While you still have mint growing in your gardens, meadows, or at the edge of the driveway, alongside the ugly metal barn,

I want to give you this recipe for summer tea/juice. It’s light and refreshing, lightly sweetened with honey and orange juice. My children love it.

Orange-Mint Tea
Adapted from Simply In Season

I don’t measure the ingredients for this tea, so what I’ve written below is just to give you a rough idea. Change it around to suit your tastes.

10-15 stalks of mint, just the top 6-8 inches
1/3 cup orange juice concentrate, or one cup of reconstituted orange juice
the juice from two lemons
1/2-3/4 cup honey

Pick over the stalks of mint, removing any bad leaves, and if you want to, gently rinse the stalks with water. Put two to three quarts of water in a large kettle and bring to a boil. Stir the mint leaves into the water, put the lid back on the kettle, and remove the kettle from the heat. Allow the tea to steep for 30 minutes.

Scoop the mint out of the water and pour the tea through a fine-mesh strainer to remove all leafy particles. Stir the honey and lemon and orange juices into the tea and add more cold water, or ice, to make a gallon of tea.

Yesterday I lied. I said that I was “still down, sort of”. There ended up being no “sort of” in sight. Once I finished my post, I went back to bed and spent the rest of the day there, sleeping off and on, too headachy to even read. Then I fell asleep with The Baby Nickel and slept the whole night, too. I don’t think I’ve had that much sleep in ages.

I got up at six this morning and have been on the go, albeit a bit slowly and gingerly, ever since. I washed the kitchen floor, put two trays of Romas in the oven to roast, made breakfast and lunch, got a French toast casserole in the fridge for tomorrow’s breakfast, made mustard eggs, read to Miss Becca Boo and Yo-Yo Boy (we’re reading Pinky Pye by Eleanor Estes), collected seeds from my heirloom lettuce, and so on.

Obviously, we skipped church. I wasn’t feeling that good.

I’m going to tell you about the smashed potatoes next, but before I do, I have a trivia question for you. When I boil my red beets, the edges turn yellow-ish.

But, after letting them sit for an hour or so, the red color comes back into them.

Why is that? Is it because the boiling water just sucks the color out of them and then as they cook they keep bleeding red from the middle outward? Is it the type of beet I have? Any scientific reason for this? Anyone?

Okay, now on to the smashed potatoes.

Smashing Potatoes
I read about these potatoes on Sarah’s blog, and she says she read about them in some fancy cooking magazine, as well as on the Pioneer Woman’s website. I’m not going to give exact measurements since it’s really more of process then a recipe. I hope that doesn’t frustrate you too much.

These potatoes go with anything—eggs at breakfast, hamburgers, corn-on-the-cob and tomato sandwiches, salads, spicy red beans, and they make an excellent snack when dipped in ketchup, or gobbled up plain (I had made the potatoes, the ones in the following photographs, for an after-work, pre-supper snack). You can bake them with fresh herbs, or serve them up with sour cream, salsa, bacon, and black olives. I’m sure you’ll get a chance to eat them a variety of different ways, because once you have tried them, you will make them again and again and again and…. Yep, that many times. No joke.

12-24 smallish potatoes, about the size of golf balls (this time around I used French fingerlings)
olive oil
coarse salt
black pepper

Wash the potatoes (no need to peel them) and cook in boiling water till tender. At this point you can continue on with the recipe, or you can store them in the refrigerator until a later time that’s more convenient for you. (Or, if you’re like me, you’ll boil up a big kettle of them so you have them ready to go whenever you get hit with a craving.)

Coat a heavy-bottomed ban with olive oil, and sprinkle it with some coarse salt and black pepper (this helps the potatoes to keep from sticking to the pan, as well as giving flavor to the bottom side). Set the potatoes on the pan, leaving ample space between each potato.

Using a potato smashing device, roughly smash each potato.

The goal here is to get the potatoes mashed fairly thin. If they crumble apart, just push them back together with your fingers.

Generously drizzle olive oil on top of each potato (about one teaspoon per potato) and sprinkle them with more salt and pepper.

Bake the potatoes on the bottom rack of your oven, preheated to 400 degrees, until the undersides are crispy and golden brown (10-15 minutes). Flip the potatoes over and continue baking until the other side is also nicely browned. Serve hot.

I think I’m in the in between stage: I’m not fully sick, but I’m not fully well. I’m tired and sleepy and have zero energy. I don’t want to do anything. I can’t stand loud noises or commotion. My head still hurts. But I’m bored. Maybe tomorrow….

In the meantime, here’s the view from the couch where I slept for three hours, yesterday afternoon.

And from my flat-on-my-back position, I had a good view of Yo-Yo Boy, who also succumbed, though briefly, to this illness (we knew he was out-of-order when he didn’t want any potato chips at lunch—he loves potato chips).

Mr. Handsome took Blackie to the vet this morning for his booster shots. He took all the kids with him, bless his heart. I think they’re going to stop at Mickey D’s for breakfast. The thought makes me feel queasy, but I guess if they’re all happy, then I’m happy, too.