 Welcome to a special tea of the day! Today I've had a couple requests to show how I do fresh herbs when I make a tea. So, I think it's pretty simple, but I guess there are a couple little tricks to this when it comes down to it. So, let's get started. Today what I've decided to do is an oregano with lemon grass and lemon thyme. So, what I usually do is, you want to try and balance this out properly. When you've got a stronger herb, you don't want to use too much. So, like if I had some sage in this, for what this is, which is like one and a half cups, maybe two cups, and this size strainer, I would only use maybe three to five leaves. So, three to five sage leaves, any of the stronger ones. With stuff like this, when they have the smaller leaves, it's actually losing like three sprigs. So, I've got three separate sprigs here. And what I do is, you just pop the leaves off, drop moan in there. Of course, depending on the situation, you want to make sure that you've already washed these before you put them in. That's a given. Wow, drop those sprigs down there. And then, same thing with the lemon thyme. I'll take like the three or five of these whole ones, and I'll just strip them down. With the top stocks are like, wow, these ones are a little bit older, so I can kind of just easily pop them off. It's more almost like using dried herbs, because these are so old at the moment. Beee! But with the lemon thyme, because they're so small, I tend to use a lot more. So, as you can see, that's like a good six sprigs there I've used already. And bam, there's another one. And I'm going to use my last oregano here. Let's toss it on in. Shaboom! And then with these, I'll usually take about a third of it, maybe. So I'll come in here, and if it's like the bottom part, you'll take a little bit less, because it's wider, obviously. But if I'm going from the top, I'll be like, okay, let's go about right there. So, yeah, it's about a third. And then what I'll do from there is I'll take it and just do some cuts along it, like this. You can't see that very well. And just keep doing every bunch of little cuts like that. And then one or two cuts along this way. But generally, I like to let it stay together. But just enough to basically get in there so you can get the juices coming out of it. And separate it out a little bit once you start putting it in there. So like that. Yeah, just pop it out. Then you just drop the whole thing in there, because it's all good. You can use it all. And if there's any that's falling out, you just sweep it all in. So overall, you can see there that the strainers may be a third full. I mean, I've done some work going a little bit fuller than this. You can. But that's about it. I preheated this sucker, so let's turn it back on and get some tea going. Woo! Okay, so our water's hot. In this case, I use a full boil, because there's nothing in here that needs to be at only 80 degrees. Or that's Celsius, after all. We're like 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, I know there's some blends with the one I have that's like a mint, nettle, and lemongrass, which is not far from this. That one says 90 degrees Celsius. So yeah, you can go a little bit cooler if you want. It's not like at the end of the day going to kill it. It's a more matter of what it's doing to the nutrients of it. So if you're wanting to be safe, you can go a little bit lower. But generally, for most of these herbs, you can go up to 100 degrees for full boiling, Fahrenheit, 212 degrees Fahrenheit. And it'll be perfectly fine. From there, it's really a matter of preference for how strong you want it. It also depends on the strength of the herb in itself from the beginning. So really strong herbs like the sage, you really don't want to go much longer than 3 or 4 minutes. And for a lot of the other ones, though, that are more subtle, like the thyme ones and the lemon ones, you can go up to 5 to 8 minutes, really. Yeah, it's definitely good. Oh yeah, here's one more tip for you. If you don't have a way to store your herbs fresh like if you just did a fresh cutting from one of your plants, what you can do is just put it in a cup with some water and let it sit on the window sill. And from that, you could end up creating a whole new plant if you want. Or you can just let it stay in there to stay fresh before you use it for your tea and such. Otherwise, if you're going to have it like this when I get it from the store, like I don't have lemongrass at the moment so I just buy the lemongrass from the store, what I do is I'll take a paper towel and I'll just damp it very lightly with some water. And then I'll take these and I'll wrap them on up there and put them back in the package. And they store really well. Usually with these they like say the date, like on this one is May 31st, but I can end up using these like a good week to two weeks after that date most often than not. So yeah, it's easy to do. I still have to wait for the tea. I can only wait for so long so this has only gone about maybe four minutes now. So let's see what we got here. Woo, that's hot. Smells good. That's a nice blend. I like it. Actually, I feel like I could have maybe used a touch more oregano on this. Like I said, it's like if you want to be bold, you can use more. If you want it to be subtle, just go easy. Don't push it too hard. That was three good sized sprigs about this long of oregano. And that, you know, balanced off with the two different lemony flavors. It's still not quite enough because that's two different herbs that have lemon flavor in them. So you're having to make it so if you're using that much lemon, you have to use a little bit more for that flavor to come back out. So I thought it was pretty close, but yeah, considering how small the leaves are, it can't quite hold its own. I mean, if that was sage, I would still be feeling a good amount of sage with these five leaves because that stuff is so strong when it by itself. But yeah, I think it can still use a little more brew time officially with these ones in particular that I think if as much as anything I may just go, you take some more time to brew for me because it's not quite strong enough for me yet. But there you go. That's my quick little example. If you have any other thoughts or questions about it, feel free to let me know and make a comment. And yeah, till next time. Have a happy tea day.