Solar Power!!

Ah. The signs of a Desert Summer are everywhere: the over-watered green grass turning to a stiff, sickly beige. The first of the gigantic black widow spider webs. The searing, cancerous streams of sunlight onto your skin. The corpses of homeless people found rotting away under their not-so-protective blue tarps. And the constant urge for a nice, crisp glass of Sun Tea.


So began the usual and completely unfruitful search for one of those awesome glass sun tea jars with a spout that we remembered from yesteryear...And by "yesteryear" we mean "the '80's". Sadly, however, the super-icky plastic market has kidnapped the sun tea jar business and so we went home in hysterical tears.


Then! Huzzah! Like some sort of brilliant smack to the face we realized: We can make Tea in any old jar!! Duh, right? So we set about our experiment using a sun-dried tomato jar and about 4 bags of chamomile.

We left it out for about 4 hours, where it went from beige water to EXTREMELY weak iced tea.

Still delicious, but it lacked that kick that you hope for.

So the next experiment was with a little less water and 5 bags of pomegranate white tea. Mmmmm. The picture you see below is after it had been steeping for about 2 nano-seconds. We left out for a little longer (5 hours) and it was pretty awesome.

The next morning, we put out a jar of 6 bags of green tea and left it out while we were at work all day. We came home to veeeery strong, veeery bitter green tea. So we pretty much hit every level of the Sun Tea strength spectrum. Good thing we didn't have a giant glass jar of the stuff afterall, huh? Lesson learned.

Update: We discovered that the peeeerfect blend is 4 bags Chamomile, 1 bag Green and a random handful of the Peppermint Tea Leaves that Melissa got us for Christmas.

God we're dull.

Next, we're going to try steeping with fruit and herbs in there. And one with Szechaun.

She will be delicious.

But Why? WHY? WHYYYYY?!?!?!?

We originally thought to start this weblog as a way to share with our family all of the super fun projects on which we spend our time. Sort of a, "Hey, Mom! Look What I Did!!!" in electronic format. It's a way to compare beer-brewing techniques with the father-in-law or show Mom your latest experiment in horticulture...which is great, since, by the time she visits, the cat will probably have killed a large fraction of the house plants.

And, frankly, we have waaaay too many projects and hobbies and experiments and adventures. And we have waaaaaaay not enough attention span. So this is also a unique way, for our own sakes, to log and keep track of all of our burning irons. And maybe the ones that got a little too cooled down. And probably the ones that got all rusty because we left them out in the rain.

Let's face it: we may not even keep up with this weblog.

But we're sure excited about trying!!!