Iced Tea

This isn't a recipe, more of a note that, um, it's really easy to make your own iced tea. We were buying lots of the Trader Joe white tea iced tea, which is really good and nearly sugar-free, but then I realized that's kinda silly. And I feel guilty about throwing away (even with recycling) all of those big plastic containers it comes in. So now I make iced tea a lot. Boil a big pot of water. Turn off heat. Throw in a few teabags of any variety. Sweeten with honey if desired. Let cool. Pour in pitcher. Store in fridge. It pretty much makes itself, and we can experiment with herbal teas, green teas, whatever is in our tea shelf (and frankly needs to be used up). Seems kinda duh. I don't know why we weren't doing this before.

And weirdly, when I offer my homemade iced tea to guests, they seem delighted. So I'm thinking maybe others, like me, just thought of iced tea as something you buy in the store or order in a cafe.

Note added 7/18/08 - this is kind of embarrassing, but I recently started boiling just a cup of water, making super-strong tea, and then diluting with cold water, for even faster, more energy-efficient iced tea making. Don't know why this didn't occur to me before. It was written on the side of my box of tea!