I'm a Little Teapot

I had gotten in the habit after a stressful work day to come home and sip a glass of wine with my husband.  Then I noticed a couple pounds creep back on.  Empty calories will do that to you.

So now I make a pot of tea when I get home and reserve alcohol for just the weekends.

My husband, the birthday fairy, got me a great tea set late this summer..  It even came with a little checklist.  Being a former airline pilot, I know about checklists.

This will be a perfect way to wind down without a lot of extra sugar and calories.

The electric pot is for heating water quickly and to the perfect temperature for tea.  With it came a ceramic "Brown Betty" tea pot from England, made as they were centuries ago. The "Brown Betty" origins go back to the end of the 17th century and to the birth of the British ceramic teapot, although in 1700 an ordinary small unglazed teapot made from Red Clay from the Bradwell Woods area in Stoke-on-Trent was a luxury item costing about 12 shillings.

During Queen Victoria's reign, tea became a symbol of Britain's' greatest period of expansion and stability.  Every home owned a teapot, eve if it was the basic Brown Betty, tea no longer being a refined, upper class beverage, but a basis of a whole meal.

With the lovely little four cup teapot, came some scone mix and an assortment of loose leaf tea including vanilla chair, pumpkin spice black, English breakfast, Assam, Darjeeling, caffeine free Rooibos, traditional black tea and Scottish Caramel Toffee Pu-erh.  All from the English Tea Company.  Since I have a Scottish great great grandmother he put the Scot flag in there (otherwise, I'm mostly English, from the Kent area and German.)

With that, we opened up a package of Biscuits from my favorite, the Brits Store in Lawrence, KS. (Wonderful people to do business with):

http://www.britsusa.com/

OK, just one biscuit.  But it was a very soothing ritual, one I'm going to repeat.