Archive for November, 2009

My boss gave me some imported green tea that a foreign student had given her because she does not drink green tea. She gave me a box containing Vietnamese green tea and a sealed can containing Chinese green tea. When i got home I opened the box of Vietnamese tea to see nothing but dried and crumpled tea leaves. I have only made tea in tea bags and am unsure how to prepare tea from straight leaves. Thanks in advance.

I love green tea! With the proper preparation techniques, I’m sure you’ll love it as well.

If you have a teapot, this paragraph explains how to brew tea with it: First, heat enough water that you think you will use plus a little extra until boiling (not in the actual teapot). Pour a little of the hot water into the teapot (without leaves in it) and swish it around for a while to warm it. Pour this water out and then measure out about one teaspoon of leaves for each cup of water and put it in the teapot. Wait until the water has cooled to about 170-180 degrees and pour the water in the pot until full. Cover it and wait about 2 minutes. While waiting, make sure you have your cup(s) ready as well as some sort of strainer to place over your cup while pouring the tea to block the leaves. When the time is up, make sure to pour all of the tea out of the pot, even if you aren’t going to drink it right away. This will assure that all of the tea is the same in strength. Green tea can always be steeped again, usually about 3 times, depending on the quality of the leaf.

If you don’t have a teapot, you could use a simple tea ball infuser which you could get at most general supermarkets (although I don’t recommend them as they don’t allow the proper movement and unfurling of the leaf and I encourage you to invest in a teapot). Simply use about 1 teaspoon of leaves and put them in the ball. Heat water to the above temperature and pour it in the cup. Put the tea ball in the water and then wait 2 minutes. Remove the ball and enjoy.

I encourage you to become familiar with the tea world and try other types of green tea (there are more than you’d think) or the other types of tea such as white, yellow, oolong, black, and pu-erh.
Here’ a good website to start with: http://www.cooksshophere.com/products/tea.htm

what are the health benefits of green tea. I hear that it is ment to be good good for you?

Loads of anti aging antioxidants that keep immune systems healthy and are good at fighting off the common colds you get this time of year. Good for stabilising blood sugar levels.

They have tried different flavours, they even do a blend with black tea, but seeings as I like my green tea unsweetened I don’t like to mix it with tea. The only one I like is the lemon green tea as it reminds me of the smell of the little lemon hot napkins you get on the plane when travelling. The taste doesn’t change much, but the smell is lovely.

It is even better if you press the teabags on your skin when they have cooled down slightly as it gives me younger, fresher, clear skin and really clears up spots fast.

Yes. Tea is good for you, and green tea is the best form of it for your health. One of the components of tea that make it so healthy, are the antioxidants.

We do not know whether decaf teas have the same polyphenols, and thus the same health benefits. It is not yet known if removing caffeine also removes polyphenols in the decaffeinating process.

Vitamins are a very important part of a healthy balanced diet. They are essential for speeding up chemical reactions in our body and are also needed to prevent certain diseases. Fresh fruits and vegetables are the main sources of nearly all kinds of vitamins. Eggs and milk also provide a lot of vitamins. However, when we don’t eat enough of these foods, it can cause vitamin deficiency within our body. This vitamin deficiency can be cured by taking a handful of multivitamin nutritional supplements. Vitamin supplements are important because other nutrients, such as minerals, work with the vitamins in the form of enzymes and coenzymes to help fight against certain diseases.

A few years ago people thought that eating a healthy diet is sufficient to keep an individual fit and healthy. However, recent research has shown that taking supplements is beneficial even for people that eat a healthy diet. This is because modern methods of farming serve to reduce the overall quality of vegetables, add to this the amount of time the vegetables sit on the shelves and it’s no wonder that the amount of nutrients in these vegetables is reduced.

It has been established that water-soluble vitamins, like B vitamins (B6, B12 and folic acid), and vitamin C, are the ones that get absorbed by the bloodstream and often leave the body when we urinate. Because of this reason even healthy diets alone are not enough to keep these vitamins to a certain level which is necessary to keep a person fit and healthy. There are no clear symptoms to detect deficiency of vitamins in body. However, you can conclude vitamin deficiency if your daily food intake does not conform with prescribed healthy and balanced diet.

Although it’s very important to consult a diet professional before consuming any kind of vitamin or mineral food supplement, it’s also necessary that you do a little research of your own to find out how to choose a particular nutritional supplement product.

There are some precautions that you must consider before chosing which nutritional suppliment you should take. First of all you need to know that there’s nothing like a properly functioning and healthy body. Vitamin supplements are no comparison for natural foods, but if you think you need vitamin supplements always put quality first. Don’t go for cheaper products merely because they are cheap. Expensive products are often the ones that contain natural substances which are totally harmless and nearly as effective for the body as natural food sources. Your body’s nutrition is very important, it should be worth investing in.

Always choose supplements which use ingredients that have been suggested by renowned scientists and dietitians. A combination of Flavonoids, Phytochemicals along with the necessary vitamins and minerals is thought to provide a balanced supplement and is useful for improving the overall health of an individual. Green tea is an excellent source of Flavonoids, just another thing that we can thank the Chinese for! If supplements have to be consumed, make sure they are made out of concentrated plant material.

