A Year of Blogging: June 10, 2011

June 10 was "National Iced Tea Day". What a delicious and refreshing day! I used to associate iced tea with summer. My dad wanted us to drink milk every night for dinner. Dad's family farmed, so he was used to drinking milk. Mom didn't grow up drinking milk. The only time Grandma Wager had milk in the frig was if we were visiting. Mom and Dad compromised- we didn't have to drink milk with dinner when it was hot. We usually had iced tea. Mom bought the Nestea powdered mix, and we made iced tea by the pitcher. I grew up drinking sweetened tea with lemon. There is a difference between sweetened tea and sweet tea. Sweet Tea is served in the south. It is so sweet, it makes your teeth hurt. Sweetened tea doesn't have the bite that unsweetened tea does, but it's not the syrupy sweet tea so favored in the South. Grandpa used to make Sun Tea. He put tea bags in a big glass jar with water, and left it out in the sun. It was more of an unsweetened tea, and was different than what I was used to drinking. It took a while to get used to it. When I was fitted with braces at the age of 13, one of the things I was told to avoid was sweetened tea. The orthodontist said I could drink unsweetened tea. I don't know why, perhaps the extra sugar was bad for all the metal. So I switched, and started drinking unsweetened tea. Once the braces came off, I wasn't able to switch back. In the three years I had braces, I found I actually liked unsweetened tea. When I became an adult, I realized that Iced Tea is on restaurant menus all year long. You can drink it any time, it doesn't have to be in summer. A few years ago, I tried a raspberry iced tea at Bob Evans, and I was hooked. It's a good balance between the sweetened tea and unsweetened. The raspberry provides just enough sweetness. Then I discovered that Nestea makes a raspberry iced tea powder. That is now my drink of choice! I drink it all year long. Some days I go through a whole pitcher. It is one of the items that is almost always on the grocery list. Erich gets annoyed because he said 'I'm always buying raspberry iced tea!" To me, there's no better way to kick back and relax than with a nice glass of raspberry iced tea.