Avocado Leaf Tea

I drink a lot of tea, particularly during the cooler months. Once I've had my morning cup of coffee, I switch to a milder beverage, preferably one with less caffeine. Too much of that stuff not only makes me jittery, but also gives me heart palpitations. Rooibos is my go-to, and while I really enjoy it, sometimes I am looking for a different flavor profile.

Then I discovered tea made from avocado leaves. I know! Though avocado toast doesn't thrill me, I do find the beverage made by steeping the leaves of the avocado tree rather exciting. For one thing, it's actually quite delicious--smooth, and non-tannic--and naturally caffeine-free, which is a huge plus. And it is purported to have all sorts of health benefits. Avocado leaves contain flavonoids, polyphenols, terpenes, and serotonin, substances which have been known to reduce the risk of cancer, heart disease, and stroke, help kidney function, lower blood pressure and cholesterol, elevate mood, promote alertness and memory retention, reduce stress, and aid in forming healthy sleep patterns. All the things.

I realize I'm making a cup of tea sound like a miracle cure, but there is strong scientific evidence that tea made from the leaves of Persea americana Mill can control blood pressure and help reduce the formation of kidney stones. Avocado Leaf Tea (the brand name, so easy to remember) has information on their web site, along with links to health studies that corroborate this.

I brought home a few samples of Avocado Leaf Tea from the Fancy Food Show last year. It was summer and I don't drink as much tea then so put them away and forgot about it. When I stumbled upon the bags recently and made a pot, I realized how much I liked the stuff. So I ordered both the natural and lemon flavors (flavored with lemongrass and honeybush, a relative of rooibos) which have become my brew of choice recently. And they don't have me bouncing off the walls, like my recent experience with a couple of pots of Earl Grey.

If you're looking for a healthful tea beverage, I recommend you try Avocado Leaf Tea. The folks who own the company are really nice too, and I like to support and promote nice people who make good things.

* Any products in this post that are mentioned by name may have been provided to Minxeats by the manufacturer. However, all opinions belong to Minxeats. Amazon links earn me $! Please buy!

Posted on Minxeats.com.

Flashback Friday - Tea for Two

This post originally appeared on Minxeats.com on February 20, 2008.
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Did you know that a venti drip coffee at Starbucks contains 480mg of caffeine? Even their decaf has 20mg. Because caffeine tends to give me heart palpitations, I've started to drink more tea (an average cup of tea has between 40 - 60mg), particularly rooibos (caffeine free).

I've always liked a good cup of tea. Ok, I lie - not always. When I was a kid, the only tea we had around the house was that familiar red and yellow box of Lipton's, and it was always served with sugar and lemon, or when someone had a cold, honey and lemon. Lemon was a constant. Now, I think it's fine for iced tea, but I abhor it in hot tea. When my family visited London for the first time in 1976 and tried English Breakfast with sugar and cream, it was a revelation. I could get into drinking tea this way! It was like dessert in a cup, sweet and creamy, but also the tea flavor was bold and not obscured by the strident flavor of citrus. And to this day, that's the way I prefer my cuppa camellia sinensis.

Some teas aren't meant to be had with milk, or sugar for that matter. Over the years I've come to appreciate herbal teas, served neat, and always have tea with Chinese food (jasmine or hurn peen) or sushi (green, preferably genmaicha). It aids with digestion, and somehow just seems right.

I'm drinking more tea than ever these days and have been exploring different brands. Our supermarkets carry the usual suspects: Twinings, Celestial Seasonings, and the ubiquitous Lipton's. I do like some flavors of Celestial Seasonings, particularly the Madagascar Vanilla Red and the impossible-to-find Roastaroma. We keep tins of loose Twinings Earl Grey and English Breakfast tea in the cupboard, but their quality seems to have declined a bit over the years. Lipton has a place on the shelf as well, but only for use in iced tea. Mr Minx and I like to brew up a few plain orange pekoe bags along with several flavored tea bags (usually CS Zingers) in a saucepan of water, and dilute it with enough cold water to fill a gallon jug. This is our usual summertime libation.

