Photo: Alexia

While June is nearly over, it's still worth noting that June is National Iced Tea Month. I didn't know that a few weeks ago when I started my quest for better iced tea (or I would have written this up sooner).

Personally, my quest started from a different set of motivations.

• I like tea, but 200°F beverages and 90°F temperatures don't really mix well.
• I enjoy a good meal, but can't stand wine and don't drink alcohol. The complexities in fine tea offer the possibilities of matching high quality tea to food in the same ways that wine usually is matched. In short, I think it can offer a way to have a more sophisticated beverage with my meals than soda, water or milk while staying away from alcohol.
• Nearly every iced tea "recipe" I find pretty much disqualifies itself from contributing to the conversation by using Lipton tea bags as their gold standard against which "good" iced tea should be measured. Given that fans of coffee don't hold Folgers up as a benchmark, or $2 wine or McDonald's as the pinnacle of hamburger cuisine, the pulverized bits of tea that are in Lipton bags are the starting point, not the end.

So, I've started on a journey to come up with better iced teas for myself. Like I said, I started with the standard "Lipton recipe" and process, which goes something like this:

1. Boil 4 cups of water.
2. Put a couple of tea bags into it and let them brew for about twice as long as "normal".
3. Pour that into a 2 quart pitcher.
4. Fill the pitcher with ice.
5. Pour into glass with ice.

Sweet tea adds anywhere from 1/2 to a cup of sugar to step 3. I generally do like my tea sweetened, but often, the sugar is pumped too high because the tea is really astringent and needs the sweetening in order to smooth over that flavor.

I dropped into my local tea shop and they actually had a little flyer making recommendations of varieties that make good iced tea. Taking that as a good starting point, I bought half a dozen varieties, some from the list and some I just wanted to try and have been drinking the resulting teas over the last couple of weeks. I'll be buying more from the list as I get through the first batch.

I bought:

• Hunan Black
• Formosa Choicest Oolong (which I drink regularly as a hot tea)
• Mauritius Black, which has a lovely vanilla note to it.
• China Black Special, which might be a bit too smoky for me.
• Big Red Robe Oolong
• Longevity Oolong

Along with messing with the starting teas, I've been trying varying levels of sugar and using other sweeteners as well. It's clear that some teas need far less sweetening, even to taste like "sweet tea", like the Mauritius, for which 3/4 cup was so overly sweet it made me want to gag. It was much better when I dialed the sugar way back.

The downside to iced tea as wine substitute is that iced tea doesn't keep very well. A day or so later, it's pretty nasty, but you can make a fresh pitcher really quickly, so I don't have a problem with that. The fact that this is true when iced tea is made from scratch, is why bottled iced tea kind of creeps me out. Exactly what stabilizing chemicals and preservatives are necessary to keep it in exactly the same state for months on end?

At any rate, I know that there are a lot of people out there who either stay away from alcohol for ethical reasons, personal reasons, or just for taste reasons, but really want to have a nice drink with their meals. Between Seven Cups, The Tea Source and Adagio Teas alone, there are hundreds of different varieties worth trying out as part of my quest. From deep earthy puerh's to light white teas, there's surely as much rich complexity there as there is in wine and iced tea can be elevated from just another nozzle on the soda fountain to a beverage suitable as part of any gourmet meal.

Last weekend, my family had its "Christmas" celebration. My sister had been out of the country since November. Since we already usually have that celebration on New Year's Day to completely sidestep all of the extended family bickering that can come when everyone wants to have theirs during the same time slots, it wasn't that weird to have it later.

Besides, it's much colder in February this time around than December was, so it actually felt more like Christmas anyway. And, without the gigantic pressure of an entire retail industry shoving the day down our throats, it had a more natural family feel anyway.

So, last week, I got a call *from* my sister asking if I'd be willing to make a key lime pie and bring it along. I made one 2 years before (along with butterscotch cream pie and chocolate cream pie) and she'd been thinking about during much of her stay, working in a Jamaican orphanage on the top of a mountain. Figuring that you can't really turn down a sister that you love, much less someone who was willing to do 2 months of charity work in less than ideal conditions, I made it.

Actually, I made 3.

