I have made a cup of tea. If that news made you spit out your Honey Nut Loops in shock, then prepare yourself for more: I have made two cups of tea.
A unkempt gentleman at the back, in the cheap seats, puts up his hand and shouts: “I am not impressed by that at all. What’s the big deal?”
Well, sir, the moderately sized deal is that – how can I put this? – I made the actual tea, and not just the cuppa as such. It was rosehip tea.
The doings came straight from the garden. I’d heard folk praising rosehips for health reasons, and knew that some grew in my garden. But, checking it out on YouTube, I saw people using all sorts of fancy equipment, and concluded that I was far too busy for that sort of thing.
However, more recently, I discovered a video by a lady, who’d made rosehip tea for decades, and demystified the whole thing: you don’t need to cut them open, remove the seeds and so on. They’re going to be strained into the cup anyway, so use the whole thing.
All you do is put them in a blender (or juicer, in my case), then let them steep for a few hours in newly boiled water. Then you pour it straight from the pot, through a strainer, into the cup and voila – as the Chinese say – you’ve a healthy cup of tea.
My tea was just lightly pink in colour. I hadn’t used too many rosehips as I was frightened I’d get poisoned, and thought it would be better to get poisoned a little bit than a lot. Mother Nature is always trying to kill us, and I don’t trust her an inch.
But the tea tasted fine, even kinda sweet, though I did add a bit of honey. I’ll need to go out and get more rosehips. There aren’t as many in the garden as I’d anticipated.
True, I’d hacked back a lot of the dog rose on which the rosehips grow, because it is monstrous, spiky, slightly scary stuff that wants to take over the world. The size they grow to is extraordinary.
But I was well pleased at making the tea. I’d been convinced that this sort of do-it-yourself natural malarkey wouldn’t work for me. Culinary DIY was bound to prove as fruitless as normal DIY, or Destroy It Yourself, as I call it.
Now I can hold my head up, confident that I could live in the wild for years, surviving happily on berries, nuts, seeds, and oven chips left to bake in the sun.
I wonder what other cups of tea I could make? Flowers next Spring maybe. There’s mint in the garden, which would surely be fine.
I’ll still drink industrial strength, “proper” brickies’ tea, mind, particularly since a recent scientific-style study found that strong tea lowered your blood pressure.
Oddly enough, I’d made more of an effort to drink tea rather than coffee recently and, when I had my blood pressure checked, the nurse said: “It’s come way down.” So maybe there’s some truth in this, even though I’d read it in a newspaper.
But there you are, folks: drink tea. Strong tea, weak tea, herbal tea and rosehip tea. For tea is the berries!
More in this series:
RAB MCNEIL: I scream, you scream…the pleasure of a choc ice in the freezer
