Adult Time Out: Make This Sweet and Spicy Ginger Tea

Photo by Dominik Martin via Unsplash.

Brooklyn's Clinton Hill neighborhood once had a cafe called Pillow. True to its name, it was full of pillows—small purple ones strewn on every banquette to cushion the hard texture of the seat, or a tough morning of deadlines or winter blues. I spent more hours than I can count there, mostly working on editorial projects but occasionally reading a novel, staring into space, and trying to flag down someone to take my order. Usually, that was yet another cup of Pillow's addictive homemade ginger tea.

I knew nothing about ginger tea until I first tried it at Pillow. Since then it's become so tied into my fall and winter workdays that I don't think I can by without it. Sometimes I use it to kick-start a stretch of hours spent glued to my laptop, and other times I use it as incentive to get stuff done so I can reward myself with a cup afterwards.

Ginger tea, the homemade kind, isn't like other teas: It's chewy, it has a serious bite, and it can be as sweet or spicy as you want it to be. Now that Pillow has sadly shut down, thanks no doubt to the massive condo developments going up across the street (and the attendant rent hikes), I've had to resort to making my own. With an excellent, insanely easy recipe I found on Spruce, I can get pretty close to those magical cups of ginger tea that the Pillow staff eventually started bringing me as soon as I walked in.

The recipe comes from a health retreat in Thailand, and I've adapted it only slightly. First I peel and slice about two inches of raw ginger into thin slices about the size of a dime (see my pic below; you can use a vegetable peeler instead of a knife to get thinner slices). I let them reach a boil in a saucepan filled with two cups of water, then when the water boils I turn the heat down slightly and let the ginger-water mixture boil for another 15 minutes. I add two squirts of lemon (instead of the lime that the Spruce recipe calls for, but that's your call) and about a tablespoon of honey. That's it.

Brace yourself if you haven't had this tea before. If you don't mellow it with honey (or agave nectar or sugar), the spicy kick is no joke. The sweetness, slight or generous, will mellow the ginger, and a cup of this stuff will rev you up, calm you down, and make you (or me, anyway) feel blissed out for a moment or an afternoon, on days when that feeling is all too hard to come by.