Throughout lockdown, my son has become more and more interested in the work that I do. His school teaches the children a lot about green issues and has an eco team, so ways of looking after our planet is something he’s very much aware of and keen to learn more about.
Now, H isn’t great at drinking water so I’m always on the lookout for more ways to help get liquid into him. Inspired by his sudden questioning of why I have boxes of random fruit peels and a bag of her scraps in the freezer, of why I drop a Parmesan rind in our Bolognese or why I put the bones from the roast in the slow cooker, I thought I’d experiment making herbal teas with him. He’s regularly asking for a cup of tea, which I’m not keen to give him just yet, so I thought it might be something he’d latch onto.
We’ve been making our infusions using bits and pieces that we have in the kitchen, including scraps that are destined for the food waste bin. We’ve been playing around with combinations of ingredients and he has been enjoying his cold whilst I’ve been drinking them hot.
Our favourite is a tea made using apple cores (and sometimes peel when A refuses to eat the peel on her apple!) and cinnamon.
Lemon, ginger and mint is a classic but always a winner. We make ours using squeezed lemon halves, ginger peel and mint stalks, which I have in a box in the freezer.
We played around with clementine peel, firstly with hibiscus (this one needed sweetening a little so we added a drop of the syrup from a jar of stem ginger) and secondly with cinnamon and ginger. Lovely though not to H’s taste!
Our latest experiment last week was with pineapple peel and ginger. Drunk cold, this was really refreshing. I can picture us drinking lots of this in the garden in the summer!