steeping drama

As we come to the last days of wintry January, the official National Hot Tea Month, let us sit with Alan Rickman for a moment or two and contemplate an intensely furious tea moment.  (Perhaps somebody slipped him a bag of that crappy cheap Earl Grey that tastes like it's made with Lemon Pledge instead of bergamot.) 

staying healthy with the gypsies

Last month I saw a box of Traditional Medicinals Gypsy Cold Care Tea on sale and thought, "Looks interesting but I don't have a cold, I don't need it."  And that was probably when a gypsy curse floated out of nowhere to strike me down with a wicked cold/sinus infection soon after, because I dared to presume that I didn't need any Gypsy Cold Care in my life.  I got through the first miserable days with hot lemonade steeped with bits of fresh ginger, and I think that helped a lot.  But then there was all this remaining congestion and a weird croupy cough, and at that point I went for the Gypsy Cold Care potion.  It's great stuff, with organically magical things like elder flower, yarrow flower, peppermint, hyssop, rose hips, cinnamon bark, ginger and licorice, and it really does seem that if you drink a lot of it and let those natural elements go to work, you can get over a plague quickly but in a holistically healed way.  And anytime I can feel better without antibiotics or visits to doctors' offices but by sipping hot tea and watching Jean Reno in Les Visiteurs instead -- I am happy.

Pictured:  The Sleeping Gypsy -- Henri Rousseau, 1897

lampedusa and some blood oranges

I had a cup of Rare Tea Cellar's Sicilian Blood Orange Green over the holidays and really loved it, and this is something because I'm not a big fan of green tea.  When I think of Sicily in literature I think of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's classic The Leopard, a complex and fascinating novel about that Italian region circa 1860, as the old ways of aristocratic life give way to the upheavals of the Risorgimiento.  The Leopard seems like a fine match for Rare Tea Cellar's Sicilian Blood Orange Green, pairing a book you can lose yourself in with a tea you'll want to sip slowly and surely enjoy more than one refill of.