Dragonfly Moroccan Mint Green Tea Review

Posted on December 5, 2012 by tony

It’s really hard to find my favorite Moroccan Mint Green Tea in the UK, and so I thought I would try the Dragonfly brand of Moroccan Mint when I saw it in my local Sainsbury’s last week.

Dragonfly is a well respected brand of tea in the UK, also I am pleased to see now available in the USA through Amazon.com.

The first thing when reading a description of this tea is to not be put off by it, since the description says:

Dragonfly Moroccan Mint Green Tea is an organically grown, authentic and delicious blend of brisk Chinese Gunpowder tea and refreshing organic Moroccan spearmint. Gunpowder green tea is named after its appearance: the dark green tea leaves are rolled by hand into tiny pellets that resemble gunpowder.

It’s quite easy to get a mental picture of an old man sitting in a back room in Morocco, rolling up tea-leaves into pellets with his bare hands and dirty finger nails. I am sure this is not how it’s made – well at least I hope not! It certainly doesn’t taste like it, which is a good thing.

The first thing to note here is that the tea comes in a box of 20 sachets, each tea bag being individually wrapped to help lock in the flavor.

Just opening the sacket reveals a wonderfully refereshing waft of spearmint, so your senses already know that they are in for a treat.

I let my tea brew for 4-5 minutes to give it a fuller flavor. Unlike several brands of Moroccan Mint that I have tried, this does not cause it to have a bitter taste, which can spoil the flavor completely. The spearmint helps to enhance the flavor of the green tea, and the two together are a refreshing blend.

Personally I find this tea to be sweet enough, and don’t feel the need to add sugar to it.

I still prefer my original favorite, Stash Moroccan Mint Green Tea, but the Dragonfly brand comes a close second and is definitely a great tasting tea.

Chicken And Chocolate – Not Always The Best Combination

Posted on May 21, 2012 by tony

I have eaten Mole Poblano before a few times and really enjoyed it. Pronounced “Moe-lay” not “Mole” like the animal, this is a Mexican dish with slices of meat covered with a thick dark sauce that is made of bitter chocolate and chili. If you weren’t told that there was chocolate in it, you probably wouldn’t even realise.

However, chicken and chocolate don’t always go together that well as you will find out…

Saturday was one of the first fine days in weeks, actually one of the first since Easter, following which parts of the UK have seen pretty much 40 days and 40 nights of rain. Indeed it was almost Biblical, but I digress…

Having spent some time working in the garden, then sitting out on our new deck for the first time since it was completed over Easter weekend, Debbie suggested that we order in an Indian take-away instead of cooking something for dinner.

She had seen a new Indian take-away restaurant open recently close to us, and had looked it up online, and found that you could place an order over the internet and they would deliver.

The take-away location belongs to an established restaurant in town, and their web site proclaims:

Winning the Mega Chef award has allowed us to built up a reputation for innovation, pushing the boundaries of Indian cuisine, initiating the revolution of ‘Fusion’ cooking. On our menu you will find dishes inspired by the food of Indian Mughals, as well as some rather unusual creations such as the Zyava, a spicy tamarind and our famous chocolate and chilli dish.

Well it sounded good, and there were a lot of choices on the menu, but no Chicken Dansak which is what I like to order most of the time.

So I chose instead one of their featured specials, the Chicken Zyava, mentioned above and which is described as follows:

Dark chocolate is given a twist of sharpness by tamarind, jazzed by fresh chilli and then soothed with a mellow creamy sauce

Well although I know chocolate is not a traditional Indian ingredient, having previously really enjoyed Mole Poblano, and with there not being anything else on the menu that caught my eye, I thought I would try it. I love chillis and tamarind too, so why not be daring.

Well the food arrived, early too, but disappointingly the appetisers were not very good, and lukewarm, and the Spicy Chips that we ordered turned out to be like McDonalds Fries coated in something like Cayenne Pepper and were cold and rubbery.

Then on to the main course, only to find that Debbie’s Chicken Biryani was very stodgy, and my Chicken Zyava, well I could tell as soon as I took the lid off the container that I was not going to enjoy this take-away meal.

Hot Chocolate! Everyone is familiar with Hot Chocolate right? Can you visualise a take-away container, filled with Hot Chocolate and with some cubes of spicy chicken in it?

