Somehow It Just Works

Today we practised the art of no effort food preparation and preservation. First we brewed sun tea.  This involved putting four orange pekoe and two mint tea bags in a pitcher of room temperature water and placing it in the sun.  I then left it to brew for a few hours.  There you have it - sun tea.  

This tea making practice was very popular in the 1970s, though it is considered a bit risky by today's food safety standards.  The sun does not heat the water sufficiently to kill any microbes that might have contaminated the tea.  We used a clean pitcher, reverse osmosis water, and refrigerated the tea immediately after brewing to make the process as safe as possible.

The tea's flavour ended up being quite lovely with absolutely no bitterness.  

Sun tea straight up.

I served it over ice and also tried mixing it with two tablespoons of lemonade for added flavour and sweetness.  It got two thumbs up from Ian for taste - I apologized in advance if I ended up food poisoning him with my snub to current food safety protocols. 

Lemon sun tea.

In addition to minimal effort tea, I also needed to preserve the herbs I harvested from Dad's garden at the cottage and Matt and Skyla's now-defunct mint patch.  The mint, despite being encased in a sealed ziplock bag, was extremely potent.  It made the cucumber that shared its vegetable drawer into a mint cucumber - very cool.  Less well received was the accidentally mint-infused milk that I served the boys for lunch.  Their verdict was unanimous - the mint had to go.

So it got dried alongside the tarragon...

and the summer savory, which has this Thanksgiving turkey's name all over it.

Needless to say, my kitchen smells divine this evening - fresh and minty and like stuffing.  It is a weird combination, I know, but somehow, like the sun tea, it just works.