Well, Why Not?

It’s about 90 degrees outside today. Not exactly welcoming weather for a hot pot of tea outside on the deck. So, I started thinking ‘why not have iced tea in a pot and still enjoy the whole tea experience just with iced tea.’? I’m curious to know if others do that as well. Please let me know.

I made two large containers of my favorite loose China Oolong tea from Upton Tea Imports and place them in the fridge to chill for a few hours.

Rather than have plain iced tea in a tall glass filled with ice (everybody does that!), I used one of my favorite tea pots that I bought at a little shop in The Berkshires. It’s a lovely, delicate rose pattern from Crown Dorset Ceramics in Staffordshire, England. Each time we’d go back to the Berkshires I’d grab something from this pattern.

Instead of using a regular tea cup and saucer, I used the beautiful clear tea cup that my tea-friend Gwen gave me. The wording on the front of the cup is “Feuille de Thé” which mean Tea Leaf in English. Appropriate, I thought!

I used a beautiful Celtic shawl my late sister Dori gave me for my wedding as the tablecloth and cut some heliopsis and orange echinacea from my garden to use as a centerpiece. I placed the flowers in a lovely floral mug I bought at the England pavilion at Epcot Disney in 2002. It has a small crack in it, so it’s not useful as a drinking apparatus anymore but fit the bill perfectly for a small bouquet.

Because this tea was a spur-of-the-moment type of event and I wasn’t about to turn on the oven to bake some scones in this 90-degree weather, I just grabbed some fresh strawberries and some lemon cookies. I hadn’t noticed until I started taking photos that the cookies had little clovers on them. Appropriate with the tablecloth.

I’m a tad embarrassed by the blueberries, but I know my tea friends around the world will forgive me for that little faux pas!I plopped about 6 or 8 ice cubes into the tea pot (it’s a large one!) and one or two into the cup itself and poured away.

With my garden, bird feeders, and the stream in view I sat outside and enjoyed the nice, refreshing libation of good, quality iced tea on a summer day. Granted, it would have been better under a palm tree on a breezy beach, but I’ll take my little slice of heaven here in Maine.