The smell is what got me first – Hot Chocolate! It looked just like Hot Chocolate! Guess what – it tasted like Hot Chocolate!

Trust me when I say that a mug of Hot Chocolate goes down a treat on a cold day, but with spicy chicken… well quite honestly it made me feel queasy, especially trying to eat it with fluffy Pilau Rice too.

Debbie could tell you that I very rarely leave anything on my plate, but this was so awful that I couldn’t even eat half of it, I was beginning to gag.

It’s a real shame, because I like to try new dishes, and I have eaten some really exotic meals in my time, but Chicken and Chocolate – I think I will leave it to the Mexicans…

The Greek Bakery

Posted on July 11, 2011 by tony

Living in Harringay which is a suburb of North London in the 1980’s was a surreal experience in many ways.

Although this was England, Harringay is a highly ethnic part of London, and had a large Cypriot population (Greeks/Turks from the island of Cyprus), and driving down the main road (Green Lanes), many of the banks and businesses not only looked foreign, the shop names were in Greek lettering as well.

We lived about ½ a mile off Green Lanes, and close to use was a Greek Bakery that was one of those that you would walk inside just for the smell.

They baked Greek breads, pastries and cakes 7 days a week, at a time when few bakeries were open on a Sunday, and it was a great experience to go there early on a Sunday morning and buy some Greek Bread for breakfast.

Their bread was often covered in Poppy, Sesame and other seeds, and it just tasted so good.

We moved from there to the opposite side of London about 1990 and I have never been back since, so the bakery has probably long since gone, but the memory lingers.

Being a bread-a-holic, it’s great to see that there are many places these days that specialise in breads for breakfast, and when I head back to the USA to see my daughters, there is nothing nicer to go to breakfast at a place that serves good coffee and freshly baked bagels.

You Can’t Celebrate Easter Without Cadbury’s

Posted on April 13, 2011 by tony

If you live in the UK there is really only one name that springs to mind when you think of Chocolate, and it’s Cadbury’s.

Cadbury’s chocolate is superior to most others. It’s creamy and it tastes so good.

Easter would not be complete without Easter Eggs or other chocolate treats, and this year Cadbury’s have some wonderful chocolate gift packs to please chocolate lovers of every age.

Cadbury Gifts Direct have a great selection of chocolate gifts this Easter, something to please every chocolate lover, whether young or old.

How about an Easter Egg Trail Kit which has a selection of large and small eggs that will delight the kids. Or maybe an Easter Treasure Box that is stuffed with chocolate bars and Cadbury Cream Eggs.

Cadbury’s also have an Essential Easter Collection, a hamper filled with different kinds of Easter Eggs and chocolates, enough for the whole family.

Or for the Cadbury’s Caramel fans, why not surprise them with a Caramel Bunnies pack, that has a giant chocolate egg filled with mini caramel eggs, and a Caramel Bunny soft toy.

If your Easter would not be complete without Cadbury’s, take a look at Cadbury Gifts Direct and see what might help to make the perfect Easter for your loved ones.

F Is For Fish And Chips

Posted on April 7, 2011 by tony

Fish And Chips is known throughout the world as the Great British Takeaway, and nothing quite compares with a really good portion of Cod And Chips, wrapped in paper, and eaten while sitting on a bench overlooking the seaside, or a quaint Cornish Harbour, as we did when we were in Cornwall on honeymoon last year (see slideshow).

Years ago of course, but not so these days, Fish And Chips did use to be wrapped in newspaper, but now while a “good” chippie will still wrap your meal in a more hygenic paper wrapper, others use polystyrene (styrofoam) trays, or even cardboard ones.

A lot of other things have changed since the 1970′s, with the advent in the UK of Chinese and Indian takeaways, as well as the numerous Greek Doner Kebab (Gyro) restaurants that have proliferated throughout the country as well.

Add to this the enormous number of American style Fast Food establishments, such as McDonalds, Burger King, KFC and Pizza Hut, and good old British Fish And Chips has a lot of competition.

Thankfully however, this great British dish is still highly popular, and it is still possible to find good Fish And Chip shops that sell this in the traditional style.

Debbie’s grandparents used to own a Fish And Chip shop, and so when she was growing up she spent a lot of time there. Debbie created a lens about Fish And Chips on Squidoo that tells of her experiences, as well as providing a lot of history and background on our national dish.

