Although we enjoy the convenience of buying herbal teas at our local grocery stores, there is nothing more satisfying than growing one's own herbs for food and beverage.
My family's all time favorite tea blend is MINT and LEMON. This is something we reach for when needing a boost for our throat, and feeling under the weather. For sweetener, we mix in pure local honey.
In this batch, I had dehydrated a combination of regular mint and Peppermint, Stevia, and Lemon Balm.
You can see my post here about Dehydrating Stevia
Another favorite food to dehydrate for tea is LEMONS. I posted another blog on the importance of DEHYDRATED LEMONS.
When I first started thinking about how to stock up on lemons, I couldn't find a single blog on the web. Not even dehydrated lemons. I guess this was about 10 years ago when I tried to come up with an idea on how to preserve lemons for emergencies. After all, I couldn't imagine anything worse than facing an illness and not having my comfort foods and favorite tea. I ended up canning some lemons.
After I discovered the ease and convenience of dehydrated lemons, I was hooked!
I'm on the quest for growing my own tea leaves to add to my herbal blends, but for the time being, I use a variety of commercial black & green teas. I try to find organic as much as possible, but I do enjoy buying in bulk from nearby Indian stores.
This is my spill on "organic"... I try to avoid pesticides as much as possible. This is why I prefer reaching for homemade EVERYTHING when my family is sick. The less MSG, and unnatural ingredients introduced into a diet, the better.
A few years back, I ordered a bunch of herb seeds for my medicine cabinet. I wasn't quite sure HOW I was going to use these herbs for medicine, but I just knew I needed to have these for just in case.
This was before I discovered my dehydrator. I needed a way to store these valuable herbs long term, and drying was the solution. Another option is tinctures, and of course, fresh herbs.
The sky is the limit on the blends we can come up with.
I like Amber's outlook...
1 comment:
Stevia is the best from what I've read & I have used. It is great to throw into the vita mix with whatever fruits and vegetables that I am going to mix up for breakfast along with Chia and flax. I can put lemon flavoured Stevia in my tea. My mind is so full of ideas of ways to use the flavoured Stevia.
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