See, I mentioned at work that I was going to the grocery store after work to pick up limes and that I hoped they were decent this time of year. One thing led to another and someone said that it'd be tasty if I brought one in to work too. So, I figured, why not? I'll make 2. Then, I got back to work and Shelly called and said that I should probably make 2 because she remembered it going quickly last time. But, because she didn't know about pie #2 yet, hers was actually pie #3.

The thing is, though, that key lime pie is one of the easiest pies to make "from scratch" and is an easy way to impress people when you're asked to bring a dessert. So, I thought I'd share.


Key Lime Pie - Serves 8 slices

Optional:
1/2 cup bottled lime or key lime juice


The bottled lime juice is in case you don't want to spend the time extracting and straining that much juice out of the 4 limes. And, the graham cracker crust could be made by hand, but I don't bother. What I do to the crust makes it work and it tastes fine. Much of the complaint about the store-bought crusts is because they use vegetable shortening instead of butter, which I remedy in the pursuit of a more firm, crunchy crust.

At any rate, preheat the oven to 325°F.

Take the eggs and seperate 4 of the yolks off in a bowl. The remaining whole egg and the egg whites go into another bowl and get beaten.

Melt the butter in the microwave and get a pastry brush. I prefer the silicon ones as you tend to waste less getting stuck in the brush.

Brush a coating of butter into the crust, followed by a coating of the beaten egg wash. You want the butter to cover completely and the egg wash to be as thin as you can get it without missing anywhere.

Put the crust in the oven for 15-20 minutes. What you're after is golden toasting and you'll smell it when that happens.

In the mean time, you need to scrape the zest off of the limes into the bowl with the egg yolks. You only want the green part of the peel, not the white pith underneath. The smaller the bits are the better.

Beat the zest and the egg yolks together for a couple of minutes.

Then, scrape the sweetened condensed milk out of the can and into the egg mixture and beat *that* until it's blended.

If you're using the fresh lime juice, you need to end up with 1/2 cup of squeezed and strained juice, otherwise, use the limes in your Diet Coke and use 1/2 cup of bottled juice. Put the lime juice into the bowl and mix until blended.

Let this sit for about 20 minutes at room temperature. The lime juice will work on the eggs and the whole mixture will thicken.

To completely set it up, though, we'll bake it for about 15 minutes in a 300°F oven, until it still moves when you shake it, but it's completely set.

Let it cool and refrigerate it for 3 hours before topping and serving.

The easy way to top it is with Cool Whip or canned whipped cream. If you want to make your own whipped cream:


3/4 cup heavy whipping cream
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla


Put that in your electric mixer (or prepare to earn your stripes doing it by hand) and beat it until it is at the "stiff peaks" level. That's when you can pull the whisk out of the mixture, turn it upside-down and the mixture will stand up on its own without tipping over.

Spread the whipped cream across the pie, cut and serve.

Oh, and in case it isn't obvious, this pie is generally more suitable for adults than kids. I wouldn't try serving it to a room full of 8 year olds.

A week or so ago, I noticed that Seven Cups Tea had some of the stuff I've grown to like, Rou Gui and I ordered some, along with a little bit of some other stuff I wanted to try. Fast forward to Tuesday, when a box arrived from them. I tore it open to find it full of the items that someone in Florida had ordered.

By the time I got around to contacting them yesterday, I had actually received the right order instead, with a note to not worry about the mixup. So, I now have 3 bags of green tea (which I don't typically enjoy: too grassy). I was sharing this dilemma with a tea-drinking friend and she mentioned cooking with it, which intrigued me. I've cooked lots of Coke/Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, coffee, etc. They are great ways to bring in complex flavors to both savory and sweet dishes.

She pointed me to a pretty cool site for cooking with tea, which looks like a really interesting starting point. It's also a great example of leveraging the web and engaging people with your product. Adagio Teas runs this tea recipe site, called TeaChef. Every month, they choose a tea out out of their catalog and ask participants to come up with recipes for it. They offer free samples to help in that endeavor. They collect the recipes and, after ranking them, etc. present them on the site.

It's a pretty innovative way to engage people and get them excited about a single product that they sell. I'd love to see the sales figures for the selected teas following their feature. I'd be really surprised if there's not a huge spike.

Now, which recipe to try first . . .

Photo: arifm

Over the weekend, it was time to swap out the nutrient bath in the hydroponic garden, and with the forecast for this week making an overnight freeze not out of the realm of possibility, I figured I'd take the whole works inside.

