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A New Year + Chai Concentrate

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The second 2014 started I was gladly bidding 2013 farewell.  Or rather, hoping the door hit its ass on the way out.  I accomplished a lot of great things in 2013, but the last couple of weeks of the year were full of not so great things.  It’s hard sometimes not to let the bad outweigh the good.  The bad things are overwhelming, making it easy to focus on them instead of all the positive in your life.  I going to attempt to focus on the positive in the new year and keep moving forward no matter what happens.  Hopefully that didn’t sound too cheesey and you aren’t rolling your eyes at me right about now…

I’ve grown to love the start of the year.  It fosters a lot of inspiriation, planning, and list-making.  All I want to do lately is make lists of goals and ideas for the blog, my shop, and my life in general.  I realize I sort of let my focus lag from this space the last month of the year, but I was able to bake some large granola orders and spend a lot of time with family instead.  So, I guess it’s all about finding balance within what I consider priorities.  What I’m getting at is that I’ll try my darndest to post here once or twice a week, but I won’t beat myself up if I don’t post as much as I think I should be when things start to pick up.

I started the new year off by making one of my favorite things: CHAI!  I love a good spicy chai so it felt natural to mix up my own concentrate to have on hand. Some of the best chai I’ve had was from the Bru coffee truck in Austin so I used it as a bit of inspiration.  Making chai is as simple as boiling water and then dumping a bunch of tea and spices in the pot to steep.  Strain them out, add a bit of sweetener, and you’ve got a jar of liquid gold.  Well, maybe not liquid gold, but certainly something really damn delicious.

This isn’t so much a recipe as it is a guideline.  Feel free to increase or decrease the spices depending on how you like your chai.  I like to go a little heavier with the ginger and use a whole vanilla bean in mine, but it’s completely up to you.  I think it’s about time for a chai break!

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Herbal Sun Tea

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I must apologize for my absence over the past couple of weeks.  I’ve been out of town for work and didn’t have much time to sleep much less write this post.  I planned on posting this a while ago when we got a bit of a cool front and it was pleasant enough to have the windows open.  I find myself pining for that weather now as it’s quite hard to go outside without breaking a sweat.  Despite my tardiness in posting, I’m thinking a nice cold glass of sun tea will be a welcome addition to any Labor Day festivities.

I can remember my mom making sun tea when I was a kid.  We had a special glass dispenser that you would put the tea in and then park it outside for a bit to steep.  I remember it having a yellow/sunny motif on it as if to say it was the perfect vessel for sun tea making.  I also remember not being too terribly keen on sun tea (I think we mostly used Lipton bags).  I suppose the pleasant breeze and mild temperatures prompted me to make my own version full of fresh flavors from my homegrown herbs.

Sun tea is a pretty simple affair.  It involves filling a glass mason jar with herbs/tea, covering it with water, and parking it in a sunny spot for a few hours.  What I’ve included below is my version of an herbal sun tea so feel free to use it as more of a starting off point.  Now, go forth and experiment with your own sun tea!
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