Especially when I'm sick and especially especially when I'm sick in the winter (and this is about as wintery as FL gets, usually (even if this year seems to be trending more like a real winter)), I crave tea. To quote my ninth grade piano teacher Ms Perrette, "My tea cup looks like the inside of a smoker's lung" because it's never empty long enough to bother scrubbing it out. Well, I crave tea all the time no matter what, but in the summer, it's more alone the lines of iced tea* or barley tea**/ mugicha. In the winter, I crave hot, black tea. I rarely sweeten my tea, but I tend to like the ones that go well with sugar and milk in case I decide I want to: this is Rose Black Tea from Butterfly Brand***, the one that comes in an almost-plain box at the Asian Market, for, like, two dollars. It's the best and most rosy black tea I've ever had, less floral than the British rose-flavored teas, but more authentic-rose flavored and scented. It tastes like summer in places where roses grow easily and bloom all through the sunny months. I don't drink it in the summer because it's too... too summery for that. It's distilled summer. Summer for winter days.
* Brewed as black as coffee on the stove for a long time-- like, 45 minutes-- uncut until you pour it over ice, very sweet, and spiked with a fresh lime wedge or two. This is how my mom makes it. The closest I've found out in the wild, strangely enough, is McDonalds or Wendy's; Wendy's tends to be too sweet but is usually dark enough, and McD tends to be too light, but is properly sweet. And ours is about half the time gross with oldness, so I usually go for the too sweet Wendy's.
** Get yer teabag and boil it for a few minutes, then chill the tea in the fridge and it's delicious. I tried the cold-brew kind before and found it both watery and bitter in an unpleasant way.
*** http://steepster.com/teas/butterfly-brand/4141-rose-black-tea?post=56632
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