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I'm not a Southern Belle. I think aside for a trip to Disney World and a trip to the Grand Canyon as a kid, I've never as much stepped foot in the southern part of the US. (Oh wait- does a road trip to West Virginia count?)Southern things are foreign to me, things I read about online, but never really experience them myself. Southern foods are foreign foods to me, not the comfort foods with which I grew up. (Then again, in my home in the American Midwest, we didn't eat standard "Northern US foods either. Our standard fare was either Eastern European, Chinese, Italian, or Middle Eastern.)
So, all the Southerners may feel free to disregard this post, as it's about something so standard in the South, but a new concept to me, a born and bred Northerner.
If you've ever thought that solar cooking was not doable for you, because you don't have the time or energy or money to spend on building and using a solar cooker, or if you don't have a yard or a porch, then I have a type of "solar cooking" that can work for you, so long as you have a glass jar and a windowsill that gets at least half an hour of sunlight a day.
Its called sun tea.
Iced tea, that instead of boiling the water in the kettle, seeping the bags, and then cooling the water and mixing it with other things to make iced, doesn't use any hot water whatsoever.
With sun tea, you just put your tea bags in a jar with water.
Wow, in just half an hour, your tea concentrate will be ready, as good as if you had used boiling water to seep the bags.
When I first heard of sun tea, I thought that the tea bags needed to seep in the sun for hours and hours to make a weak tea, but nope. Nice, strong stuff.
Now go ahead and make yourself a nice pitcher of sun tea mock Lipton's iced tea.
Its a hot day.
You deserve it.
(Ok, all you Southerners laughing your head off, you can stop now. I thought this was a cool idea, and there's no reason only Southerners should know about it.)
Do you make iced tea? How do you make it? What type of tea do you use? How do you seep the bags?
My favorite sun tea I've been making lately has been with a citrus green tea mix that I got from a friend. So refreshing and delicious!