Use your favorite tea bags to brew iced tea. It’s easy! Photo by Katharine Pollak | THE NIBBLE.
June is National Iced Tea Month, inspiring one of our favorite tips:
Brew your own iced tea.
It’s easy to buy bottles of ready-brewed tea, but why pay dollars when you can enjoy it for pennies—and be kind to the environment at the same time?
We picked up two boxes of flavored tea bags from Salada: Pomegranate Berry and Tropical Mango. First we enjoyed them hot.
Then, as the weather quantum-leaped into summer, we enjoyed them iced, brewing the tea in our favorite Breville Tea Maker (you can easily boil water in a tea kettle and brew the tea in a large mixing bowl).
The fruit gives a natural sweetness to the tea, so no extra sweetener was necessary.
We let the brewed tea cool, then pour it into empty water bottles and iced tea bottles we’d saved for the purpose. If we’d had room in the fridge, we’d have a pitcher—but we also enjoy the grab-and-go convenience of our home-brewed tea in 16-ounce bottles.
We love the flavor of these fruity iced teas, and we also love the math:
Box Of 20 Flavored Salada Tea Bags: $3.00
Amount Of Tea Brewed From Them: More than 20 bottles’ worth*
One Bottled Of Tea: $1.59 to $1.79 or more (one flavored tea bag: 15¢)
Amount Saved: $52.65* (that’s a weekly savings for us, as we drink several bottles a day)
Benefit To Environment: Good
*We used two tea bags to brew tea that filled 3.5 16-ounce bottles, or 35 bottles worth from one box of 20 tea bags. At $1.59/bottle for ready-made tea, our $3.00 box of tea made $55.65 worth of $1.59 bottles.
Brew your favorite tea flavors—we also brew jasmine, lemongrass, plain black and green teas, among others.
We loved the old food pyramid. But not everyone likes to read charts as much as we do, or count off the number of fruit, veggie and grain servings.
The original food pyramid, launched by the USDA in 1992, included the four food groups stacked in the shape of a pyramid with the number of recommended servings a person should eat from each group in a day. The widest part of the pyramid depicted the foods that should make up most of the diet (cereals and grains). The top of the pyramid, indicating the group that should be eaten in small amounts, was fats.
In 2005, the USDA revised the pyramid, expanding the number of food groups to six and adding a person walking up steps on the side of the pyramid to emphasize the need for exercise.
But it wasn’t popular with some nutritionists; and it for sure had no visible impact on the increase of child (and adult) obesity rates.
So long pyramid, hello plate. Image courtesy MyPlate.com.
The new guideline, MyPlate, is a dramatic departure: a simple visual so that people can eat healthy at every meal. The visual has four colored sections representing fruits, vegetables, grains and proteins. Next to the plate is a smaller circle representing dairy products.
Now, instead a huge plate of pasta with a small salad or a large piece of meat and potatoes with a few broccoli florets, one can look at the plate and see that at least half of it should be grains and vegetables. (Pasta is a grain—but that grain shouldn’t occupy 100% of the plate.)
On ChooseMyPlate.com, the USDA emphasizes several important nutrition messages: eat smaller portions, make at least half the plate fruits and vegetables and avoid sugary drinks.
Here’s the advice from the USDA (none of it is news):
Balance Your Calories
Enjoy your food, but eat less of it.
Avoid oversized portions.
Eat More Healthy Foods
Make half your plate fruits and vegetables.
Make at least half of your grains whole grains.
Switch to fat-free or low-fat (1%) milk.
Foods to Reduce
Salt: Compare sodium in foods like soup, breads, and frozen meals—and choose the foods with the lower amount of sodium.
Many people use olive oil and canola oil as healthy fats. But is your healthy oil expeller pressed (good) or chemically extracted (not as good)?
Expeller pressed oils (also known as cold pressed oils) are those that have been extracted from fruits (avocados, olives, etc.), nuts, seeds and grains by expeller pressing.
A completely natural process, the source material has been squeezed in an expeller machine—an old-fashioned mechanical press. Some types of oils may then be refined using a steam filtration process.
The best oils are produced this way, and only oils produced this way are 100% natural.
Expeller pressed oils are typically more expensive because the pressed olives, nuts, etc. yield only about two-thirds as much oil as they would with chemical extraction.
Producers choose a lower yield and a pure product, rather than soaking the fruits/seeds/grains in chemicals, which can leave residues in the oil.
Is your olive oil expeller pressed and free of chemicals, or has it been extracted with a petrochemical? Photo by Liv Friis -Larsen | IST.
Even an oil labeled “virgin” does not guarantee the absence of chemicals. The word “virgin” refers to the lower acidity level of an olive oil. You need to see the words “expeller pressed” or “cold pressed.” (More about virgin olive oil.)
Expeller pressed oil are 100% natural, free of chemical solvents, additives and preservatives. Because they are less volatile, they evaporate less when heated; so you can use less when cooking. This can offset the higher price.
Another benefit: oils with a high level of saturated fat, such as coconut oil, contain fewer triglycerides than common vegetable oil (and thus have less saturated fat) when they are expeller pressed. Canola oil becomes lower in saturated fat than chemically extracted olive oil, and higher in Vitamin E, Omega 3 and Omega 6.
What is chemically-extracted oil?
If you don’t purchase oils that are labeled expeller pressed or cold press, your oil has been processed with hexane, a petroleum derivative (also known as a petro-organic compound). It is then further processed with phosphoric acid and other additives.
You’ll want many bites of these whoopie pies. Photo by River Soma | THE NIBBLE.
We’ve had many a whoopie pie, and can attest that the absolute best are from artisan baker WannaHavaCookie.
We wannahav lots of these cakelike cookies:* perfect recipes of moist cake and buttercream. Each one is a pillow of comfort food.
*A whoopie pie is not a pie, but a sandwich cookie. It’s made not from cookies, but from cake. Confusing? Well, that’s how the industry classifies it. A cookie is a handheld food; a piece of cake requires a fork.
Send any dad an assortment of scrumptious Wannahavacookie Whoopie Pie Classics.
The mixed dozen includes chocolate, red velvet and vanilla cake whoopie pies (the best red velvet cake we’ve ever had). They’re filled with chocolate, vanilla, raspberry, mint and peanut butter buttercream fillings, and are packaged in a reusable bucket tin.
WHOOPIE PIE TRIVIA: Legend credits an unnamed Amish woman with the invention of the whoopie pie. She allegedly took some leftover cake and frosting and made a handheld treat for her husband’s lunch box. He opened his lunch box and exclaimed, “Whoopie.” However, according to food historians, the real credit likely goes to a Boston bakery that created the whoopie pie sometime during the Depression. Details.
