#creaming & screaming | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

deadmomjokes · 2 years

Text

I used to hate herbal tea. I drank it for medicinal purposes, but it was a chore. But then I learned The Secret, the one that makes herbal tea not only palatable, but enjoyable. Tasty. Delightful, even. I will tell it to you now:

Herbal tea is not tea.

Duh, you say, but let me explain further.

Herbal tea is not tea, and it will suck if you treat it like tea.

Actual tea, as in the tea plant Camellia sinensis, has very specific steep times and temperatures. This varies by variety (green vs black vs white), but it all comes down to a common factor:

Tea is high in tannins.

Tannins make stuff bitter. Tannins are released from the tea if you heat it too high or too long (again, specifics depend on variety but the point stands). If you steep it too long, BOOM, tannins. You put it in water that is still boiling or hasn’t cooled down enough from boiling? TANNINS. You get nasty, bitter, burnt-grass-tasting tea.

Herbal tea almost universally doesn’t have tannins. This means you almost universally can’t over-steep herbal tea. And in fact, and listen up because this is the practical part of the secret, you need to steep it way longer than actual tea if you want to get the flavors into the water!

Those recommended steep times on your herbal tea box are based off actual tea (black tea to be specific). It’s usually somewhere around 5-7 minutes, but what you actually need is something like 10-15 minutes.

And most conventional tea-making wisdom will tell you to not put the water in too soon after boiling, but again, that’s for tannin-rich Camellia sinensis. You could literally boil* your herbal tea if you wanted. It might make it slightly less sweet depending on variety, and you will probably bust your tea bag doing so, but my point is that you should put as hot of water as you can get into your steeping vessel. As in kettle starts whistling, pour it in immediately over the tea bag. Then let it sit for 10-15 minutes as discussed above.

The only exceptions that I know of personally are meadowsweet, red raspberry leaf, and yarrow, and only one of those is a very common herbal tea ingredient. And honestly, it’s not even high enough in tannins to affect your whole cup if it’s just part of a blend.

So please stop drinking weak plant-adjacent water and start getting the actual flavors you paid for.

*I have actually just dumped herbs in a pot and boiled them and it made a delicious tea. I used lavender, chamomile, lemon balm, and mint, all of which I’d grown myself, and literally just tossed the fresh-picked sprigs into a pot and boiled the crap out of it for close to 10 minutes because I forgot about it while I was rearranging the freezer. It was delicious and not bitter at all despite being a color I can only describe as “positively murky,” and I could taste every single one of the herbs I put in there. It also made my whole apartment smell like a sunny meadow. Do with this information what you will. Am I recommending you boil the devil out of your herbal tea bags? Not necessarily. But I’m also not not recommending it.

#recipes #tea #herbal tea #if i have to read one more 5-7 minute recommendation i'm gonna scream into an envelope and mail it to the marketing dept #looking at YOU teavana #your nutty almond cream blend is PITIFUL before 15 minutes and you may absolutely quote me on that

6K notes · View notes

bluepallilworld · 2 months

Text

A Tear's Soul

Part 1: All is certainly well in this fine world

Mimosa barely had the time to register what was happening before he was warped elsewhere by his happy-go-lucky friend.

He was used to Lint’s instantaneous portals with how often he had been ambushed but the sensation never failed to be truly bizarre.

It felt like dipping your toes in lukewarm water then suddenly you were drenched and dry at the same time. And in a random place you did not ask to go.

The instant the shock runned out of his system, Mimosa whirled around and hit Lint’s head with the side of his hand.

“LINT, COME ON! Couldn’t this at least wait after breakfast? I’m hungry…”

Lint’s only reaction was to giggle so hard she toppled down on the wooden floor.

“Where would be the fun in that? If you really wanted that breakfast, you should have woken up earlier!”

“...You would just have come even earlier if I did that, wouldn’t you?”

She smiled and stood up, whistling and buzzing around.

The kid sighed and started looking around.

Where were they?

The floor was wooden and a little dusty, the walls were pretty bare except for some weird unrecognizable knick-knacks on shelves. The room was small.

“Whom closet did you zap us in?”

Lint tsked and wiggled her finger in front of his face.

“You’re really”, she pointed to a big dent in a wall, “not a good detective, uh?”

Mimosa stared hard at the dent. It looked a bit like a puppy’s face? It reminded him of when they played hide-and-seek with Mu’s at her second home and he just rammed his elbow so hard into a wall it damaged the wall. It didn't hurt but it left its mark on the house.

