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deadmomjokes · 2 years

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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

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gonewiddershins · 1 year

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#every twilight/thorn princess fanart i see is so hot and/or serious – something straight out of a mafia movie

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Book Rec Ask Meme (Part 3 of 7)

18. your least favorite book ever

One of the effects of being a shameless DNF-er is how I don't really have least favorite books. Because they can't be my least fave if I drop them halfway through and go and happily read something else instead. Least favorite book (singular) ever is even worse- why on earth would I read a book I loathe that much? The only answer is "Buddy Reads" and even for that I have drawn lines I will Not Cross. And even if those lines were crossed, I feel uncomfortable rating that book as "the worst" because making me read something I don't like makes me very, very mad and that naturally spills over to my feelings about the actual book.

So I skimmed through Goodreads and randomly picked a book that made me mad enough that I remembered being mad to this day. This actually means the book had potential, because I tend to forget books which had no redeeming features whatsoever. But this is also the third draft of this answer so it's what you're getting. (There is actually book I dislike more than this one, but that's getting saved for the un-recommend question.)

Tangled by Emma Chase is an office romcom. And it would probably be pretty entertaining (my tastes they are so low) if (a) the author did not decide that swearing was an inherently funny action and used it to indicate idk- something positive about the male lead, (b) it weren't for the unquestioned gender essentialism - you know the thing, men are like this women are like that and god forbid anyone deviates even slightly from the norm, and (c) I didn't keep getting smacked in the face with constant workplace sexual harassment.

The harassment was bad enough to have my oblivious self feel mildly uncomfortable when I first read it. When I skimmed through it again to remember why I hated it so much it almost made me want to puke. If any guy thought about me the way the ML thought about the FL I would knee him in the balls. Also, I HATE it when romances end with a "grand gesture" that magically solves everything. Especially in this case. FL, you were so fucking bland that I don't remember a goddamned thing about you but you should have kneed him in the balls. For fuck's sake.

QUOTE: (slime. slime all over my face and my arms.)

Doe Eyes may be telling me no…but her body? Her body’s screaming, Yes, yes, fuck me on the bar. In the span of three minutes, she’s told me why she’s here, what she does for a living, and allowed me to fondle her hand. Those are not the actions of a woman who is not interested—those are the actions of a woman who does not want to be interested. And I can definitely work with that.

23. a book that is currently on your TBR

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3 notes - Posted July 7, 2022

1, 9 10 13 15 16 18 23 52 53 55 60 63 71 80 86 107 121 127 134 135 for ur ask meme

wheeeee~

okay so there's are enough of these questions that I'm gonna answer this in parts because otherwise (a) I'll never finish and (b) tumblr WILL end up earing my drafts and I wince just thinking about that. So here we go-

1. a book that is close to your heart

The Beginning by K.A. Applegate. Anyone who's spent some time on my tumblr knows about my obsession with this series. It drilled into my ear and took over all higher life form function way back when I was an impressionable pre-teen. And then after sometime, when I thought I'd found other things to obsess about, I found copies of the final arc and it decided to permanently take up residence in my brain.

The Beginning is the final installment of the Animorphs series, which famously feature kids turning into animals to fight brain stealing alien puppeteers. It's not a climax- it's a extended denouement, because the books have always been about how children people are affected by war as much as as it was about the actual war. Animorphs also ended on a very bittersweet note, something unthinkable to baby me who had never seen a story end this way before. It was a learning experience.

Quote:

"Jake, you can't . . ." She took a deep breath. "You can't equate the victim and the perpetrator."

"So as long as you're playing defense it's not possible to commit a war crime?" I asked. "That's pretty close to just saying that the winner makes the rules because it's the winner who writes the history."

She grabbed my arm and searched for my eyes, forcing me to look at her. "No, Jake, it isn't. There are a lot of close calls in history, lots of wars where the blame is evenly split between the sides. This isn't one of them. Before they came to Earth no human ever attacked a Yeerk. No human ever harmed a Yeerk. This one is clear: We are the victims. They made war on us."

