My car still won't start (I need a new battery), and I had to be at St. Elizabeth's for 6 am this morning. J. was nice enough to give me a ride at 5:30 a.m. so that I didn't have to bike there, which was VERY MUCH appreciated especially after noting the thick layer of frost that was present this morning.
Since I was driven to work, afterwards I had to take good ole Boston Public Transportation home, I JUST missed the bus I was trying to get, so I wound up walking a couple of miles (which was good, and maybe I can partially justify my constantly skipping the gym lately?), then I hopped on a bus that took me to Central Square.
Being in the area, and being in need of flour after my cookie making Monday, I stopped into the Harvest Co op. I picked up some whole wheat pastry flour, raisins, and sesame sticks (coming to a salad soon??)
While at the Co op I also recalled a recent conversation with Annabelle, and she told me you can get stevia from the bulk section at the coop, which makes it ideal for giving it a try, since I was hesitant to purchase a whole package of it for like $8 and discover I disliked it.
Stevia is the "new" big sweetener. Elizabeth is constantly talking about it, and at work I have been analyzing more and more food records with people using stevia. There are even stevia sweetened sodas now (I love how junk food products think if they add something natural they are suddenly healthy, but that's a rant for another day...)
Stevia is a natural sweetener made from the leaves of the stevia plant. I'm not going to go too in detail about stevia, since I feel like everyone that reads my blog knows significantly more about it than I do.
At any rate, I decided to give it a try. I purchased 0.06# of the herb, for just over a dollar, - not too harsh of an investment.
When I got home, I decided to have some in a cup of tea. I chose a basic black tea so that I could really get a sense for what stevia tastes like.
It looked a bit more frothy than usual, and there was a definite green tinge in the foam, but as I always say, I've never met anything green that I didn't like (yet)!
I think the excess foam/ powderiness is partially due to the fact that I've recently switched over to using powdered soymilk in coffee and tea etc (basically because it's a lot lighter to carry home than whole soymilk haha).
Sooks was also very interested in this new sweetener and hesitantly inspected the situation.
Stevia wasn't as sweet as I was expecting, but I used it very sparingly since I was a bit nervous from I've heard all these stats that it is like 200x sweeter than sugar, and a serving size I read on one package was 1/40th teaspoon.
It tasted pretty good, and made my tea an adequate sweetness. There was a lot of residue left over from the stevia, and it left me with a bit of a powdery taste in my mouth.
I know this green kind is the more "raw" less refined version, so perhaps the more refined ones have less excess particals to cause this build up and powdery taste.
I'll have to give this sweetener a try in other settings, and perhaps not in the presence of powdered soymilk and see how it fares.
As for now, Sookie and I Signing out!