As for new and different teas, I stumbled upon the difficult to pronounce Tea Gschwender, a German company that sells its wares here in the US via a shop in Chicago and online. They have a large selection of teas, from black to white and everything in between. I particularly like their red, or rooibush teas. Not actually a tea, rooibos is a member of the legume family, the leaves of which are used to brew a tealike beverage that is completely caffeine-free and full of beneficial phytochemicals.

Another recent discovery is Zhena's Gypsy Teas, an all-organic, Fair Trade product. The rose-flavored Gypsy Love is delicious, with or without milk and sugar.

Mr Minx and I tend to like our tea on the strong side. A tea bag dunked in water just doesn't do it, and we don't mess around with cutesy pots and infusers. Instead, we use our trusty 4-cup Mr Coffee. Two bags in the basket, or a couple tablespoons of loose tea in a coffee filter, brews up quite a nice pot. Several pots, actually. Sometimes I can get two or three out of a single batch of leaves before it starts to taste weak. My current favorite is Winter Magic (pictured above), a rooibos from Tea Gschwender, with cinnamon and almonds bits, cardamom husks, red sandalwood, and cardamom seeds.

I still drink coffee a couple of times a week - decaf - but have really started to prefer a cup of tea most mornings. What's your favorite caffeine-delivery method?



Posted on Minxeats.com.

Boordy Vineyard's Sweetland Cellars Wines

About a month ago, as we toodled up Long Green Pike on our way to visit friends in Forest Hill, we drove past Boordy Vineyards. Not having realized it was so close to us, we decided a visit was in order. That opportunity came more quickly than we anticipated, as we were soon invited to a dinner to celebrate the wine producer's Sweetland Cellars line of wines.

Formerly known as Boordy's "Just for Fun" series, products from the Sweetland Cellars brand are, as the name suggests, on the sweeter side.

Some folks may turn their noses up at sweet wines, but other people will drink nothing but. Personally, I think Moscato and some Rieslings are great "gateway wines" for the uninitiated. I grew up drinking my grandmother's home-made wine, which was very strong and very sweet. A shotglass-full was enough, but it was delicious and fruity. My tastes have expanded over the years and I can appreciate bone-dry wines, but there's still a special place in my heart for the sweeter ones.

Sweetland Cellars offers six wines so far, two whites, three reds, and a dark pink wine--Jazz Berry--that contains primarily strawberry and raspberry juices with some grape. Tango Peach is a Moscato flavored with peaches and White Sangria is infused with mango and citrus. The blueberry-infused Zinberry, the citrus and spice Viva Sangria, and the even spicier Spiced Wassail, round out the line.

While these wines would be great to sip with friends on a fun evening (or all alone in the privacy of your bathtub - we don't judge), we discovered that the Sweetland Cellars wines also pair well with food and can be used as ingredients in cocktails.

After an opportunity to taste the wines and snack on a spread of charcuterie and cheeses by Hampden's The Food Market served in Boordy's barn, we got a little tour of the Sweetland Cellars state-of-the-art winemaking facility, which was completed in 2013. Everything a winemaker needs is in this cathedral-like structure, the result of the De Ford family's many years in the wine business.

After the tour, we were treated to a five course small plates-style dinner with cocktail pairings, each including one of Sweetland Cellars wines.

The first course was tuna tartare with "everything" spiced aioli, dried veggies, and wheat toast. The accompanying cocktail, "Peach on the Beach," featured Sweetland Cellars Tango Peach wine. (The recipes for the cocktails we tried and more are on the Sweetland Cellars web site, but I've included them here as well.)

3 oz chilled Tango Peach
1 oz Citron vodka
2 muddled raspberries
Splash 7-up
Ice

The second course was spicy grilled shrimp with a charred pineapple "pudding" and chewy morsels of dehydrated pineapple. The accompanying cocktail was a "White Sangria Fizz," that complemented the sweet pineapple flavors.

3 oz chilled White Sangria
1 oz vodka
2 oz apple juice
Splash of club soda
Ice

Our third course was pan-seared duck breast with cherries, chocolate, and pecans served with a Jazz Berry chocolate martini.

