Daily Dec #3: coffee & me

[topaz119]

wendy asked me how I take my coffee, and the short answer is: tea. :D.

I really don’t drink coffee at all—I occasionally go for a good coffee-flavored ice cream to counter-balance some serious chocolate (and I have a recipe for a Baked Alaska using coffee ice cream for which I’m trying to find a suitable occasion) but I usually don't even like mocha candy.

Tea, on the other hand, is a big thing around my house. I have one of those over-the-door shoe organizers (with the clear plastic pockets, right?) on my pantry door and that’s where all my little boxes of tea live in the kitchen. I usually do Earl Grey in the morning (no milk, just a bit of lemon, which is all kinds of wrong, I know, but I like what I like) and I’ll end the day with something herbal (and decaf!), usually a Lemon/Red Zinger or a Peppermint (chamomile makes me feel like I’m drinking the proverbial ‘hot leaf juice’ and let’s just not talk about green tea at all.) If I’m feeling bored (or if the boys have used up the last of my EG), I have some jasmine tea to mix things up a bit. I used to do the fancy blends from Teavana, etc, but in one of our ever-present reorganizations at the office, I ended up on the same team as two fabulous Indian women who have shared with me with their own custom chai blends (I think their mothers make them up in bulk) and so I will do at least one chai latte every afternoon. My go-to Starbucks order is an iced passion tea if the weather is hot, or I’ll do the seasonal syrup in a hot chai (er, not the peppermint stuff—that goes in hot chocolate, but the gingerbread syrup is pretty tasty in their chai.)

So, yeah, tl;dr: How I take my coffee is TEA. ♥

Comments

[endeni]

/How I take my coffee is TEA. ♥/ - Eheh, me too. Tea, no sugar, lemon. I don't care if it's not how you're supposed to take it, it's how I like it. ;)
/(chamomile makes me feel like I’m drinking the proverbial ‘hot leaf juice’ and let’s just not talk about green tea at all/ - Totally, someone after my own heart. :D

[topaz119]

I am amazed at how many people are right there with me--I always feel like the odd one out (when they built our new office, they put a custom Starbucks in the lobby even though there's a proper retail location less than a block away, that's how much coffee gets drunk at our offices.) Yay tea!

[endeni]

Eheh, trying living in Italy where espresso is more of a ritual than a simple drink. Every-time I accompany someone to take a coffe in bar and don't order one for myself I can almost feel the eyes of the barman silently judging me... :D

[topaz119]

Oh, yes, I can only imagine! My mother's family is from southern Italy so "coffee" in my childhood == espresso (and a little grappa) which might have had something to do with my not liking it now...

[endeni]

Eheh, really? My relatives often drink espesso with some homemade anise liquor my granpa makes... *shakes head*

[topaz119]

Oh, anise -- I can't take that flavor either. I'm such a failure as an Italian--I even got my grandmother to make non-anise flavored pizzelle for her holiday baking.

[endeni]

Eheh, I'm not crazy about it either.
Anyway, I didn't know about your Italian roots. Did your relatives pass along any of the language? :)

[topaz119]

No, not really much language. When I was a little girl (very little, maybe 4 or 5), my great-grandfather (whom I called Nonno) was still alive and there are lots of pictures of me sitting with him. Everyone tells me that he had lost all his English by then (he was very old, close to 100) but I remember talking to him. Possibly I talked in English and he answered in Italian, but every Sunday that my grandmother (his daughter) took me to her sister's house (where he lived) for dinner, we spent the whole afternoon together, either in his little garden or with my dolls if it was raining.

Have you ever seen the movie Moonstruck? The house that Loretta's family lives in is like straight out of my memories of Tia Angeline's house (though it's set in Brooklyn and we lived in small coal mining towns in the West Virginia mountains.)

[endeni]

Aw, thank you for sharing you're memories with me, dear. I used to call my great-grandmother "nonna" too, "bisnonna" (AKA great-grandmother, literally twice a grandmother) is too much of a mouthful for a small child.
And, yes yes, I remember Moonstruck, that's a nice frame of reference, thank you. :)

home blend chai

[jenna_thorn]

I want to work in your office. My guys just come back from China with weird rice candy.

A funny: since our office supplies coffee and hot chocolate in the break rooms but not tea, our Brit (and Aussie and one Canadian) distributors have learned that I have tea at my desk, so they'll come in for meetings and make an excuse to drop by to visit and steal a bag of tea. 8-)

Re: home blend chai

[topaz119]

They saw me with a box of chai (one of the supermarket brands) and took pity on me. And then I think their mothers got competitive, so I'm set for *years*.

We finally got our coffee service to include a little rack of tea, but it's shoved over to one side, hidden in the corner behind the machine that brews/holds the regular type coffee and the *other* keurig/nespresso type machine for the fancy coffees (and hot choc, too, yay.)

[st_aurafina]

Tea! *hearts it*

[topaz119]

yay!

[rikes]

I ended up on the same team as two fabulous Indian women who have shared with me with their own custom chai blends (I think their mothers make them up in bulk)

Nice! I'm also a tea instead of coffee person. But you seem to have much better dealers. ;)

[topaz119]

I am so surprised by all the tea drinkers on my flist/circle!

