Time for Tea

I had been thinking about experimenting with different edible plants and herbs, after reading up on all their incredible health benefits. I had thought about dehydrating the plants to make them into tea.

After eating the nettle crisps a few days back, and reading up on all there health benefits, I wanted to use that as a base for the tea and then add other herbs in for more goodness and also flavour. The health benefits of nettles are so impressive, they may help soothe allergies, have natural anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving properties, can help strengthen bones due to being packed with calcium, magnesium, iron, vitamins D and K. They can boost heart health, nettles contain the flavonoids quercetin and kaempferol, which can help lower blood pressure. Nettles can also help skin conditions like eczema and acne, due to its antihistamine, anti-inflammatory and anti-microbia abilities. They can also help strengthen the immune system and the list really does go on. So you can see why I am keen to get this super food in my diet.

I set the oven to a really low heat only 50c and spread the nettles out. They dehydrated quite quickly in the oven and I then used a pestle and mortar to crush them.

I dehydrated some more camellia leaves, the leaves of this plant can helps boost your immune system.

I thought that it would be good to mix something that tasted nice with the tea so dehydrated an apple. This took a few hours due to the amount of moisture.

While the apple was dehydrating, I dehydrated some Apple Mint also known as pineapple mint or woolly mint. This took hardly any time and smelled amazing. The apple mint can help with digestion and stomach health, helps to break down fat and can improve metabolism. The mint leaves contains nutrients like iron, potassium, calcium, vitamin A and C and the health benefits go on. So it made it a great plant to mix with the nettles for goodness and flavour.

I decided to mix the nettle, apple mint and some of the dehydrated apple to make the tea. I left it a few minutes to infuse in the tea pot. I sweetened it with some of the dandelion honey that I made a few weeks ago. It was delicious, and refreshing, and I’ll definitely be trying out some more herbs and different variations.