Many people buy spiced tea as a fall and holiday favorite; perhaps the most popular is Constant Comment.

But you can make your own with the tea and spices you already have in the kitchen. In addition to black tea, you can make green spice tea or white spice tea, or rooibos (caffeine-free) spice tea, exactly as Ruth Bigelow did when she created Constant Comment tea in 1946.

We’ve seen a lot of recipes for spiced tea made from instant powdered tea, a can of Tang, and a can of powdered lemonade, mixed with nutmeg and cinnamon.

With all due respect to the first three ingredients: Yuck! Make your spice tea with whole-leaf tea and real lemon juice.
 
 
EASY SPICE TEA RECIPE

Ingredients

 
You can keep playing with the spices until you have your perfect recipe. Consider adding cardamom, chocolate, ginger, licorice, and/or peppercorns.

Then, you can fill pouches with your signature tea blend (using loose tea, not bags) and give them as gifts to tea-loving friends.
 
Preparation

1. COMBINE water, cinnamon, and cloves in a medium pan. Bring to a boil; reduce heat. Cover and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from heat.

2. ADD tea bags; steep for 5 minutes. Remove tea bags and spices.

3. SERVE the tea hot or iced with a lemon wedge and choice of sweeteners, although the spice flavors are so exciting that no sweetener is necessary.

[2] It’s easy to make spice tea without special tea bags like these. On the other hand, a tin of spice tea bags makes a nice seasonal gift (© by Aimee Seavey | New England Today).

It can be either.

 
 
MORE TEA

Find more of our favorite teas and recipes in our Gourmet Tea Section and our Tea Glossary.
 
 

They’ve developed this tasty recipe for deviled eggs with bacon and Cheddar cheese—delicious at breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack time.

Prep Time: 30 minutes
Cook Time: 0 minutes
Servings: 24 servings (1 serving = one stuffed egg half)
 
 
RECIPE: DEVILED EGGS WITH BACON & CHEDDAR

Ingredients

Deviled eggs can be made up to 12 hours in advance.

1. CUT cooked eggs lengthwise in half. Remove yolks to medium bowl. Reserve 24 white halves. Finely chop remaining 4 white halves. Save remaining 2 yolks for other use: crumbled into salads, on cooked vegetables, in baked potatoes, etc.

2. MASH yolks with fork. Add mayonnaise, sour cream, mustard, lemon juice and pepper; mix well. Add chopped egg whites, bacon, cheese and chives; mix well.

3. SPOON 1 heaping tablespoon of yolk mixture into each reserved egg white half. Refrigerate, covered, to blend flavors.

4. GARNISH with a dusting of paprika prior to serving.
 
 
COOKING TIPS

Egg Freshness. Very fresh eggs can be difficult to peel. To ensure easily peeled eggs, buy and refrigerate them a week to 10 days in advance of cooking. This “breather” allows the eggs time to take in air, which helps separate the membranes from the shell.

Peeling Tip #1. Hard-cooked eggs are easiest to peel right after cooling. Cooling causes the egg to contract slightly in the shell.

Peeling Tip #2. To peel a hard-boiled egg, gently tap egg on countertop until shell is finely crackled all over. Roll the egg between your hands to loosen the shell. Start peeling at large end, holding egg under cold running water to help ease the shell off.

Storage. In the shell, hard-cooked eggs can be refrigerated safely up to one week. Refrigerate in their original carton to prevent odor absorption. Once peeled, eggs should be eaten that day.

Easy Filling Technique. Here’s the no-mess method: Put the filling in a 1-quart plastic food-storage bag. Push filling toward bottom corner of bag. Snip off about 1/2-inch of corner. Squeeze filling from bag into egg whites.

Picnic Or Tailgate Food Safety Tip. Place filling in plastic bag; carry cooked white halves and filling mixture separately in cooler. Fill eggs on the spot, pressing filling out of snipped corner of bag.
 
MORE DEVILED EGG RECIPES

Who knew you could make jam without cooking it? That you could set it in the freezer? That it could be such a fun activity?

And that freezer jam is low sugar, with just one-fourth of the sugar and fewer calories than conventional jam (it’s less thick and sticky, too)?

The next time berries or any other favorite fruit are at a good price; pick up four cups’ worth. Then, you just mash it into a purée, mix in the sugar and a special pectin, No Cook Freezer Jam Fruit Pectin.

While we haven’t tried it yet, we’re planning to mix in Splenda and see how we do with sugar-free freezer jam.

See how easy it is in the video below. Try it and let us know how you like it.

For the differences between chutney, jam, jelly, marmalade, preserves and more, check out our Jam Glossary.

Superb fruit flavor, exquisite texture, creative recipes: These are jams (and marmalades) to treasure. They’re a treat for the table, and a simply delectable gift (at $8.00 per jar).

Far beyond a bread spread, these joyous jams can be enjoyed during every meal of the day, plus snacks. You’ll see the 20 different ways we use them in the full review.

In fact, just thinking about Emily G’s jams make us want to have a snack right now. So we’ll cut this piece short and send you to the longer review.

And if you don’t know the difference between chutney, jam, jelly, marmalade and preserves, we’ve got that covered in our Jam Glossary.

Make your daily chocolate nibble fairly-
traded. Photo of Equal Exchange Minis by
Elvira Kalviste.

While you won’t see many articles about it, cacao is an agricultural product that uses child slave labor in the fields. Just search for “chocolate slave labor” and you’ll read all about it.

Start with this article from CNN. The journalists document that “child labor, trafficking and slavery are rife in an industry that produces some of the world’s best-known brands.”

So, with a small effort to help make the world a better place, we buy Fair Trade/fairly traded products whenever we can. Especially for Halloween, we don’t want to give kids chocolate that enslaves other kids.

Equal Exchange chocolate is a producer/packager of chocolate, cocoa, coffee and tea, supporting small-scale farmers and their families in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Panama and Peru.

All of the products are organic as well as fairly-traded. The company motto: “Small Farmers, Big Change.”

Fair Trade ensures that farmers are paid fair value for their beans. In more than a few situations, brokers buy up crops for less than it costs to produce them, keeping small farmers in an endless loop of poverty.

Fair value affords money for adult labor (enabling the farmers’ children to go to school instead of working in the fields), a minimum standard of living and sound agricultural practices that protect both workers and the environment.

This issue impacts mass-marketed chocolate brands. In the case of the expensive gourmet chocolate, the chocolate makers are already paying top dollar to the best farmers (those fortunate to have the land in the areas that produce the best beans) to secure the limited supply of the world’s finest cacao (so you can feel good about paying $6.00 or more for that chocolate bar).

“Fair Trade” is a trademarked term authorized by TransFair USA, a nonprofit organization that audits transactions between U.S. companies offering Fair Trade Certified™ products and the international suppliers from whom they source. TransFair is one of 20 members of Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO). Read more on the issues of Fair Trade.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FAIR TRADE & “FAIRLY TRADED”

Only products certified by TransFair USA can use the trademarked term, “Fair Trade.” Products certified by other organizations must call themselves “fairly traded.”

EQUAL EXCHANGE HOLIDAY GIFTS

If you want to buy products that are ethically sourced, Equal Exchange and other producers are more than happy to provide them.

Equal Exchange has candy bars for stocking stuffers, boxes of minis (single bites of chocolate) for those who like to nibble and tins of cocoa, along with tea, coffee and gift baskets.

Shop online at Shop.Equal.Exchange.com.

And spread the word about Fair Trade.

Equal Exchange’s fairly traded, organic candy bars. Photo by Elvira Kalviste | THE NIBBLE.