Yummy Tea and an Update

Hey there, lovelies! Just wanted to share what's going on in my kitchen lately. Not much if I can hep it! I found out a couple of weeks ago that I can't eat garlic or onions anymore!!! AAARGHMPH! Seriously, every soup I make has onion for a base, every quick food from the store I can eat, every meal from restaurants I'm used to.... all... include... garlic or onions (can you even get food without garlic and onions at a restaurant?). I'll live, I'm just having a pity party first.

So, how did this come about? Well, my hubby has always (not always, but for quite a while) been able to tell when I eat a lot of garlic or onions. Apparently, they make me smell weird. Like, my skin. Isn't that weird? Anyway, the weird-smelling-skin issue has gotten worse over the last year to where I smelled weird if I had any garlic or onions, even a teeny bit, cooked or not, in powder form or not. So needless to say, I'd cut back pretty drastically on my consumption even before recently, bu then I started noticing uncomfortable, squiggly feelings in my tummy when I'd eat them. Well, the squiggly feelings have gotten worse, so now I'm giving up pretty much all of my store-bought convenience foods: egg rolls, hummus, marinara, dressings, refried beans, baked beans, vegetable stock, not to mention the afore-mentioned homemade soup. Oh sure, I'll find new recipes, I'll figure out how to make soup that doesn't taste super bland (I'm looking at you, last week's carrot soup!), and hopefully I'll find new convenience foods (or just learn to make more of my own!). For now though, I'm pretty bummed.

Check out that steam!

One thing that has made my culinary life a wee bit happier lately is a new (to me) flavor of tea! I love tea. I mean, really love it. It's great when you want a bit of something warm and you're watching your figure (watching it do what, praytell?). It's good cold, instead of soda. It's good sweetened or not, caffeinated or not, black, or red, or white, or green, fruity, or floral, or spicy. Pretty much, tea is great. And it doesn't include garlic or onions. My new kind of best friend. The flavor I've been loving lately is Celestial Seasonings Bengal Spice. It's labeled as a caffeine free chai, but it's better than any chai I've ever had, and I like me some chai. It's crazy-sweet without any sweetener! And you can infuse it approximately a zillion times and still get some yummy flavor. And it tastes like cinnamon. So yum. I would have never found it if I hadn't gone into the store when I was already stressed out and made an impulse buy. Thank you, impulse buy, thank you.

Anyway, super long post, huh? Without even a recipe?! Well, you have many onion/garlic-free recipes to look forward to, including my new favorite cheese sauce (so good)! I actually hadn't posted my former favorite cheese sauce yet, which I will still do, since I have some old pictures and it's crazy-delicious for peeps who can still have the good stuff. The new cheese is good stuff too, just not onion/garlic stuff. Anyway... kinda finding it strange to end after such a long, rambling post so.... the end.