to process what the liver and lymph system could not. This can affect every cell in the body, both short and long term.

The best part is while you are detoxing, you can eat natural, whole foods at the same time!

CLEANSING TEAS/HERBS:

Acid Removal:

Burdock, Catnip, Meadowsweet, Pau d’Arco, Plantain, Slippery Elm, and Spearmint

Blood Cleaner:

Burdock, Goldenseal, Plantain, Sarsaparilla and Yarrow

Female:

Calendula, Chaste Tree Berry, Damiana, Dong Quai, Milk Thistle, Motherwort, Paul d’Arco, and Slippery Elm

Heart:

Astragalus, Calendula, Dong Quai, Ginkgo, Ginger, Hawthorm, Motherwort, and Suma

Kidney:

Cleavers, Cranberry Powder, Damiana, Hawthorm, Horsetail, Marshmallow, Plantain, and Red Raspberry Leaf

Liver:

Calendula, Cleavers, Dandelion Leaf, Dandelion Root, Marshmallow, Milk Thistle, and Slippery Elm

Lungs:

Elder, Goldenseal, Hyssop, Lungwort, Marshmallow, Mullein, Plantain, and Pleurisy root

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Original “Whole Foods” Diet

The answer is as old as time and never changes. It is the edicts from the Bible concerning what should be eaten and what should not be eaten. It is the original “whole foods diet”. Somehow we have allowed unnatural or modified foods to substitute for the real thing. Let’s get back to eating the way God intended.So many people are continually searching for “the” diet that will help them lose weight or make them healthy. Diets come and go. While one recommends no carbohydrates, another touts protein as the answer. What are you to believe? This way of eating derives rules for determining clean and unclean foods from certain passages in the Bible : Genesis, Proverbs, Luke, Exodus, Peter, Leviticus, Judges, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, 1 Corinthians, Habakkuk, and Daniel.[1] Your body is amazing and works like a well-oiled machine if allowed to do so. Teas and herbs are natural plants that have been used for over four thousand years. The father of medicine – Hippocrates – was once quoted as saying, “Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food.” I recommend a book I carry at the tea shop that goes into depth about teas and herbs by author, Victoria Zak. In her book, 20,000 Secrets of Tea, The Most Effective Ways to Benefit from Nature’s Healing Herbs, she talks about nature’s plants as healers and much more. “Tea has been a favorite beverage worldwide for hundreds of years. A cup of tea on a rainy evening can chase the chills away and a pot of tea shared among friends can lend an air of enchantment to an afternoon. But more than that, tea can treat a variety of ailments, and with this invaluable guide, you can put the secrets of tea to work for you!”   wrote Victoria Zak in the forward. If you want to read more on eating naturally, this is a great post about the very reasons you might want to work on changing your eating habits for a lifetime. https://www.amazingfacts.org/media-library/study-guide/e/4990/t/god-s-free-health-plan

Genesis 9:3           Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.

 

 

 

 

Sweet Watermelon Oolong Tea

 

Featured Watermelon Oolong Tea

Summer and watermelon go hand and hand. Memories of plates piled high with pink and green watermelon wedges; their juicy, fresh pulp just waiting to be devoured. And who can remember the watermelon seed spitting contests that followed? Sweet Watermelon Oolong Tea is a featured tea at Boston Harbor this summer.

It is a blend of organic premium flavored oolong, papaya pieces, plum, safflower petals, and natural flavors. With its fruity flavor of watermelon with a hint of sweetness, it is refreshing and thirst-quenching over ice or steaming hot.

Benefits of Oolong Tea

Plus there are many benefits of Oolong tea. It is rich in antioxidants and contains many  minerals including calcium, manganese, copper, selenium, potassium and carotin. Vitamin A, vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin E and vitamin K are part of its nutritional value. It is revered for various benefits as listed below:

• Weight maintenance
• Anti-cancer properties
• Healthy skin
• Removal of free radicals
• Aid to control diabetes
• Healthy bones
• Mental performance

Such a refreshing drink for summer and tastes terrific!

 

 

Marshmallow Root

I opened up Boston Harbor to share marshmallow root with everyone. It is one of my favorite herbs because everyone benefits from this plant.  Althaea officinalis is its latin name.

It helps with many different things like reducing inflammation, immunity, anti-aging, disease resistance, kidney weakness, lowers blood sugar levels, shrinks and softens growths, and had protein to build muscle.

Marshmallow is also filled with many nutrients like vitamin A, B1, B2, B3, B5, C, oxygen, calcium, iron, potassium, and magnesium. The list could go on and on.

This plant is amazing!

Marshmallow grows in yards all over. Growing to around 4 feet in length with stems that have jagged edged leaves that are covered with fine hair. The flowers that can grow up to 2 inches wide with colors the vary from white, light red, or purple. You can harvest marshmallow yourself and use all of it’s parts. The roots can be dried and used for tea, the flowers are good for dry chapped skin, and the leaves can be put into a salad and eaten.

Caution:

However, if you use chemicals on your lawn, you do not want to use those. These plants have been tainted by the chemicals. If you do decide you want to start harvesting the marshmallow plant, wait two years after your last lawn treatment and you should be able to harvest them the third year.

When marshmallow root is dried it can be white and fluffy or chunky with a little bit of fluff. It all depends on how it is prepared. When making the tea, it has a faint yellow color if any at all. Marshmallow does not have much of a flavor, it’s not sweet or bitter so if you mix it with another tea or flavor it’s not going to ruin the taste of your drink.

Here is this fun rhyme to help you remember the uses of marshmallow:

Dry places are moistened
Hard conditions are softened
Inflammation goes away
Tissues resist decay.
-Cathie-