[rikes]

Maybe it's a fannish thing? I only really started drinking tea after several trips to the UK to meet fannish friends! :D (Finland is very much a coffee country, I just never learned to like it!)

[pouncer]

Yay tea!

[topaz119]

My mom is a heavy tea drinker, so I always raid her stash, too.

[sperrywink]

I would have to answer coca-cola. I can't stand coffee OR tea. Hot drinks in general are a no-no. *g*

[topaz119]

Well, you know I am totally addicted to Diet Coke once the morning/afternoon tea is done!

[hamsterwoman]

how I take my coffee, and the short answer is: tea. :D.

Hee! :)

I do drink coffee, for the caffeine boost, but I don't enjoy it, and my hot drink of choice is definitely tea as well.

Earl Grey in the morning (no milk, sugar, or lemon; I associate sweet stuff in my tea with being sick, 'cos tea with honey for a sore throat or strong tea with sugar for an upset stomach were things I grew up with); occasionally, if I'm in England or using tea as a coffee substitute, I'll put milk/cream in it, but that's about it.

I also end the day with herbal tea (Tension Tamer or Bedtime Tea or something like that; chamomile by itself is boring, but I do like it in more interesting blends).

And chai latte is my Starbucks drink of choice (though I've never tried any flavored variety, hmm....) I also used to really like the Tully's tea lattes, back when we had one around here.

Shoe organizer to store tea is a neat idea! We have 2-3 shelves taken up by tea boxes, and it's hard to access the ones in the back, as well as taking up a lot of room... I need to figure out if we have a place to hang a shoe organizer, 'cos I really like that approach!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_luaineach/]

I associate sweet stuff in my tea with being sick

I do, as well, and have noticed that when I begin craving hot sweet tea (I usually drink all my things "black", not being a liker of sweet thing), it's a pretty good indicator that I'm coming down with something and will be popping symptoms in the next day or two. So I don't know if it is in fact something my body needs that makes me crave it, or a regression to childhood sick-time comfort-drink of strong tea and sugar as a childhood thing (and dipping graham crackers in to it!)

[topaz119.livejournal.com]

I get all my caffeine from Diet Coke (not Coke Zero) and tea. I never really had the taste for coffee and then when I was pregnant with #2Son, the coffee maker at the office dripped constantly onto the warming plate so there was always the smell of burned coffee in half the office area. ugh. That pretty much finished it off for me.

My 'pantry' is a tiny section of the laundry room that got walled off and had a regular door installed and there's just enough room between the shelves and the door jamb for small things to fit. I keep the everyday cloth napkins tucked into some of the slots, but 80 percent of it is tea. I use those over-the-door hangers everywhere--never for shoes, though! The front hall closet has one with gloves and mittens and dog leashes, and the linen closet has one with all the different color uniform socks from all the sports teams over the years (and BabyBoy's karate belts.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_luaineach/]

Shoe organizer is genius!

I also drink much more tea than coffee (tea, daily; coffee, 1-2x a week) and I actually like coffee that much more. I drink a wide variety of both actual teas and herbal "teas", but usually start my day with earl grey or one of the "breakfast tea" blends (english, irish), I drink oolong, green, and/or matcha -- usually iced -- in the afternoon, and then also have some sort of "calming" blend in the p.m.

[topaz119.livejournal.com]

Oh, I forgot matcha! I do like that, and I like to cook with it, too (ice creams and cream fillings, etc.)

I use those over-the-door shoe hangers for everything but shoes! Gloves and scarves and colored soccer & baseball uniform socks are especially handy.

[ancarett]

Tea is the only thing for me, too. I joke that I'm a tea refugee from the U.S. to Canada because I got tired of restaurants there doing it wrong.

[topaz119.livejournal.com]

Given where I live now (Southeastern US), I always have to specify (VERY LOUDLY) that I want HOT TEA, because if you just ask for 'tea' around here, you usually end up with it iced and sweetened, which is not something I've ever gotten the taste for.

[msktrnanny.livejournal.com]

Wow. I had you firmly in Camp Coffee! The shoe organizer thing is brilliant! Wish my tea stash was small enough to steal the idea. It's a sickness, I tell you.

Have you done tea at Grand Floridian? One of my very favorite quiet spots at Disney.

[topaz119.livejournal.com]

No, never with coffee! ugh. BabyBoy sent me a text from camp this year saying Also, I have discovered coffee and it is a magical thing, and then kept trying to get me to drink/try whatever concoction he had from Sbux during Dragon Con, but I still can't get into it.

I haven't gotten to try the GF tea--it looks lovely and I love that little area where they hold it, but I just haven't quite made it there yet. We'll probably be at the GF this NYE, but we don't usually get there until after tea (we take over the corner of Mizner's and spend the evening there listening to the band and just hanging out. Very nice.)

Some friends & I do tea at the Ritz every few months--we've even had a few baby showers there, too. It's really such a nice, laid-back way to get together.