D Is For Dine With Me

Posted on April 5, 2011 by tony

Today is the 4th day of the The A to Z Blogging Challenge, which requires you to publish an article for every day in April except for the 4 Sundays, with each article being related to the appropriate letter of the alphabet.

With it being the fourth article in this series of 26, today’s letter is D, and seeing as how I am feeling a little peckish, I thought you might like to come Dine With Me.

I love food, and it doesn’t matter whether I am eating in or eating out, I love them both.

With money being fairly tight these days, the same as with many of us, eating out is becoming more and more a luxury that we are able to afford maybe once a month, if that.

Debbie and I do enjoy fine dining once in a while, but both of us were brought up on good old style English Cooking, and that is what we still love to eat, although we do cook a lot of other things as well.

Breakfast is one meal that I really do enjoy, although most of the time I keep it pretty simple. I love once in a while to go to a good buffet restaurant like Golden Corral where I can enjoy anything and everything that I feel like eating, although it’s not a good idea to do this too often of course.

A while back I created a lens on Squidoo entitled What’s Your Favorite Breakfast Food and this has a lot of different types of breakfast foods listed.

Having lived in the USA for 15 years, I wanted to write something about how different eating out is in the USA as compared to the UK, with food being often a lot cheaper in the USA as well as there being a lot more choice of places to eat.

I published several articles about buffet restaurants, The Buffet Restaurant In The USA and The Buffet Restaurant In The UK, as well as Sweet Tomatoes A Healthy Buffet Restaurant Alternative.

Although I do love buffets, I love healthy food as well, and Sweet Tomatoes is one of the places that Debbie and I love to go to when we are in Florida. Their Soup and Salad Bar and other fresh items are to die for. Well, if you enjoy soup and salad that is.

Buffet Restaurants are also great places to go if you have small children or babies, which led to my publishing articles on Buffet Restaurants Perfect For Couples With Babies and Buffet Restaurants Ideal For Toddlers And Older Children.

But getting back to reality, and the lack of money, and once a week we usually end up eating what has become a staple English meal over the years, Baked Beans On Toast. Baked Beans have a completely different use in the UK to in the USA, and here you can serve them on toast for any meal of the day, making a quick and also cheap meal.

Cheese On Toast is also one of my favorites, and again in England we eat this for any meal, quite often with Baked Beans smothered over it. I tell you, this can’t be beat, and it kept me going through my university days.

I hope you enjoyed learning about my taste in food, and also had a chance to visit some of my food related articles. I would love to hear any comments that you have on both my taste in food as well as your favorite kinds of food.

If you enjoyed this article, please can you help us by sharing it. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, we love them all. Thanks so much for taking the time to read us and I hope you enjoyed your visit to Off The Record.

Cheese On Toast Can Make A Quick Tasty Meal Or Snack

Posted on October 20, 2010 by tony

Cheese on toast is something that is very quick to prepare and perfect for a tasty snack or even for a meal.

This article was previously published on Associated Content.

There are so many ways that you can prepare cheese on toast, and I will even pass on my secret way of cooking it to perfection as well.

What Is Cheese On Toast?

One thing it’s not is just slices of cheese placed on a piece of toast, it’s far more than that.

Well ok, scientifically that is actually cheese on toast, but to make it properly, you need to melt the cheese on the toast, and do it properly you need to prepare it correctly before placing it under the grill.

Isn’t This The Same As Welsh Rarebit?

Well yes it can be, but traditional Welsh Rarebit is made by making a blend of grated cheese, mustard and other ingredients, spreading these on the bread, and then toasting it.

The method I am going to describe here doesn’t require any mixing up of ingredients, just slicing or grating of your cheese.

Basic Cheese On Toast Recipe

Depending on how hungry everyone is and whether this is just a snack, a dish to serve with a meal, or a full meal, you need to decide how many slices of toast per person.

I usually allow 2 slices per person, so let’s firstly take our slices of bread, and put them to one side.

Now prepare your cheese, and either a mild to medium Cheddar (medium or sharp Cheddar in the USA) works well.

You can either thinly slice your cheese, or grate it, depending on preference and how much cheese you want to use. It takes a bit longer to grate the cheese, but you can use less that way, however grated cheese can be prone to falling off the bread, and makes a mess in the grill.

