Making Iced Tea in India

So Friday night rolled around and no one really wanted to do anything. But it was Friday night so what's a good Texan to do but find a way to make some good old fashioned Sweet Tea.

Don't get me wrong, there's lots of tea in India. It's just not made cold here. Top that off with ice that's not safe to use and it makes the whole thing... difficult... My Japanese use that word a lot. They use the word "impossible" a lot too. Sometimes when I'm not really sure it fits. Like when the power goes out and you don't realize it so you're about to plug in your laptop and they say "Impossible". I have the voice of Inigo Montoya running through my head. "You keep using that word; I don't think it means what you think it means."

But back to making iced tea.

Nawaf, my Yemeni friend, very nicely offered to walk to the supermarket with me. It was dark so I definitely appreciated the company. I didn't take any pictures there which is too bad because we ran into the rickshaw driver who took me and Pavil to Rishikesh. His name is Happy which I think is apt because he has a very nice smile and he smiles a lot. He tapped me on the shoulder and said "Hello, Ma'am" and then he smiled very big and introduced me to his mother and brother.

That was pretty much it but I thought it was cool that he recognized me three weeks later. Of course me and Matthew are the only Angrez (white people but literally Englishman) living within five miles of this neighborhood. But still...

So I bought a pitcher, some tea, some sugar, and a set of ice cube trays.

The only pitcher they had was this pink one. It was completely unmarked besides those very pretty pink flowers. This is me trying to decide what size it is. I finally realized I could use my Nalgene to measure it. It's slightly less than a half gallon. So for those of you that use the metric system, it's somewhere between the one and two liter marks. In other words, someone thought this random size was a good size for a pitcher.

Oh well.

I used eight teabags anyway.

I had to use this yellow bowl to heat up the water in the microwave because I don't think I'm allowed to use the gas stove. And quite frankly, I'm not sure that I want to. It scares me a little bit. But then, so did riding the bus and the vikram, so maybe it's  just a matter of time and self confidence... and Kapel (the cook) letting me use it.

And of course you have  to have ice for iced tea. So we filled my new ice cube trays up and loaded them into this ice encrusted freezer. It reminds me of my old dorm fridge.

But it turned out okay. I made some simple syrup out of sugar and some more microwaved hot water. I put that in a separate bottle so people that don't like sugar would still want to drink it.

Songjoo was game.

But Nawaf and Abu were too cool for school.

They also refused to try the pickles and peanut butter I brought home from the market.... wimps :) The Japanese thought the pickles were great and apparently peanut butter is pretty common in Japan as well.

 I just realized that might be confusing. I was not serving the two together. I brought home both a jar of peanut butter, and a jar of pickles. Some people might like the two together, but that's a little much even for me.

So that's what I did Friday night. Stay tuned for a post from my weekend in Rajpur.