The 17th is St. Patrick's Day in Ireland, one of my ancestral homelands, and in here in the US as well, so a great day to go green...
...green tea, that is! and if green tea is too bitter for you, thanks to its quantity of catechins, try it with a tiny pinch of salt on your tongue, or with a salty cracker—salt turns off the bitter receptor.
Have a piece of dried ginger on hand? drop it into your cup, count to ten, then fish it out again. You won't taste ginger, but the full delicious herbal flavor profile of the tea will come to the fore. That's because the shogaols in dried ginger wake up the cold receptors and help bring out the cool/cold receptor binding compounds in the green tea.
Or leave the ginger in, and enjoy the combination.
Lemon, as in a slice of lemon, or better yet, a lemon cookie, is great with green tea, but if you want the flavor without the sourness, try a piece of lemongrass in your cup. Both have limonene, which activates the cold receptors and does what the ginger does.
Mint goes great, too, because it too activates the cool and cold receptors.
Enjoy!
On my Facebook post for the 17th, which comes on a little after 5pm Eastern Standard Time in the US, I've put a photo of the Gorreana Tea Plantation in the Azores, one of the two places in Europe where green tea is grown and processed.
Image of the Plantação de Chá Gorreana, Ribeira Grande, Ilha de São Miguel, Açores, from Wikipedia. For more about Gorreana tea, go to http://www.gorreanatea.com/our-tea/green-tea.html
It's Portugal, not Ireland, but ever so green, too. I've been following the weather in Western Ireland over the past several years. With its warm misty almost Mediterranean climate, perhaps Western Ireland could grow tea, too!
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