FEED YOUR FACE: Spice Tea made with Tang

Kathi here. I love a nice mug of hot, spicy tea on a cold day. It warms my innards (and my hands if I hold the cup just right) and makes my tongue happy.

I learned a recipe for hot spiced tea when I was in Girl Scouts. It was made out of Tang. (Yes, hide your shock: Tang had been invented by then!) Of course, we wanted to drink something that the astronauts did.

Every Fall or Winter I get in the mood to have some of this tea. It's an old church-lady favorite now!

This tea is also a welcome gift and is easy to make. The recipe is forgiving. You can package it in some fun and creative ways or you can just stick it in a plastic sandwich bag. Either way -- it tastes good.

You can put a sandwich bag of it in a festive mug and add a bow. Or put it in a canning jar that you have decorated with glass paint – or just a plain jar. You could put it in a plastic sandwich bag, cut a large circle out of fabric, gather it up, and tie it with a bow.

Or, you could forget about packaging it up and keep it all for yourself.

The basic recipe is this:
1 cup instant iced tea (you can use plain, lemon, sweetened, unsweetened)
2 cups Tang instant breakfast drink
1 tablespoon of allspice or pumpkin pie spice

You can mix that up and use it as is, or you can add some Jello (lemon, orange, lime, or ?) or instant lemonade mix, or instant apple cider mix.

Add one heaping tablespoon of the mix to a mug of boiling water. Stir to dissolve, then drink it when it's cool enough to stand it.

One sip whooshes me back to those Girl Scout days when this recipe helped me earn a cooking badge. Come to think of it, it's not really cooking. Oh, well. . . somehow it counted.

And it still makes my tongue happy.