3 parts chilled Jazz Berry
1 part Chocolate vodka

Another meat course of lamb chops with coffee, black garlic, goat cheese, and chimichurri evoked the flavors of India and was served with a "Zinberry Smash" cocktail.

3 oz chilled Zinberry
1 oz vodka
Muddled blueberries
Twist of lemon
Splash ginger ale
Splash tonic or soda water
Sprig of mint
Ice

Finally, we enjoyed desserts made by one of Sweetland's employees. The mini blueberry cheesecakes used Zinberry wine in the glaze, while the peaches on the peach cupcakes were poached in Tango Peach.


It was a fun night. Everything was so beautiful, from the grounds to the food, hell, even the people. The De Ford family was so nice and willing to answer any and all questions about their Sweetland Cellars products, and offered a good introduction to a line of wines with which we were not familiar. Time to stock up so I can drink alone in the bathtub experiment with wine cocktails to go with our own dinners.




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Cookbook Review - Cheers to Vegan Sweets

While I don't bake often, I do enjoy whipping up something sweet and cake-like from time to time. I have plenty of baking cookbooks on my shelves, but couldn't pass up a review copy of Kelly Peloza's new one, Cheers to Vegan Sweets: Drink-Inspired Vegan Desserts: From the Cafe to the Cocktail Lounge, Turn Your Sweet Sips Into Even Better Bites! Talk about a specialty cookbook! Not only are the 125 recipes for cookies, brownies, cupcakes, and cakes inspired by beverages (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic), but they're all vegan.

Vegan, of course, means no butter or eggs. Instead, the recipes call for vegan margarine (like Earth Balance, which is actually very good and far far FAR tastier than any other of those margarine products that taste like fake-butter popcorn topping), and in some cases, coconut oil, both available at Whole Foods and some larger supermarkets. As for egg replacers - there are none, which makes this cookbook accessible for pretty much everyone, since there are few hard-to-find ingredients.

I wanted to try every recipe, well, all of them except for the Kool-Aid cookies, but started with the bourbon banana bread, as I had three very ripe bananas begging to be turned into something. The result was pretty delicious, with strong banana flavor and a hint of bourbon, and the texture was moist and fluffy. Rather than bake it in a large loaf pan for 1 hour, I used three smaller ones that I baked for 35 minutes. They were perfect.

If you're vegan, have vegan friends, or aren't vegan at all, Cheers to Vegan Sweets might be a fun addition to your cookbook shelf. After all, one can certainly substitute real butter for the vegan margarine if they want.

I won't tell.

* Any products in this post that are mentioned by name may have been provided to Minxeats by the manufacturer. However, all opinions belong to Minxeats. Amazon links earn me $! Please buy!



Posted on Minxeats.com.

Product of the Week - Prometheus Springs Elixir

In NY last Sunday, I sampled a product called Prometheus Springs Capsaicin Spiced Elixir. I first tried the pomegranate and black pepper flavor, which had an unusual warmth, partly from the pepper, and partly from the capsaicin - the chemicals that give chiles their heat. Capsaicin is believed to elevate mood by releasing endorphins. Why anyone would think to put it in a beverage is beyond me, but hey, it works. I felt pretty snazzy for a few hours afterwards, despite getting lost in the East Village, wandering far from my intended destination.

In addition to the pomegranate, I also tried the lychee wasabi, which had a brighter flavor and more heat (and a somewhat rank smell), and the lemon ginger. The pomegranate was my favorite of the three. As I was drinking, I thought these beverages would make for fine cocktail mixers, then I realized that most people there were drinking it with prosecco, while I had all three flavors straight up. The company thinks their product would work well with alcohol, too, as there are several drink recipes on their Web site.

Prometheus Springs Elixirs are currently only available at The Natural, 2150 York Road in Timonium, but should be in Whole Foods shortly. If you can find a bottle, do give it a try, as it's very unusual and quite delicious. Just don't attempt to chug-a-lug it, Snapple-style, because you might hurt yourself in the process. :)