A rainy afternoon and tea...

To me, there are only two kinds of Sundays. One is the bright and sunny kind and the second are all the other kinds of Sundays. The first ones are reserved for soaking in as much sun as I can lazing around in the balcony, with a good book in one hand, coffee in another and maybe, experimenting with baking later in the day.

All other kinds of Sundays are usually lazy too, albeit a little less cheerful. Rainy Sundays are the most challenging ones. Forced to stay indoors, I get restless and bored quickly. It's during these times, a really good book is the greatest blessing. Last few weeks, Pune saw a lot of rains and one of the Sunday afternoons I ended up on a house arrest due the downpour. I had just started a very interesting management book (not my usual preference) called The Purchasing Machine which talks about some of the best practices some of the top organizations use to improve their supply chain and purchasing processes. I won't go into the details of the book as I was reading it not for leisure but for a better understanding of the function I was working with in my office.

For some reason, I was reminded of office and the lemon tea that gets served there, occasionally though. Almost on an auto pilot mode, I went into the kitchen to make it and reduce the gloominess the rains had brought with it. Honestly, there is hardly any "recipe" to it. Just regular tea powder steeped in hot water, with sugar and a few drops of lemon squeezed into it. The only reason I chose to put it up as a recipe here is to get the combination of the three ingredients right.

I've tried all the variants of this tea several times before coming up with the right one. The trick is to not steep the tea till becomes too strong. It needs to be somewhere between not too light and not too strong. The second trick is the amount of lemon. For one cup, a quarter of a lemon is usually enough. And the last one, is to add enough sugar to make it sweet. This was really difficult for me as I usually don't take my tea or coffee too sweet. So seeing a spoon full or more of sugar go into it made me take a mental note of not drinking this too often. Honey didn't help, as the taste didn't seem quite right to me. Of course, I urge you to try out variations till you arrive at your kind of tea.

So here it is, a "recipeless" lemon tea :)

• 1.5 cups water
• 1 -2 spoons of tea powder or bags
• 1.5 spoons of sugar
• a Quarter piece of lemon 

Boil the water and add the tea to it. Steep the tea till it is not too strong. pour it into a glass, add sugar according to taste and stir. Squeeze the quarter of lemon into the tea, stir and serve.

Perfect for gloomy and cold rainy days!