Healthy Gift from Your Kitchen - Chai Tea Recipe

There are many chai tea recipes - as many as their are chai tea drinkers! Each recipe is unique and it's possible to invent your own by taking the basic Indian spices and adjusting them to your own personal taste.

Chai tea is a wonderful gift to make in your own kitchen for a friend or loved one this holiday season. Winter is tea drinking time and tea is a healthy, warming drink. Add immune boosting Indian spices and you are helping to protect yourself from the cold and flu germs that fly around this time of year.

To give Chai tea as a gift, make a recipe and put it in a decorative jar. In another decorative jar, put loose black tea . This makes a nice gift all by itself but if you want something a little fancier, put the tea, chai and a nice tea cup and saucer like this Burgundy Tea For One Teapot into a basket, add more decorative glass canisters for the tea or a small personal size tea pot.

Chai Tea Recipe

Ingredients

1 Tbsp fennel or anise seed
6 green cardamom pods
12 cloves
1 cinnamon stick
1/4" ginger root, sliced thin
1/4 tsp black pepper corns
2 bay leaves

(To create a gift with this recipe, double it, mix well and put into air tight, decorative jar and then write up the following directions to put with it.)

To make this chai tea, add one-half of the ingredients to 7 cups water

Boil 5 minutes, then steep for about 10 minutes

Add 2 tbsp Darjeeling or other black tea, bring mixture to a boil again, then turn down heat and simmer 5 additional minutes. Strain liquid into a tea pot.

Then add 6 tbs honey and 1 cup of milk and pour into cups.

Enjoy with friends.

A smaller, simpler chai recipe for one cup of chai tea could include just

1 inch stick of cinnamon
8 cardomom pods
8 whole cloves
1 1/2 cups water

Experiment with chai spices to see what combination you like best.

For more healthy weightloss tips, visit my website Path2HealthyLiving.com

100 Healthy Living Tips #11 - Enjoy the Health Benefits of Ginger

Ginger is a powerful herb with great health benefits, plus it's easy to find, affordable and tasty. Adding ginger to your daily diet helps reduce inflammation which causes arthtitis and joint pain, heart disease, allergies, ulcerative colitis and more. Ginger also aids good digestion and has been used as a treatment for digestive ailments, such as diarrhea, nausea and gas.

Ginger is also a warming herb and is used in Chinese medicine to reduce fever, reduce the congestion of a cold and sooth tired muscles.

What's the Best Kind of Ginger?

Ginger can easily be found in teas, powder and fresh. Fresh is the best type of ginger and is available in the veggie section of your local supermarket. Fresh unpeeled ginger keeps about 3 weeks in the frig.

How to make Ginger Tea?

Bring 4 cups of water to a boil in a saucepan.

Peel a 2-inch piece of ginger and slice into very thin strips. Add these to the boiling water.

Reduce heat  and simmer for about 20 minutes.

Strain out the strips of ginger and enjoy.

Add honey and lemon to taste.

Ginger is also great in recipes.Click here for a list of delicious ways to add ginger to your daily menus.

Other Immune boosting tips and recipes

Energy Drinks - Are They Good For You?

Energy drinks are all the rage right now and personally, I don't like them. To give me energy, I stick to healthy water or green tea, both of which boost metabolism. Are energy drinks good for you?

A recent study suggests that energy drinks, even when consumed by healthy young adults, raises systolic blood pressure by 10 points and increases heart rates by 5 to 7 beats per minute. This study was done on people consuming two energy drinks daily. Most of these energy drinks contain very high levels of caffeine and the amino acid taurine.

This is the effect of energy drinks on healthy people. Imagine the effects on people who already have high blood pressure or heart disease?

Think regular or diet soda is a healthier choice? Studies show that soft drinks, even diet soda, also poses health risks. Those drinking only one soda a day were more likely to develop high blood pressure, high triglycerides (part of your cholesterol count), heart disease and diabetes.

Drinking energy drinks and soda can be a habit and a habit can be broken. Replace your energy drinks and soda with water or green or black tea (iced or hot is fine). Once you get into the habit of drinking healthier drinks, you'll actually prefer them and wonder why you ever reached for that soda or energy drink.