Day 90: Green Tea With Pineapple & Grapefruit

It's here. At long last - day 90!!  If you've been reading the last few weeks, you've known that I've gotten a little weary of the whole process.  I love blogging - and walking - and photography - and tea...but the 'every day without fail' nature of it can become a struggle.

I'll write more tomorrow about my thoughts on the whole process.  I've arranged to have an Afternoon Tea at The Saint in Glasgow with two of my girls tomorrow, to celebrate the success of the 90 days!  We're very excited about the little cakes, sandwiches, and not only tea but cocktails in teacups! But more on that tomorrow for the celebratory blog post.  For now, I'm blogging as usual on one of my classics, green tea.

I genuinely thought I'd blogged on all the green tea versions in my cupboard, but I realised when cutting a grapefruit (and wondering if I should try to create my own tea version) that although I've been drinking this one every few days, I haven't officially blogged it yet!  Twinings does a whole series of 'Green Tea With...', and I've tried Orange and Lotus Flower, Blueberry and Raspberry, Mango, Cranberry, and Lemon, just to name a few.  I think I've actually tried a few others that aren't listed on the blog.  All of them are lovely.  The fruit flavour with green is just right.  My friend Moe asked me yesterday, of all the teas I've tried, which was my favourite, and I said I think it's the Green Tea With Mango, loose leaf.  But I'm thankful to Twinings for its green-tea-with series that got me hooked on greens in the first place.

Today's green tea, with pineapple and grapefruit, has a lovely sour kick to it.  I even added a little grapefruit juice to spike it further.  I have a lot of good memories of grapefruit.  The house that I grew up in, in Phoenix, was on land that was once a grapefruit orchard.  We had at least 13 trees on our property alone, and every house on the block had its share, too.  When I was younger, I wasn't as big a fan of grapefruit - too sour, and of course when you're young you want things as sweet as possible.  But as I got older I really enjoyed going out back and picking one of the huge yellow fruits directly off the tree, and taking it inside for breakfast.  Some of them took two hands to hold - and the skin was as thick as your thumb.  Some trees had sweeter fruit than others - some you could hardly eat unless you had liberally dosed it with sugar, and others had a tinge of red to them.  I remember the smell of them, and the white blossoms on the trees in spring, and the green abundance of leaves, and the painted-white-tree-trunks.  And after a storm, the green leaves and brown branches would be flung about, and the yellow grapefruits would be bobbing about in our swimming pool, and we would use them to play mini-basketball, or to surprise the cat.  (If you hold a grapefruit under water, and then release it, it springs up with a pop and the cat jumps backwards ten feet.  Great fun.)  Even just smelling the skin of the grapefruit I bought here at Tescos takes me back to summer afternoons in Arizona, the blue of the swimming pool matching the sky, and round yellow fruits lying about, and me lying about, watching the clouds drift across the sky.

Tea does wonderful things for you.