Prairie Cottage Corner - Home of Sunbonnet Sue and Friends

A Calming Tea

Sometimes I need a really calming tea to help me relax.  In our rather isolated community, 40 miles from everywhere, so to speak, I can't always buy what I want at the moment.  So, much of the food we eat, we also store, either dried, canned, or frozen.  Most of the calming teas on the market include the ingredients we put together for our product.  Here's the mix in our big stainless steel mixing bowl:

Calming Tea Recipe

Ingredients, above, clockwise from the left:

3 c. Dried Spearmint

1 c. Dried  Lemon Grass

1 c. Dried Passion Flower

1/4 c. Dried Orange Peel

1/4 c. Dried Rose Petals

1/4 c. Dried Cascade Hops

2 c. Dried Chamomile 

We bought most of the ingredients from San Francisco Herb Company.  They didn't have hops, though.  I Googled the hops and found a company in Oregon, where they grow a lot of them.  I've seen them growing in the fields on huge networks of wires some 20 feet high.  They grow on vines that go on and on.  When you break the cones apart, they leave a kind of sticky substance on your fingers....like sugar.  My herb books says they have a relaxing effect.  No wonder beer used to make me so sleepy!

Hops come in small cones.  We break them apart for use in the tea.

Measuring the Spearmint.  Yum.

Measuring the Passion Flower.

Lovely Rose Petals

Mix.....

And Mix....

And Mix...

Put it in a 2-quart canning jar...

....and store it away.

Left to right:  Passion Flower, Orange Peel, Hops, Chamomile, Lemon Grass, Calming Tea, Spearmint and Rose Petals.

To make your cup of tea - Take up a teaspoon or so of the mixture in a tea ball.  Put the ball in your cup and pour very hot water over it.  We have a water machine that uses bottled water which also quick-heats it, and I use that.  I add sweetener to my tea but the spearmint makes it wonderfully mellow and sweet all by itself.  When I have company, I make this tea in a pot.  The stronger the tea, the more calming the effect.  It's great as a sleep aid.  Enjoy!

Aaaaaaah.........