How to make Iced Tea

Iced tea is (to my mind anyway) quintessentially American.  So having a New Zealander tell you how she makes her iced tea is like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, though my grandmother NEVER sucked eggs. Anyway making cold tea from hot water has always left a bitterness in the tea that I do not like.  So I make it using cold water. Good fresh filtered water is pretty important to good iced tea.

So here is how to make the easiest iced tea in the world. 

In the evening. Put two Dargeeling tea bags (or English breakfast or whatever) and one lemon tea bag  (or fennel or chamomile if you don’t get allergies) into a big jug of cold water. Use REAL Tea not those dusty iced tea bags.  Refrigerate for the night. In the morning it is ready, a gentle iced tea with no bitterness,  a delicate yet full tea flavour, chilled and ready to drink. You can use any kind of good tea at all, even the lovely minty green tea. A quarter of a cup of tea leaves would be better but I find the tea bags so much easier in my fast moving morning.

Remove the tea bags or strain the leaves in the morning.

You can add a slice of lemon or a few bruised mint leaves.

Cold brew is the way to go for me.  And this drink is  a fixture in my fridge now.

Artistic dirty pig.  Makes a change.

I can hear the Bobby calf calling out to his mother. I still need him to help me get Lady Astor to drop her milk  in the milking room but things are improving in that department.  I bring her in get her ready, turn on the pump then I bring him in to bumble about until her milk is down then wrestle him back out the door before putting on the cups. Without him her udder stays large and hard with only a tiny amount of milk released. Bad girl. She is way too old for this carry on. I have to do all this when she is in the room and prepared, with the pump running and me there hoping that gradually these will all become the triggers again and I can wean this damn calf out of my milking room. And as I dodge and grab and shoo this calf out the door I console myself that I am not milking next summer so it cannot become a life long problem.  It is rather an entertaining early morning  circus though!  The only spectator being Wai watching us from under the gate.

I hope you have a lovely day.

Love celi

Weather: Wet and Humid. Cloudy – good pig walking weather.