A little cold front has come through, giving us some relief from the heat and a little preview of Autumn weather. While I'm ready for the hot days of summer to be over, I'm not quite ready to say goodbye to the abundance of tasty fruits and veggies available this time of year. I've especially enjoyed the fruit this summer, including peaches, berries and watermelons.
Since it is still summer (at least for the next couple of weeks), and while decent fresh berries can still be found, I decided to make some raspberry iced tea with a new variety of Tazo tea I found. I love experimenting with new tea flavors! If you can't find this variety of tea, feel free to use regular black tea and add in some extra puréed berries for flavor.
Raspberry Iced Tea
Ingredients:
- 1 Tazo Iced Blushberry Black Tea bag (this larger bag size is used especially for pitchers of tea)
- 1 cup fresh or frozen raspberries + a few extra berries for garnish
- 1 cup sugar (for official southern sweet iced tea); feel free to reduce sugar, remove altogether or substitute with sweetener of choice
- 7 cups water, divided
Directions:
- Bring 4 cups water and 1 cup sugar to boil, stirring sugar until dissolved.
- Remove from heat and add tea bag. Allow to steep for 5 minutes.
- Pour into pitcher.
- In a blender or food processor, purée raspberries with 1 cup of water.
- Strain out seeds with cheesecloth or fine mesh sieve and discard, reserving raspberry liquid.
- Add raspberry juice to tea mixture in pitcher.
- Add additional 2 cups cold water to pitcher and mix well.
Pour over ice, garnish with fresh raspberries and enjoy!
