Come to Tea: An Elegant Garden Gathering – Food
Come to Tea: An Elegant Garden Gathering
Debbie Rodgers
Perhaps nothing says "garden party" like having afternoon tea outdoors. Its a charming reminder of bygone days and childhood make-believe. Outdoor spaces of all kinds, including balconies, can be successfully adapted to a tea party.
Tea parties span generations and will be enjoyed by your most sophisticated women friends or all the giggling little girls of your acquaintance.
What makes an elegant tea party Look at these factors.
Flowers
Plan to hold your tea party when your garden is in its fullest bloom -- perhaps its lilac time, June roses, or peony season. Be sure to cut some of the blooms for the tea table vases. If you dont have a garden, buy an armful of flowers at a farmers market or stop by a country ditch and pick bunches of wild daisies and Queen Annes lace.
Invitations
Send handwritten notes by snail mail. Your guests will recognize your party as an elegant affair and dress accordingly! Typically, tea is held around 4 p.m. -- perfect for day-blooming flowers. Include an invitation for the little ones to bring along a doll or teddy friend.
Table Setting
The more elegant, the better. Stash the paper table covering and the plastic glasses just for today. Instead, use a crisp linen tablecloth, pressed cloth napkins and your best bone china cups and saucers. If its a little girls party, you might want to invest in two or three miniature tea sets.
Try to have adequate seating for everyone. Consider setting your straight-back indoor dining chairs outdoors. They can add an elegant touch, whether left unadorned or covered with flowered chintz.
Hats
Encourage all of your guests to wear hats -- big-brimmed, floppy and flowered. If the party is for little girls, collect old hats, scarves and silk flowers at a thrift shop, yard sale or discount store. Make decorating the hats a fun activity at the party. You can also include a box of flowery cast-offs for dressing up. Include "grown-up" shoes and old jewellery -- anything that will make the little ones feel elegant. Tea time is a fun way to introduce young ones to "elegant party" manners.
Food
Other than teaspoons, no cutlery should be required at tea. All sandwiches and sweets should be dainty finger-food. Try sandwiches of watercress, cucumber, or egg with the crusts removed and cut in quarters. Sugar cookies and petit fours are traditional sweets. You can substitute mini-cupcakes or tiny tarts.
Tea
One of the first things that I learned in seventh grade home economics class was how to brew a proper pot of hot tea, but that was many years ago. I suspect that tea-making is becoming a lost art.
Tea is actually the common name of one plant: Camillia sinesis. The three basic types of tea -- black, green and oolong -- are distinguished by the amount of oxidization that the tea leaves have undergone. The more than 3,000 varieties of tea in the world are all derived from those three basic types.
Herbal teas -- more properly, tisane or infusion -- are made from a wide variety of flowers, herbs, barks, berries, fruits and spices.
At a minimum, offer your guests a traditional tea and a caffeine-free herbal choice. Have milk not cream!, sugar and fresh lemon wedges available.
So, dust off your teacups and your manners and sit down with your girlfriends for a proper tea party. Its a lovely summer interlude!
About The Author
Debbie Rodgers, the haven maven, owns and operates Paradise Porch, and is dedicated to helping people create outdoor living spaces that nurture and enrich them. Her latest how-to guide
English Has Come A Long, Long Way… – Writing
English Has Come A Long, Long Way...
David Leonhardt
I often wonder what would happen if Shakespeare were to be transported in a time machine to our world today. What would he think How would he react
Yes, Willie would probably tell me "thou hast too much time on thy hands if thou spendeth it wondering about such flights of fancy." But only after he found his feet.
You see, Willie would be blown away by some of the comforts we take for granted. For instance, that box we walk into. The doors close all by themselves...just like magic. When they open, we are magically in a different place.
"What callest thou this contraption" Willie would ask in utter amazement.
An elevator. You would think nothing would phase a man who just landed his time machine 400 years into the future.
"Ah, I see. It was not magic after all. It elevated us, because it is an elevator."
This Willie guy is pretty handy with his English, isnt he But that wont get him far these days. A hundred years ago, even fifty, he could have figured out just about every new word by tracing its roots often to Greek or Latin. But not today.