Wait.

He gasped at the realization.

“SINCE WHEN CAN YOU POP DIRECTLY INTO TODDH’S POCKET DIMENSION?!! I thought you couldn’t go farther than the entrance?”

He shook his friend hard in his barely contained excitation.

They were at Mu’s!!!

“Well, it took me a few tries. I’m not sure I’m welcome alone here anymore by the way?”

“Why did you teleport us here? I thought you’d wanted to go exploring or somethin?”

“...You told me you missed Mu and she wouldn’t come back for at least another week sooo.”

Mimosa hugged her. He did indeed miss his younger sister but he didn’t think it was that obvious.

“Eh, couldn’t have my best friend slash “half-brother-from-another-multiverse” mopping, now?”

He buried his head into her shoulder while she rubbed his back.

“We should get out of this closet and go look for your little princess, don’t you think?”

He nodded and pushed away the other to get to the door handle. He didn’t get that far as the girl shoved him away and opened the door first.

She runned out all while shouting:

“THE LAST ONE TO FIND HER IS WET NOODLE!”

And as he, for sure, didn’t want to be a wet noodle, the boy dashed at his turn and they raced through the long corridor, crashing into furniture and laughing their heads off.

Sadly, he tripped on one of his treacherous tentacles (a fairly common occurrence) and tumbled down quite fast with a yelp. His “friend” just snickered at his misfortune and disappeared behind a corner.

Aw, he didn’t want to be the wet noodle…

He plopped down against the floor, starfish-style, and examined his surroundings. He was still in a corridor. That house had too much of those.

He craned his skull around to examine the few doors he could see from this angle.

Among the very unremarkable doors, one stood out. It was white with flowers painted all over it. The skill of the painting varied a lot and those near the bottom were merely child scribbles.

The skeleton propped himself on his elbows and stared at the door, right-sided.

It was Mu’s room.

Maybe the pasta fate would not befall on him in the end?

The slats creaked despite his best attempts to be sneaky and he cracked the door open a smidge before peeking inside.

A small skeleton was sitting there, playing on the ground with a hoop. Quiet, she was making it roll harshly against the floor until it hit the wall and got launched back at her. She then caught it with the tentacle wrapped cozily around her throat and shoulders and began the process anew.

There she was.

He readied himself to call her when a weight on his head startled him.

“FOUND HER! I WON!”, shouted Lint from above.

How did she even do that, she was slightly smaller than him! That thought was one of the many that went through his mind as she leaped over leaning on his shoulders.

Back to the ground.

Mu looked at them for a second, nodded, then went back to her game, unbothered.

Lint danced, chanting “wet noodle, wet noodle”, looking rather pleased.

He weakly protested that he found her first to which he got the counter argument; he didn't announce it first so that was null and void.

Fair.

They spent some time together, each doing their very own stuff.

Lint was trying to improve her cartwheels (with various success) all while chittering about some story he half-listened to, she tried to coax them into leaving for an adventure a few times but didn’t insist for once so she kept doing clumsy cartwheels.

Mu continued her game, focused on it, Mimosa ignored the action's goal but she was fully entranced by it (despite glancing in his direction a few times, probably wondering about what he was doing).

He was cutting paper shapes with scissors and gluing those to pins he found in a box.

Once he was satisfied with the amount of paper shapes, he tapped gently on Mu’s shoulder to get her attention. She turned around and tilted her head before eyeing a notebook laying on the ground next to her.

“You don’t have to use your book if you don’t feel like it, I won’t ask complex questions.”

His mute sister nodded and gave him her whole attention.

He pointed at his work.

“Would you like it if I put some of these on your hat to keep company to your flower pin?”

Her eyelights grew two sizes before he even finished his sentence, she stuck her hands in the pockets on each extremity of the drooping bunny ears of her dark colored hat and excitedly moved up her arms, showing the paws design sewed on that side of the pockets.

“I’ll take that for a yes!”

Mu nodded so hard her hat would have flipped away if her hands weren’t still stuffed in.

He pointed to the paper shapes and asked her to point to the ones she’d like most.

She didn’t hesitate and picked anything vaguely flower shaped plus one that looked like a lemon (or an eye?). When he interrogated her on that choice, she just uncurled her tentacle, revealing the rest of her face and smiled.