"That's good," I said softly. "All of that is good. We have justification. We're the good guys."

Marco said, "That's right, Big Jake, we are."

I nodded. "That's good for the big picture. See, my problem is a little more personal."

Ax asked.

"Well, Ax-man, you're right, you did call my attention to the possibilities on the Pool ship. And when you did that I guess I should have thought, Well, Jake, it's a harsh, terrible thing to do, but you're justified because, after all, you're the victim here. But that's not what I thought. You know what I thought?"

Cassie released her grip on me. But Marco just took a step up close, right in my face.

"I know what you thought, Jake. You thought Die, you filthy worms. Feel the fear, Yeerks. Feel the pain. Feel the helplessness. You wanted them to suffer and the idea of them suffering and dying made you happy. You were thrilled. You were high."

Cassie winced. She looked away.

I said, "Yeah, Marco. That was about it: word for word."

9. your favourite book of 2020 2022

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3 notes - Posted July 4, 2022

Book Rec Ask Meme (Part 2 of 7)

13. your favorite romance novel

You should know by now that I don't actually have favorites. I have a list of things I like and how much I like them varies with time, emotions, circumstances, and also maybe the phases of the moon. But The Duke in Disguise by Cat Sabastian was the first book I thought of when I saw this question, so it's the answer by default.

A Duke in Disguise is a standalone (technically it's part of a series, but books in romance novels series are often functionally standalones with cameos) romance story about two childhood friends- a prickly left-leaning publisher trying to keep her business afloat and an illustrator (engraver, to be precise) who turns out to be the long-lost heir to a dukedom. It's filled with class rage and ideas about what independence means and wonderful friend and family characters. The heroine is bi and filled with rage goes to her ex-girlfriend when she wants to yell about stuff. It's great.

QUOTE:

How one was meant to feed all these people on a couple of mutton chops Verity did not know. Supper was supposed to serve four: herself, Nate, Ash, and Charlie. But Nate had come home with three friends he met at the pub, which would have been bad enough even if he hadn’t evidently also invited Amelia Allenby, the half-grown daughter of Verity’s friend. At half past seven, a carriage pulled up in front of the house and disgorged a girl in pearl earbobs and a white muslin frock, dressed as if she were going to dine with the great and good of the land, rather than pick at too few mutton chops and be an eyewitness to sedition. Amelia was seventeen and looked upon Nate with a degree of hero worship that nobody who brought three hungry radicals home to dinner deserved.

15. a book rec you really enjoyed

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4 notes - Posted July 6, 2022

1, 19, 27

1. a book that is close to your heart

The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold. I mean, I love almost everything this author writes but I'd only read her space opera series before this, and space opera was (at least back then) not as much my genre as Fantasy is.

It was also a very different type of fantasy from what I'd experienced. I'd mostly read grand sweeping fantasy epics before CoC, with a dash of Tamora Pierce to even things out. But I think this was the first time I'd seen adult fantasy which was less about world domination and more about people just trying to get by in the face of curses and life in general etc. Caz is a wonderful protagonist because he's so tired and so traumatized and he juxtaposes beautifully with Iselle (who is the /thematic/ protagonist) who's vibrant and a beacon of hope. The divinity-based magic system is wonderful. The way of breaking the curse is wonderfully clever. This book made me actually weep more than once. I just- //flails

It also made me be more active about searching for adult fantasy I was actually interested in, because till that point I really thought all we could have were chosen one quest narratives.

Quote:

“Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.”

19. a book that put you in a reading slump

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5 notes - Posted July 4, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

It just struck me how the MCU is milking the hell out of a nearly manufactured out of whole cloth mentor-mentee/dad-son relationship between a billionaire superhero and a socially disadvantaged kid superhero while the dc cinematic universe, which has multiple canon relationships like that, ignored them COMPLETELY in favor of more serial killer showcases.

7 notes - Posted April 14, 2022

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