It's now set up in my office, with all of the portable lights I could rig together pointed at it. I had planned on getting more of a "real" light setup before I moved it inside, but clearly my planning mojo is seriously depleted these days.

At any rate, I also made a few modifications to the setup at the same time. Because I bought such large net cups (I'd buy smaller next time), I actually moved the plants together with 2 in each cup, which made more room for future plants. I'm going to have to also do something to pull the stems together better because the stevia is pretty much sprawling out all over to the sides.

With the extra room, it made sense to start some other plants growing, so I filled the "germination station" I bought with vermiculite, basil seed, covered and watered it. I plugged in the heating pad and we'll see next weekend if they start to grow. If only a few germinate, I'll just use them. If lots start growing, I may have lots of basil seedlings if anyone wants some.

As far as bugs, etc. from bringing it inside, I haven't yet found any evidence of that being a problem. Of course, only time will really tell. I may come into my office some morning this week to be greeted by swarming pests.

Beyond the existing setup, I've been scoping out spots in my house where I could set up one or more plants with lighting. Ideally, what I'd love to have eventually is all of my "in stock" produce growing at home. I want to just grab potatoes, onions, herbs, garlic, peppers, salad greens etc. from my own supply, especially when I can control the pesticide/herbicide levels. Of course, some of those items are hard to grow hydroponically or are really inefficient. For now, the stuff I'm planning to grow is enough.

A couple of weeks ago, I ran across a geek who's been applying geeky problem solving to some of the biggest day to day issues people face: weight, fitness, time management. I tend to gravitate to lifehacks that are driven by this kind of practical approach because it's the approach I tend to take in my own solutions.

I lost the 60 pounds that I did last year by calorie counting and climbing stairs. After I moved to an office without the stairs, my progress stalled, so I've been looking for a decent way to get some exercise to bust out of the rut.

His approach to exercise, which he calls "shovelglove" (that will be the last time I call it that for reasons I'll explain in a bit) uses a sledgehammer to mimic real-world work. It's done for 14 minutes a day, driving fenceposts, chopping wood, shoveling, rowing a canoe, etc. The name comes from the fact that he started out primarily doing the shoveling motion and wrapped the hammer in a shirt to avoid scratching the floor.

I'm not going to be calling it by the name he does because: a) I have carpet in all of the rooms I do this in, so won't be doing the cloth wrapper and b) given how it actually uses a sledgehammer and most of the movements aren't shovels, the name no longer makes sense in the other direction either. I just think it needs a marketing makeover. I'm just calling it a sledgehammer workout.

I grew up doing most of the kinds of work that this exercise mimics, so it's kind of reviving muscles that haven't been worked in a long time. Of course, it's sad how 15 minutes of this now can leave me tired when 8 hours of it used to be no problem, but that's the point, isn't it?

I've also been doing bodyweight squats (crouch down and touch the floor, then stand back up) and started out being able to do about 10-15 2 weeks ago and am up to 100 as of Friday.

On the diet end, his approach has an extra level of intrigue, given some of the reading on happiness that I've been doing. Several of my recent book reads have brought up the concept of hedonic adapatation, which is how we gradually get used to good things in our life. The No-S Diet is all about making sweets, snacks and seconds into special occasion events again. It's only in VERY recent American-style society where we've had enough cheap food to make it possible to eat those things on a daily basis. By putting them in on special days on a "sometimes" basis, we also can avoid the constant cycle of hedonic adaptation as well.

Instead of becoming numb to the true pleasure of eating some of the best foods on earth (chocolate, cheesecake and the like), we end up truly savoring and enjoying them when we do eat them. Don't believe me? Take some food you both enjoy and eat regularly. Skip it for the next 10-15 times you normally would eat it. Then have it again and tell me that the first time back isn't WAY better than it usually is.

By putting that back in a little bit at a time, you make the saved-for special foods even better and focus on eating single-plate meals during the week.

That makes his eating approach both sensible as well as appealing to someone who genuinely enjoys food (a little too much). Given how I already pretty much can and do end up doing a calorie count on every plate, I'm going to try some blend of this dietary approach along with the exercise for a while and see what happens.

I can already tell that the exercise is paying off. My legs are not only getting stronger (10 to 100 squats is a huge improvement), but more definition is showing up as well. The same is true on my arms and shoulders too.