Quick and Easy Cheap and Healthy Merry Christmas!

Link to Quick and Easy Cheap and Healthy

Posted: 22 Dec 2011 06:23 PM PST

Thank you for subscribing to Quick and Easy Cheap and Healthy! Treat yourself this Christmas to sweet little healthy goodies. Click here now for your free copy of Healthy Holidays, Slightly Indulgent Sweet Treats!

I want to take this time to wish

each and every one of my readers

a very Merry Christmas!

I’m going to be spending the weekend with part of my family – there’s sure to be plenty of noise, laughter, fun, and merriment.

Oh yeah, and food. Plenty of that.

If you haven’t opened my free gift to you yet, here it is again: Healthy Holidays: Slightly Indulgent Sweet Treats. Free to all subscribers because I love you!

Here’s another little gift for you – a piano arrangement of O Come All Ye Faithful (together with Sanctus III by Bach) by Yours Truly. Enjoy!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

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Gifts from the Kitchen: Cardamom-Orange Coffee {To Go}

Posted: 22 Dec 2011 06:56 AM PST

My friend Sheila of Alice and the Mock Turtle knocks my socks off with her creativity. Her active mind is always churning with ideas and new ways of looking at things to come up with such unique solutions and fun stuff of all kinds.

One of her recent blog entries totally blew me away with its simplicity and just sheer genius! She used empty tea bags to create individual instant coffee bags and dressed them up for gift giving. I didn’t even know you could buy empty tea bags!

Anything with the word coffee instantly grabs my attention, so I was all over this idea like white on rice (or brown, I guess I should say) and I started thinking about how I could incorporate this into my gifts from the kitchen for Christmas.

And since I can’t leave well enough alone, I began dreaming of different flavored coffees – my own coffee blends, so to speak – that could be placed into these little tea bags for sheer coffee-drinking pleasure. Cardamom-Orange Coffee to Go is the result of that mental brainstorming.

Sheila had found these amazing press-and-seal tea bags that you can iron after filling to create a completely sealed envelope of coffee. For some reason which I can’t remember now, I opted to go with Teavana’s PerfecTea paper filters instead. These tea bags don’t require any ironing (not my favorite chore), but neither do they have any way to seal them at all. I found that for my own use, simply folding over the top (as they were designed to do) was sufficient, and not even one teeny tiny coffee grind found its way into my coffee.

For gift-giving, though, I wanted to be sure that the envelope didn’t spill, so I simply used a doubled length of thread and a needle to make a running stitch through the top of the folded filter. I left a 3″-or-so length of thread on either side and tied those together into a knot. Not only did this keep the coffee grinds from spilling out of the bag, but it also created a useful handle for pulling the filter in and out of a cup of hot water. And it gathers, so it can be used to help squeeze out all the coffee goodness! The whole process took maybe 30 seconds for each coffee bag (and I am by no means a proficient sewer!).

Unfortunately, it’s too late for you to order the tea bags in time for Christmas at this point, but they may be available at your local Teavana store (or other tea specialty shop). If you can find the tea bags, filling them up is super quick and easy, making them a great Christmas gift or stocking stuffer!

Some gifting suggestions:

in a coffee-themed basket for a coffee lover (with mugs, coffee-themed decor, flavored syrups, etc.)
in a tin full of home-baked goodies
with homemade (or storebought if you’re running out of time!) biscotti
by itself in a jar, as Sheila suggested, together with cream and sugar
in a portable re-usable coffee mug (I did this for a friend)

I had some small “transparent archival plastic bags” (similar to these, except not self-sealing), that I used to hold the coffee bags, both to help keep the coffee fresh, and to give it a nice clean look. You can just use a plain old zip-top plastic bag if you don’t have anything like that, or a jar, like Sheila used.

And just to make it all the more elegant for gifting, I even created some tags to go with my original coffee blend. I made it into a PDF just for you, friends! Cardamom-Orange Coffee {to go} label

Now… what to put in the coffee bags?! You can just use some plain good quality coffee beans, like Sheila did, or you can get all adventuresome with me and try out some exotic homemade naturally infused flavored coffee blends! I’ve been working on this cardamom-orange coffee flavor for a couple weeks now, so I’ll share it with you, but the sky is the limit as far as what you can put into the coffee to flavor it. Pretty much any spice or dried (dried to the point where it can be powdered) fruit can be added to the coffee beans to produce delicious flavored blends. If you experiment and come up with an awesome new flavor, tell me about it so I can try it, too!

And here’s a tip: the easiest way to get dried orange zest is to take the peels from an orange or clementine and set them out in a single layer on a plate to dry. When they’re completely dry, run them through the coffee grinder. I even just added a couple of the pieces of orange peel into the grinder with the whole coffee beans.

Cardamom-Orange Coffee

Ingredients

For each serving, you will need:
1 TBSP coffee beans, your favorite roast
1/2 tsp dried orange zest
1/4 tsp ground cardamom

Instructions

Combine all 3 in a coffee grinder and grind until fine. Brew in 6 oz of hot water.

To use the tea bag, just place about 3 tsp of this coffee blend into the bag, seal as desired (or as required by the manufacturer), then place in a coffee mug. Pour 6 oz of hot water over the coffee bag and allow it to steep for several minutes, or until desired strength. I found that the tea bag filter limited the strength of the coffee, so any more than 6 oz of water resulted in a rather weak cup of coffee.

Once you have your little tea bags full of this yumminess, you will have super QUICK coffee at the ready wherever you are. You can fill your to-go cup with hot water , place one of these babies in there and run out the door!

Just as EASY as plain old coffee! OK, dealing with the paper filters is a little more effort, but not much.

Purchasing the filters is some additional expense that I normally don’t have, but for gift-giving, it can’t be beat! Definitely a CHEAP option for all the coffee-lovers in your life. And it’s way CHEAPer than buying the famous nationwide-brands line of naturally infused flavored coffee blends. Or even their instant coffee (does anybody really pay that much for instant coffee? You do? May I ask in the name of heaven WHY?!)

Infusing your coffee with natural elements like orange zest and cardamom is a lot HEALTHY-er than purchasing the artificially (read: chemically) flavored kinds available elsewhere.

Shared at Tastetastic Thursday,