Beloved readers, I’m going to be straight with you for a moment. It is bloody freezing here in the Netherlands. When I imagine winter, while I’m sweating on the beach in July, I think of beautiful snow covered landscapes and mugs filled with warm hot chocolate. Wrapped up in a warm and colorful sweater, I imagine winter to be a wonderful thing. But the truth is – winter sucks. Sure you can eat soup every day. But does that really justify how miserable it is to go outside? Nobody told me winter in the Netherlands doesn’t mean snow – it means rain. Freezing cold rain that makes your face feel like it is covered in ice because probably it is.
There are cures for this wretched season. Summer is one of them. But a much faster one is tea. Today’s remedy is not just any tea, it is homemade chai tea. This isn’t just water with a bunch of leaves soaking in it. It is water with a bunch of leaves and toasted spices soaking in it. Plus some nice creamy milk and some sugar. This is a warm and comforting heaven. Unfortunately, this heaven is also calorie-laden which means feel free to skip the milk and the sugar if you are that kind of person. (Note: I am not that kind of person)
Chai Tea Mix
1 cups loose black tea
30 cardamom pods
6 star anise seed pods
3 tsp rainbow peppercorns (meaning a mix of all different colored ones. But you could just one color too)
1 Tbsp whole cloves
2 Tbsp fennel seeds
3 cinnamon sticks
2 tsp coriander seeds
candied ginger
I like my chai tea full of yummy spicy flavor! If you don’t know what you like, I would recommend making this as I have prescribed and then if it is too strong for you, add more black tea to dilute the spices. Or if it is too weak for you, up whichever spices you want until you are happy.
Toast all of your spices in an oven set to 350* F for 5-10 minutes or until they start to smell awesome. Once your kitchen is filled with delicious fragrance, take the spices out of the oven and chop them up on a cutting board. Try to cut them into pieces that are as small as possible – especially the cardamom, cinnamon and star anise.
Chop up the candied ginger as well. You can chop as much as you want. I went with 6 or 7 tablespoons of chopped ginger for my tea.
Mix all of this with the black tea and look at how beautiful and nice smelling it is!
To brew: Steep for about 5 minutes in 1 cup of hot water. Add 1/2 cup of milk (whole, fat free, soy, almond, rice, hemp, human, whatever) and stir in as much sugar (or honey, or agave… you get the picture) as you would like.
This would be great as a gift. Placed in a nice jar with instructions for brewing it will look nicer than most things you could buy at the same cost of all the ingredients. This recipe makes enough to fill about two jam jars. The boyfriend and I gave one away for Christmas and happily drank one down ourselves.