Now for my secret preparation tips…

ONE Cheese on toast cooks best if done on a grill pan under a gas grill (or broiler in the USA), where the gas flame is above the cheese. It does work ok in a toaster over, but a gas grill will give you the crispest toast and also melt the cheese better.

TWO Preheat the grill with the grill pan in it, so that the bread will begin to toast quickly. This makes the toast crisper rather than moist and soggy.

THREE Place the bread on the grill and toast just one side. If using the crust from the end of the loaf, place this crust upwards, since you want to place the cheese on the soft side.

FOUR When the bread has toasted on one side, take it out of the grill, and thinly butter the untoasted side. You should only need a small amount of butter, and only the outside crust needs buttering, not the middle, since the oil from the cheese will moisten this.

FIVE Now place the slices of cheese on the bread (or sprinkle your grated cheese), making sure to cover as much of the bread as possible, but not allowing the cheese to overhang the edge of the toast. If the cheese overhangs, it will just melt and drip all over the grill, and make a nice mess for you to clean up afterwards.

SIX A key step… Place the bread back on the grill pan and put it under the grill, changing the grill setting to low. This will allow the cheese to melt slowly, rather than causing the toast to burn and leaving the cheese still fairly solid.

SEVEN Keep an eye on the cheese, and when it either looks as if the cheese has melted well, or the bread crust is starting to darken, crank up the grill so that the cheese starts to bubble nicely and also starts to brown. This brings out the full flavour of the cheese, and will only take a minute or so before it is ready. Be sure to not burn the toast.

EIGHT Turn off the grill and remove the bubbling cheese on toast.

Your cheese on toast is now ready to serve, so place it on plates, cut it into pieces if you wish, and let everyone tuck in.

Great Ways To Enhance Your Cheese On Toast

Use different types of bread.

A nice brown bread with plenty of seeds in it toasts nicely, as does a herby bread. In the UK a Malted Granary loaf is great with cheese.

Buy an uncut loaf and cut generous slices for toasting, rather than thin slices of plain white bread.

Vary Your Types Of Cheese

Rather than just plain old Cheddar, you can experiment with other types of cheese, depending on your taste. Bear in mind that slowly melting the cheese does make the flavour a lot stronger, so don’t overdo it with a really strong cheese.

In the UK you can also use a Lancashire or Cheshire cheese, which are like Cheddar but nice and crumbly and with a slightly different flavour.

Other Items To Put On The Toast

In the UK Marmite is a very popular spread, although most people who have tasted it in the USA (as Marmite or Vegemite) will say that it’s disgusting. This is most likely because it needs to be spread thin and sparing, not thick like peanut butter or jam.

Try spreading Marmite thinly on your bread having buttered it, before laying the cheese on top. This adds a great savoury flavour to the cheese on toast.

Thinly slice tomatoes and place them on the bread before adding the cheese. For added flair, add black pepper to the tomatoes, and if handy some fresh basil leaves. You can also sprinkle dried Italian herbs onto the tomatoes.

Slice some stuffed olives and lay these onto the toast under the cheese. Olives add a wonderful flavour to this dish, especially when they warm up and the oil from the cheese blends with them.

Spread some Salsa on the bread before adding the cheese. This really brings out the taste of the tomatoes and herbs in the Salsa.

Cook sausages (could be Bratwurst or Hot Dogs), slice these in half lengthways, place on the bread and lay the cheese on top.

Items To Put On The Cheese On Toast Before Serving

I personally like to fry some eggs, and when the cheese on toast is ready, put it on the plate, then lay fried eggs on top. The eggs work well with the cheese.

Crispy bacon is nice on top, or pretty much anything you desire.

If serving your cheese on toast with a salad, and not eating it until it cools off, some spinach leaves and other salad items on the plate make this a really tasty meal.

Well there you have my special recipe for Cheese on Toast. I hope you find this yummy and mouth-watering, and have that it makes you want to head out to the kitchen and cook some for yourself.

Iced Green Tea With Lime

Posted on April 25, 2009 by tony

Iced Green Tea With Lime When I need a boost of energy or I am in need of refreshment, there is nothing that I like better than a large glass of Iced Green Tea with a fresh Lime squeezed into it. This really is a refreshing drink for summer. Iced Tea in itself is really refreshing, and it’s also good with a slice or two of lemon, but I like to go the whole hog and squeeze a whole lime into a 16oz glass of my favorite summer time drink.

