Cold-brewed Chai brings peace overnight

So by this point it is absolutely no surprise that my wife is with child.  Up until a few weeks ago you wouldn't have known unless you caught a glimpse of the elastic belly thing that magically transforms normal jeans into pregnancy jeans when the button can no longer snap.  You may have gotten an idea if you happened to be anywhere near her when a commercial about babies or puppies graces the screen.  For those of us who spend the majority of our time in such close quarters with her though, the pickles and the olives and the hard boiled eggs are all evidence enough that something has taken over her body.  Some glorious parasite has taken up residence and has been holding her insides hostage at the threat of a blindsided fit of tears or other inexplicable outburst.

Somehow, my ability to drink fresh brewed fully charged black diesel coffee in the mornings has been held against me by both the parasite and the host.  Sure, she drinks a large half-caf, or a medium cup'o'joe in the midst of her day, but that doesn't exactly level the scales on those mornings when my tall steaming cup of caffeination towers well over her cute little mug of caffeine-control.

Being the model-citizen that I am, I recognized the growing dissonance from this, and I took it upon myself to create something for her that could possibly begin to balance those scales and somehow overshadow the fact that I don't plan to stop drinking coffee just because she happens to be pregnant.  Knowing how big her soft spot is for chai, I set out to find the perfect recipe that would keep her from even considering a comparison to my morning dark roast.

During the summer mornings in our house, we have somewhat perfected the art of cold-brewing

coffee in mason jars.  There is something about steeping the beans overnight without using hot

 water that makes it less acidic, and therefore less bitter (definite perk when the final goal is iced

 coffee).  In my search for the perfect cup of chai I found that there are thousands of different chai

 recipes, but none that I could find that cold-brew it overnight. 

*insert mental-lightbulb and that dreaming-determined 500 yard stare here*

After a few semi-successful, and a few failed efforts, I found that it is actually way too easy to make really great chai as long as you remember a few important things:

1)whole ingredients, whole ingredients, WHOLE INGREDIENTS! 

As great as you might think powders can be in the kitchen, ground ginger

will RUIN your chai, whereas fresh ginger may just prove to be its salvation. 

2)hold this recipe with open hands...it isn't intended to be followed to the letter, but rather to provide a framework from which you can experiment.

I searched and found hundreds of variations on Chai, but there were some ingredients

that were common denominators in all of them (ginger, cloves, cardamom, and cinnamon). 

None of them need to be measured or leveled, and you can always add others. 

(Just remember how much of what you put in, so you can tweak it to your liking in the next batch).

3)try changing everything, EXCEPT THE TEA

To save on the caffeine, I tried using Green Tea for a batch.  Avoid this temptation and actually

go purchase some black tea leaves, there are many kinds of black tea available, but they all have

the same full flavor needed to carry the spices in Chai...I'm not saying that green or white tea

 absolutely won't work, but they simply don't have the backbone to carry the flavors of

a good solid Chai.

Cold-Brewed Chai Tea
materials/ingredients:
1 mason jar (2 cup capacity)
1 cinnamon stick
2-4 cardamom pods
3-5 whole cloves
5-7 fennel seeds
3-4 black peppercorns
1 vanilla bean (actually only about 1/2 inch snipped off of one)
2-3 thin slices of fresh ginger
2 cups milk/water (portioned to your liking)
1 TBSP black tea leaves (I like assam leaves for this)
1-2 tsp honey


Step 1:


Bruise ginger slices with side of knife (you're not trying to juice it...just press it till it sweats a bit)

-toss bruised ginger into mason jar

Step 2:

Slice the cardamom pods in half and break the cinnamon stick into a few pieces.


-scrape all the seeds/hulls/pods into the mason jar with the ginger

Step 3:

Snip 1/4-1/2 inch piece off of the vanilla bean, cut lengthwise, and toss it in the mason jar too.

-Add tea leaves to the mix as well.

Step 4:

Put all remaining ingredients in mason jar (cloves, peppercorns, fennel seeds)


-this is where you add whatever variations you want to try out (star anise, nutmeg, almond, etc...) 

Step 5:

Add liquid to the dry ingredients to fill the jar


(I use half skim milk and half water, but almond milk or soy milk would offer a nice variation.)

Step 6:

-put it in the fridge after dinner, and forget about it until breakfast

Step 7:

-wake up, strain all the bits and pieces out, sweeten with honey to taste, and enjoy (iced or warm).

(that whole bit about not using powders in the place of whole ingredients really helps

at the strain-step...if using whole ingredients, you can actually do this in a simple colander)

I want to be like you-ooh-ooooh

Last night, we ate dinner in front of the television for family movie night and introduced Adelaide to "The Jungle Book"  She loved pointing out every animal and calling them by name 

(something that she practiced and perfected at the zoo this past 

weekend...to the delight of all within earshot of the GEERAHFES, 

JAG-YOU-AHS, and PENGOONS)

  Addie spent the entire movie standing and dancing and playing along with the characters on the screen.  My favorite part of the entire 'family movie night' experience happened when Addie took it upon herself to teach Charlie how to dance like the monkeys.  

Thanks to technology at its finest, I don't have to 

just explain it to you, I can show you 

exactly what it looked like.