“Ok, ok, sit there and don’t move.”

He started to stick the paper bits as carefully as he could and Lint joined him on the task soon after.

They did that for a moment, he had to stop Mu from wiggling too much a few times as she grew impatient and excited.

Once they were done and confident it would hold for long enough to be satisfying, they released the small monster and she all but ran to the mirror.

Watching her twirl around in joy released a special wave of warmth in his soul. Those moments reminded him how lucky he was to still have her, how lucky he was that Fancy and the one before him found her when she had been lost and how lucky they had been to be reunited during an unplanned playtrip.

He saw Lint watching him thoughtful in the corner of his eyes but he didn’t call her out on that.

However, when she turned her gaze back toward the mirror anew and her eyelights shrieked to almost pinpoints.

Uh?

He turned his head to discover an absence of any twirling sister and shot up.

“Where?”

Something poked his shoulder.

Lint was in front of him.

He turned around.

Nothing.

Lint was glaring at random corners.

Poc.

He looked to his left then more thoroughly to his right.

Then he was promptly yoinked from the ground by something above.

“AH-”

A hand stopped his shout and he looked at his aggressor’s face.

…Nip.

The dark-boned-mixed-rabbit-skeleton grinned at him and made a sign to keep quiet. He reluctantly nodded and fred his mouth.

Nipal was a strange fellow that liked far too much scaring others in his opinion, but it came with the fact he had been born from a bad dream he guessed.

Other than that, he was pretty okay.

And also holding him with a leg while crouched on all four on the ceiling.

Nip giggled silently and he watched Lint getting more and more agitated on the ground.

She was looking everywhere for them and despite glancing up a few times, Nip always moved just in time to hide from her sight.

The demon was talented in this stuff.

Nip moved towards a wall and put him on the top of a closet using only one floating hand. Mu was already waiting there and looked absolutely giddy at the event.

Nip went back to tormenting Lint and one of the puffy ends of his bunny ears almost smacked him when he turned.

Hm. Mimosa got himself comfy to admire the chaos.

He shrugged.

That might as well happen.

Nip played for another five minutes at pocking the distraught girl running around on the floor before leaping behind her, shifting his form to a huge furry rabbit monster and caught her from behind in a hug.

Lint screamed bloody murder and Mu drew a line in her notebook. He peeked at the page… 15 was scribbled next to a vaguely bunny shaped scribble and a bit fat zero next to three bows. It looked like she had been keeping score.

He giggled. Hopefully Lint won’t see that.

This one was now hitting and biting the smug adult -to be confirmed, Nip always lied when they asked his age.

After a bit of shifting and a whole lot of being picked up and scaling things for no reason, they all finally ended up all sitting in the center of the room.

Nipal Twees, once again in his more regular shape, clapped his hands together.

“That was amusing, how are you guys doing?”

He did not wait for their answer as he wiggled his left ear, distracting little Mu that was sitting on his lap.

“Now, kids, Toddh went out to get Fancy. Boy is taking a bit long to bring back groceries.”

Where was he going with that?

“...Kitchen’s free, who wanna bake? Badly of course!”

They answered their agreement, loudly.

What a good idea, he was famished.

And like that, they made a beeline for the kitchen and promptly started to try baking… something…

They didn’t have any recipe and Fancy’s cookbook was creepy so they boycotted that idea.

Each busied themselves with a task they thought would help making… something?

The result was barely palatable and the kitchen was very close to what someone would consider “ruined”.

He would not talk about the general state of their outfits. The aprons they put on had been near useless in keeping the mess at bay.

They made a game of trying to eat the biggest part without making faces. Nip was quickly banned from playing as he was unbothered by the taste and even claimed to enjoy it.

The sound of keys in a door made them all freeze.

Toddh was back.

annnnd that's the end of part one 🎶

*******************************************************

Shine, Malignance, Bow/Butterfly and Calligraphy (mentioned) belong to @creative-firebug <3

The rest is mine owu

Tagging as requested: @shinechermont

(if someone desires to be tagged in the other parts, tell me (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ) )

👉👈tagging @zu-is-here because the whole idea of that project was born because of a discussion I had with her (no I'm not telling what it was about) (zuz tell me if you want me to tag you in the other parts or not :D)

bonus:

I thought it'd be fun to put a link to the first time I put Mimosa in a comic (almost 4 years ago), I have evolved a bit

127 notes · View notes