Green Tea comes from China and is reportedly associated with various health-promoting properties. It has been shown to promote fat oxidation and also to prevent obesity. Well that works for me! Anything that is good for the heart and helps burn fat is a good thing. Plus adding the juice of a lime, you get a good dose of Vitamin C, which helps to energize you and also to boost the immune system.

I know that a lot of people just have to have sugar in their tea, but I actually enjoy my tea without sugar. I guess I have a high tolerance for drinking things that are sour to others.

My Favorite Brand Of Green Tea

My favorite brand of Green Tea is Uncle Lee’ “Legends Of China” Organic Green Tea, which you can buy online from their own web site or other sources, plus it’s available at my local Walmart, which is where I first came across it. It’s not an expensive tea, but it’s Organic which is good, and most importantly for me – I love the taste! A box of 100 tea bags costs under $6 which is pretty good too, so it’s not an expensive luxury. I have tried quite a few green teas, including Lipton’s (nasty!) and they are mostly bitter or just not to my taste, but this is about perfect for drinking hot or cold.

Lemons or Limes can cost quite a bit depending on the time of year, but last weekend at my local Walmart in South Florida, Lemons were 20 cents each, and Limes only 8 cents! Naturally I grabbed enough to last a couple of weeks at least, and of course fruit like this does last for weeks when kept in the fridge.

If you would like to know more about the benefits of Limes, I found a useful article at Practice Natural Cures. If this doesn’t convince you of the benefits, nothng will.

How Do I Make My Iced Green Tea With Lime?

Well I don’t have an Iced Tea Maker so I make mine the hard way (which is really quite simple) by putting a tea bag into a mug, adding cold water, and microwaving for 2 1/2 minutes. Yes it would be better to use fresh tea leaves instead of tea bags, and to brew it properly, but convenience is important to me.

While this is brewing, I fill a 16oz tumbler with ice, then take a Lime, slice it in half, and use my Lime Squeezer to extract all the juice from it into a bowl. I find that this type of Lime Squeezer is very effective, but you have to be sure that the limes are not too hard, or you can break it. If you have a lime that is too hard to squeeze easily, before cutting it, roll it across the counter top to soften it, and then it will squeeze with ease. I also find that if you try to squeeze the lime directly into the tumbler, it can be messy, so it’s a lot easier to just squeeze it into a bowl.

When squeezed, I pour the lime into the tumbler, then wait 10 minutes for the tea to brew and also cool, before squeezing the tea bag, and then pouring the brewed tea into the tumbler. Take a spoon to stir, sugar or sweetener if you absolutely must, but the limes lately here have been really sweet, or should I say not terribly sour, depending on your tolerance. I know I find the Pink Grapefruit that you can get in Florida very sweet, but Debbie still needs to put sugar on them. Each to their own…

Well that’s it for making the Iced Green Tea with Lime my way, so sit back and enjoy my favorite summertime drink, but don’t disappear yet, there’s more…

What To Do With The Leftovers

Having squeezed a Lemon or Lime, there is still a lot of juice, zest and smell in the halves that are left. I place the two halves in a glass of water, and place this in the bathroom, where it gives off a fresh citrus smell for a few days. You could also dry the limes, and hang them up as room fresheners.

With the tea bag, I sometimes wipe my face over with it, since Green Tea is good for the skin, and I have a very oily skin as it is, my face is always greasy and I have to wash it frequently during the day. If you rub the tea bag over your face, it not only removes the oiliness, it acts as a light astringent and helps to remove dead skin. I don’t think you will find this in the beauty tips anywhere else, it’s something that I found, and before you start to think otherwise – NO I am not gay! Regular guys still need to take care of their skin you know… Note: If you are going to use the tea bag on your skin and you are one of these people that uses the same tea bag more than once – just don’t use it again having cleansed your face ok…

Do you have any other uses for Limes or Tea Bags? Or do you have any thoughts, tips or comments on how you drink Iced Tea or make refreshing drinks? Please leave me a comment, I would enjoy reading the feedback.

Off The Record

The Musings Of Debbe & Tony

Category Archives: Food