back then they had to use instant powdered water

Garcet's tea recipe:

1. Open tea bag packet. Be careful not to rip the bag, this will ruin the tea bag.

2. Put the tea bag in a mug NOTE: Do not put the tea bag next to the mug, this will not make tea!

3. Fill the mug with cold tap water. DO NOT FILL WITH JUICE. Ensure that the tea bag is fully immersed in the water. The tea bag will get wet, this is normal.

4. Put the filled mug of water in the microwave. Microwave for 2 minutes on high.

5. Take the mug out of the microwave. NOTE: The mug must be outside of the microwave before drinking the tea.

6. Sweeten to preference.

7. Drink your fucking tea.

Bort: I'm imagining your kitchen looks like the warehouse for a late night TV infomercial.

I usually scrounge around the backyard for whatever herbs are in season ( apple and chocolate mint at the moment ) and fire up the kettle. Honey to taste.

"Bort: I'm imagining your kitchen looks like the warehouse for a late night TV infomercial."

Well I'm not quite that bad; but for all the sweet tea people around here drink -- and are picky as hell about it -- it serves my purposes to use a $20 machine that gets it right every time.

That said, I did get one of those red copper pans from the commercials, and they really are nearly as non-stick as advertised. There's a little degradation of non-stickiness after a few months, but keep it clean and it will remain (nearly) as good as new.

I was kinda wondering about those things. It's some kind of ceramic coat I think. Last year they were all green. What happened to make it less slick, was it some specific thing?

I blame Frau Bort's teenage son, who occasionally makes a small stack of grilled cheese sandwiches and lets grease bake and bake onto the pan until there's a nearly unremovable layer of char. It takes some doing for me to clean it, and I suspect there's still a microscopic bit of material stuck to the pan that degrades the overall non-stickitude just a bit.

I got the square pan (9.5 inches) and it's ALMOST big enough for four slices of bread. You can do it, but the corners won't get done as much as the middle. I still prefer my Ninja 3-in-1 cooking system for open faced sandwiches (plus general soups, stews, casseroles, and the like). Shame the Ninja pan isn't as durable as the red copper pan, now that's a pairing of technologies I'd like to see.

Oh, I figured out cheap nutritious homemade sausage, now that's a game-changer. 1 pound of ground pork with 1 Tbsp of sausage spice (6 parts black pepper, 6 parts salt, 4 parts thyme, 3 parts ground ginger, 1 part cayenne pepper). Makes pretty good turkey sausage too. I tried lentil sausage but no, just no.

In the commercials you see them burn sugar in the thing and it comes up smelling of roses. Oh well. Perhaps the coating is being scratched, or flaking off?

In the commercials I'm sure they're using a brand new pan. As far as I can tell nothing's flaking off on my pan, but I'm not a microscopologist.

They do cheat a little on the commercial with the eggs: they cook their eggs without stirring them, and that helps them cook into a single mass that doesn't stick to the pan. If you're going to repeatedly scrape the pan with the spatula as your eggs cook, not even a new pan will save you.

So after some fishing around, I think the coating is titanium nitride. I wouldn't mind a heavy coat of the stuff on a more legit pan base, it's not teflon but it's better than straight steel.