One of the quality measures is to see if these vitamin products are coated with a colored or sugar coating to make them attractive. Don’t go for these types of product, since they probably don’t contain the essential substances that should be a part of any nutritional supplements. Good nutritional supplements are often composed of large tablets that smell of compressed plant-like material.

Always make sure that the company you are going to buy a vitamin supplement from is an authentic one and is either licensed or certified in providing health services. You can e-mail them or telephone them directly to ask some questions about their product. If they are accessible and provide satisfactory answers to your questions, you can consider buying their product. Your body is your temple, so when choosing supplements choose ones that you can trust!

This list of tips is by no means comprehensive, other tips and precautions must be considered before choosing the correct nutritional health supplement. Make sure that you buy a quality product that will prove to be useful for your body in the long run.

Chris DiCicco
http://www.articlesbase.com/supplements-and-vitamins-articles/facts-about-vitamin-nutritional-supplements-127189.html

I am looking for a chinese tea set that has three layers of different shades green. The darkest green was the one closest to the top/rim of the set. It included six cups and a tea pot (there might have been more). It was sold some time ago at Disney Epcot, about 25 years I’m guessing. I am looking to get one for my mother– she worked there a long time ago and fell in love with it but didn’t have the money to get it. Any help would be amazing. Thanks!

I would try ebay or craigslist. Since it was sold a number of years ago, this is probably your best bet. Good luck!

What can I give my father for his 70th birthday? It’s a question I’ve been pondering for a while, but without much success.

After all, 70 is a bit of a milestone and means he’s been around for quite some time. Which as far as I’m concerned, is lots of years of being my dad, and doing it very well indeed.

Socks, belts or ties clearly won’t do. I suspect that, over the years, he’s probably received enough of these to stretch all the way to somewhere very distant. Or perhaps not quite that far, but you get my meaning: something very special is required.

Which reminds me of a time when my sister and I were still quite small.

All his working life my father was a journalist - a good one - and used to have to go abroad quite often when we were kids. At least, that’s the way it seemed to us then.

After one trip to the Far East he came back laden with the most exotic gifts I’d ever seen.

I distinctly recall the tantalising scent of spices that clung to the boxes he dug from his suitcase. Jade jewellery and a seemingly endless Chinese dinner service for my mother; a beautiful porcelain doll sporting tiny, hand-sewn clothes and exquisitely braided hair for my sister; and for me, my first ever fountain pen, a grown-up, blood-red beauty with a devastatingly real gold nib. Needless to say, for some time I was slightly afraid of using it.

Did I mention that my dad was - is - an unselfishly generous man? He ended up with a 7 inch single named ‘Chairman Mao Is Together With Us’, which proves my point entirely.

Perhaps from that moment on my sister and I believed he’d always come home with something, because I remember how, as little kids, we refused to fall asleep until he arrived back from work. We were probably bundled into bed at 6pm or so in those days, and I doubt he turned up until at least half an hour later.

But hearing the front door open, my sister and I would shriek continually until he trudged upstairs to kiss us goodnight. I don’t think we even gave him the chance to take off his jacket.

All those late evening returns and early morning departures. An endless ritual that always seemed one of those things dads simply do. Very occasionally we were taken to his office and, surrounded by the smell of fresh newsprint, were allowed to play with typewriters, rummage through drawers and perhaps reach the conclusion that working life must actually be quite good fun.

It’s only much later, of course, that you’re able to appreciate the reality of working weeks without end; the pressures and anxieties and sacrifices involved. I never once heard him complain.

Knowing this now, it’s little wonder that another recollection I have of my dad is how he loved dozing in the sun on a hot weekend.

He rarely got much time to do this - there were shelves to (try to) build and gardens to dig and shopping trips to make and the vagaries of English weather to contend with - but duties over, if the sun was blazing, he’d lie on a sun-bed with a radio tinkling beside him and eventually fall asleep. A small pleasure which, of course, he’d earned many times over.

All the little things that go into making fathers, fathers. The moments recalled as, contemplating the merits of book tokens, slippers, bottles of port - in short, all the things that just won’t do - I pluck memories from the drift of years as dad approaches his 70th birthday. And still I need to find him the right gift; a thank you and a celebration rolled into one.

If I had the ability to make life do wondrous things, I’d conjure him a venerable, leather-bound chair in just the right place beside a snapping fire. There’d be two snuffling puppies to drape across his feet and a green and blue parrot astride his shoulder, nibbling at his beard.

Billy Bunter, William and Ginger would invite him round for tea, and later that evening Frank, Dean and Sammy would drop by to croon him a Happy Birthday, graciously accept a glass or three of bourbon, then warmly shake his hand before heading back to Vegas.

I’d let him read all his favourite stories as if he’d never read them before.

But life isn’t made that way, and in the absence of things I wish I could give, I can only hope this might do instead.

Words that are written just for him. Words that want to be many different things, but end up saying: “thanks, Dad”; and “how time flies! And here’s wishing you lots and lots of love on your big, 70th Birthday.”

Mike Brennan
http://www.articlesbase.com/non-fiction-articles/so-what-do-you-give-your-father-on-his-70th-birthday-430258.html