 

ex-retro babyface

Instead of writing a whole long rant about my morning at the gym, I'm going to just let "The Oatmeal" cartoon emphasize how awkward it tends to be (this way I can focus more of my energies on the non-naked lesson from my morning)



I guess the only people working out at 6am are me, and whoever lives in the retirement facility down the road from our Fitness center.



Anyway...aside from another experience in dodging eye contact with awkward men who want to talk about whatever the stock market is or isn't doing, I learned a valuable lesson this morning about shaving.

For the past 2 weeks, much to the chagrin of my wife, I've had a full mustache that complemented my aviators in such a way that made me
             (as a fan of Chicago sports)  
incredibly proud.

This morning however, it was time to say goodbye to the mustache that I have carried proudly on my upper lip.

We have a good friend who is getting married this weekend, and my 
wife has channeled the persistent widow from Luke 18 
in her efforts to have my facial hair removed 
("please.please.please.ohplease.prettyplease.please.ohplease.please...")

I never would have guessed the effect that a mere 10 minutes in the steamroom would have on the process of shaving.  I guess enough time in the steam just lulls the hairs right to sleep, because they put up absolutely no fight when they met the 5 unrelenting blades of my Gillette.

I'm talking 30 seconds or less to go from something to nothing without clippers.  AMAZING.

As I looked back at myself in the mirror after shaving I remembered EXACTLY why it is that I grow beards.  With a beard, I look like a normal well-adjusted grown up person.  Once it's gone, I see the naked face of a chubby baby looking back at me that just screams "WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO ME!?!?!?" 

So I left for the club sporting my best 'retro-sexual' look 

this morning, and I came home looking like I just parked 

my Big Wheels in the yard so I could come in for a snack.

At least I know that tomorrow morning will bring the stubble that evens it all out. 

Blah Blah Blahhhg

I've got an urge.  Not really sure why, or from whence it comes, but it doth persist.  I'm not certain if it is a result of the amount of people I know who now have families (and blogs about said families), or if it is because on occasion I will fondly romanticize my xanga days.  Maybe it's just because I'm tired of limiting what I WANT to say by characters and spaces.  In all honesty, the extents to which my editing will reach just so that I can squeeze a 200 character thought into a 140 character tweet or a 475 character rant into a 420 character status update is shameful.  It wuld make my hs englshteachr crpinhrpants #hashtag. 

But seriously, what is there about a public journal where I can air my thoughts, feelings, deepest desires, regrets, likes, dislikes, movie/music reviews, baby pictures, baby stories, recipes, garden progress updates, pet-tales, and any other assorted 'flatulences of the brain' that makes me want to come back to blogging?  

And why in the world are YOU reading it?

Whatever the reasoning, I have made a life-altering decision.  I have decided to write again.  (*gasp...shock...awe...slamming door and a blood-curdling scream)  That's right, I never was all that great at it, but as I look back on what was my xanga, I remember fond times when I actually felt active in my creativitiy.  There was nothing special about it, nothing that made it different than any of the other million blogs out there.  But the practice that was my blogging was gradually replaced by the practice that was my social networking.  These grandiose thoughts that I was able to share now had a character limit on them, and the freedom of writing whatever I was thinking about was superseded by my own concern for if I was polluting the walls of my friends.  At first, I felt as though I were going to blow my lid, like the thoughts in my head and on my heart were going to explode forth from me if I didn't find a place to appropriately vent them. 

Picture a pot of boiling water with a lid just chattering from the steam building angrily underneath.  

That was me...for a few weeks.  Then it just slowed, and slowed, and slowed.  Today I feel so unoriginal and stagnant that I have to struggle to come up with a status update or a tweet (I'm actually fairly certain that my twitter account has digital cobwebs by this point).

When I was fully entrenched in my xanga-ing, it didn't matter what I was doing, the world was beautiful.  I took pictures and made videos at a camp for a living.  I lived in a town whose population shift from Summer into Winter was more dramatic than these past few days on the Dow Jones.  I took seminary classes online.  I was a youth pastor.  I was incredibly lonely.  Somehow, in the middle of the darkest winters, I still managed to see the grey world that I lived in with vivid colors.  

NOW, I am happily married to a beautiful woman who actually knows me.  I own a beautiful house in a fun community.  My extended family-size has more than doubled with amazing in-laws.  I have undoubtedly the most beautiful and hilarious daughter that this world has EVER seen.  I have another child (gender unknown as of yet) on the way who will most likely follow suit.  My world is overflowing with beautiful colors, but I struggle with seeing them as anything far from grey most of the time.

THIS is why I'm blogging again.  Not so I can share the secrets of the universe, or the super-secret ingredient that will turn simple greenbeans into the most amazing side dish that you have ever created.  (*hint: it rhymes with Makin-grease)  I am blogging for me.  If you are still reading this...then welcome to my mind, I hope my inability to stay on a single point or keep concise doesn't drive you crazy.  I also hope that you can get over my utter disregard for grammatical 'laws' and my occasional colorful (tasteless?) word or two.

I'm not writing this for you anyway.

The interesting thing will be to see if I come back tomorrow, or how long it takes until I actually write again.  For today though...BOOM...posted.