Lychee Jasmine Tea

Floral Flavors: Nothing brightens up a dish like a real flower! Whether you live in the northern or the southern hemisphere, edible flowers can add flavor and aroma to salads, breads, spreads, desserts or dips. Make your recipe bloom with rose water, flowering herbs, floral teas, dried lavender blossoms or even fresh flowers like nasturtiums, violets, borage, squash, sunflowers or pretty much any blossom in a vegetable garden. I decided to make lychee jasmine tea!

I’m gonna be honest–this month has not been kind to me, (thankfully not because of anything catastrophic). Although I entertained the lovely idea of going to the farmer’s market all month, I never got the chance to go.

I’ve been pulling 16-17 hour-days in my basement study hovel. While there are breaks every now and then to commiserate/trade study notes with friends, eat meals, it’s been a pretty bleak experience. I sincerely hope this will pay off when I finally take this test.

Since I couldn’t find fresh flowers, I decided to try to come up with something that I already had all the ingredients for. Thus, this recipe is almost entirely composed of care package items from my parents, and is somewhat of a cross between iced tea and fruit-infused water.

I tend to associate longan with lychee, even though they’re definitely not the same thing. Both of these can usually be found in Asian markets (of which there are none within a 2-hour radius from where I am, hence why my ingredients came from a care package that my mom sent me last month).

• Longan is a great source of vitamin C and iron.
• Lychee is also a great source of vitamin C, as well as B vitamins, potassium and copper.
• Couple those with jasmine green tea and you’ll have lots of antioxidants in this drink! Antioxidants help to protect you from free radical degradation/damage.

Lychee Jasmine Tea

Print Recipe

5 Ingredient Lychee Jasmine Tea

Prep Time7 minutes mins

Course: Drinks

Cuisine: Chinese

Keyword: 5 ingredients + under, easy, quick

Servings: 4 people

Ingredients

• 2 jasmine green tea bags
• 1/4 can lychee pureed
• dried seedless longan
• frozen fruit mangoes, pineapples, strawberries, or ice
• sprig of fresh mint
• ~1/2 gallon water
• water

Instructions

• Boil the water, add tea bags and cover for ~5 minutes. Let it cool completely before you put it in the fridge to chill. (Remove tea bags before doing so!)
• Puree the lychee in a blender/food processor.
• Pour lychee puree into a tall glass, then add the tea and water.
• Top it off with the longan, frozen fruit (or ice) and a sprig of mint!

Notes:

• I have a hot water dispenser, so I just fill a cup with water and stick the tea bags in. This is very much to taste, so you can add more water if you find it to be too strong! I don’t own a pitcher, which is why I went with the cup method.
• Every can of lychee I’ve ever seen comes packed in syrup, so you can drain that if you’d like. You can also reserve some of the liquid to pour into the tea! I drained about 3/4 of the can of liquid and left the rest in so that I could get the lychee to puree properly.
• This actually only became an iced-tea/fruit-infused water hybrid because I couldn’t figure out how to get the ice dispenser to work. (Too high-tech for me, clearly, don’tjudgeme,) I decided to throw in chunks of frozen fruit instead! If you like your drinks super-chilled, I suggest you actually use ice. ;) #strugglebuscookinghacks

This is what the bag of dried longan will typically look like!

As the first and only recipe challenge founded by registered dietitians, The Recipe ReDux aims to inspire the food lover in every healthy eater and inspire the healthy eater in every food lover. Thank you for visiting. We hope you enjoy!

(Please note that this is a closed link-up for Recipe ReDux Contest entries only. Any links added to this collection for non-ReDux posts will be deleted.)