"What are those...those...those, things"
Why thats a TV, with a VCR and a DVD player. Over there, its a CD player, an AM and FM radio and an amp. This is a PC, with CDRW and floppy drives, a powerful CPU, A and C drive, and more RAM than a MAC.
"What Thy alphabet seems a bit confusing."
Once upon a time, the meaning of a word could always be guessed by simply tracing the entomology of the word back to its lowest roots.
"Thou meanest etymology, dost thou not Entomology is the study of insects and bugs."
I knew that.
I took out a Kleenex because my nose was running.
"But how dost thy nose run"
I suppose the same way I drivest on a parkway and parkest in the driveway. Or how it doesnt matter whether we fill in a form or fill out a form...either way, the taxman gets the last laugh.
I offered to take Willie for a ride.
"That is more like it. There is nothing quite like a horse under ones bottom.
No, no, no. We dont ride horses anymore. That is a barbaric way to treat such majestic beasts. Now we drive cars...and kill the horses off with the exhaust.
"I have no idea what you are talking about."
Just have a seat in the BMW, Willie, while I turn on the AC and rev up the RPMs on this old V6. Before you know it, well be doing 100 mph down the 102.
"More letters and numbers. Have words become redundant in the future"
Pretty much. As life got more and more complicated, words got more and more complicated. Pretty soon it was taking several minutes just to pronounce a single government department. So real word groups had to be replaced by acronyms
Why Does the Weight Come Back – Diet
Why Does the Weight Come Back
Kim Beardsmore
Before many Australians recently, a devastating story unfolded on a popular current affairs program.
We watched with compassion as the fattest man in Australia told of his most recent, serious attempt to lose weight. Approximately 12 months earlier and weighing close to 300 kilos, he under went surgery and had his stomach stapled.
I doubt there would have been one person watching not moved by this mans depression and plight. Despite undergoing the surgery, today he could barely get through each day, both physically and mentally. He shared with us his sense of hopelessness and wanting to end it all.
It was not only his size that was causing his depression. He had to deal with a heart broken by disappointment.
You see, the stomach stapling had been a success.
He soon lost well over 50 kilos post operation and he and his family rejoiced. But then the unthinkable happened.
The weight came back. Today he weighs well over 300 kilos - more than before the stomach stapling.
This is an extreme case, but nonetheless raises a question that so many people continue to battle with.
After a diet, why does the weight come back so quickly
To answer this we need to understand how much energy a body requires. For each pound you weigh, each day you need 12 calories to maintain your body weight. If you weigh 120 pounds you will need 120 x 12 calories, that is, 1440 calories per day to maintain that body weight. If you eat or drink more calories than your body requires, the excess energy is stored as fat. It takes 3,600 excess calories to make one pound of fat.
In this example, if your typical daily calorific intake is 2000 calories, in around 30 days you would put on between 4-5 pounds of fat!
Lets say, you then decide to go on a restrictive diet and halve your calorific consumption to 1,000 calories per day. You stay on this diet for around a month and lose 10 pounds and now weigh 110 pounds. You feel fantastic about losing the weight but cant keep up such a restrictive regime because you are irritable and have no energy.
So you go off your diet and go back to your usual routine of 2,000 calories a day. Remember you are lighter now and your body requires less energy to maintain its new weight. You would now require 110 x 12, that is, 1320 calories per day.
In this instance, by consuming 2000 calories daily, because you are lighter than before, you would put the weight back on in just 24-25 days!
If you want to keep the weight off you must develop a consistent change in eating habits to ensure you do not consume more than your body requires. You cannot continue to eat the same quantities and/or combinations of foods that caused you to be overweight in the first place. This will require developing an understanding of the nutritional content of food and raising your bodys metabolism through increased muscle mass and exercise.
c Copyright Kim Beardsmore
About The Author
Kim is successful a weight loss coach who will help you find consistent results. You will learn how to stabilize at your goal weight and never diet again. No public weigh-ins, meetings that cost you money or fads...simply long term results. Free, no obligation consultation: http://leanmachine.org/refid=overweightnet-16319. Would you like to earn money from home http://tinyurl.com/3qqdm.