AOL News reports that at a speech on Sunday, Hillary Clinton quoted Eleanor Roosevelt saying, "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she is in hot water."

I like the sentiment of that quote, but I'm not so sure I agree with it. I can definitely judge the strength of a tea bag just by nosing it - no water required.

If you were Hillary, what food would you compare women to in order to help your campaign?

My answer: A woman is like a bowl of beans - she'll be with you for the long haul! Maybe there is a reason I'm a food blogger and not a campaign speech writer.

The other day, I blogged about my awesome Big Book of Backyard Cooking. In the review, I mysteriously mentioned my favorite iced tea recipe, but I didn't want to go into detail until I could share pictures of all the tasty ingredients. So, over the weekend I ran to the store twice (because I lazily didn't check my food supply before going the first time), and whipped up a nice batch of my absolute favorite iced beverage: Julep Iced Tea.

Instead of bourbon, which keeps many a folk sauced at the Kentucky Derby, this recipe uses a super-potent batch of English Breakfast tea. It takes a little more effort than your usual iced tea, but it's well worth the effort. Julep Iced Tea is super tasty, with that immediate kick of fresh mint and the sweet, sugary aftertaste of lemony tea. Check out the recipe after the jump and the gallery below.

There's nothing quite like the sharp, fresh flavor that comes from a cup of freshly brewed, loose leaf tea. These days, there's lots of great flavor combinations to choose from, but one of the best that I've found so far is 100 Mysteries Ayurvedic Tea from the Toronto-based company Tea in the Sahara.

The jumbled mixture of coconut slices, cardamom, organic rooibos, apple, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, and large almond flakes look good, but I assure you -- it smells and tastes even better. The sharp scent of the cardamom is made creamy by the almond, while the apple and ginger make it light and slightly fruity. The smell is so good, like many fresh tea mixes, that it would make one heck of a potpurri air freshener as well. As for the taste, it's like a gentle berry tea beefed up by the thick, creamy taste of the almond and coconut, with that great blast of rooibos flavor.

Yes, I'm quite fangirl about this tea flavor, but just look at that mixture. How could you refuse it?

There's also no muss to this blend. For the perfect cup, they ask for 1 tsp of leaves added to boiling water and steeped for 5-7 minutes. If you make a pot, the leftovers make one heck of a tasty iced tea to boot.

Can you imaging living on tea alone for over twenty years? That's what life is like for a Vietnamese man, Phan Tuan Loc. At first he couldn't eat meat anymore, and then he stopped eating food entirely about twenty years ago. Now he lives on three cups of tea with sugar per day.

His family tried to keep this a secret and he tried to stop going to social events, but eventually people noticed that Phan Tuan Loc just didn't eat, and it freaked them out (I know I would be). Even stints at hospitals couldn't figure things out. Now Mr Loc just drinks his tea and gets a protein solution transmission from a health station when he feels really weak.

I love to eat. It's one of my favorite things to do, and I certainly can not see myself living without food, especially for twenty years. Apparently there are other cases like this (at least according to the article), and I just feel sorry for them. I don't even want to think of such a possibility. I'm sure there are worse fates, but this one is still right up there.

Whether it's for iced coffee or a party, here are some fun things you can do with ice cubes.

You've probably had this happen to you. You've just made yourself a nice cup of tea or coffee and you go into the fridge to get the milk and you open it and it has gone bad. So you have to put on your shoes and jacket and head out to the store to get more.

That's what happened to me today. My fat free milk went bad and smelled like...vinegar or something else that milk shouldn't smell like. So I had to go out into the rain and walk up the street to the convenience store.

I'm still not sure why it went bad so quickly. The date on it was May 2. My roommate has a jug of 2% milk with a date of May 1 and that's still fine. Does milk go bad quicker if it has less fat in it?

It has been a while, but I was a cigarette smoker. I loved it: the taste, the feel of the cigarette in my hand, etc. I'm not trying to glamorize smoking. I obviously quit for a good reason: it'll kill ya. However, that's the idea behind Cigarettea. You can enjoy some of the trappings of cigarettes without the harmful risks.

It's actually tea in the form of a cigarette. The tea leaves take the place of tobacco, and the filter part takes the place of the string so that you can pull the tea out once it's steeped. I have no idea what the quality level is, but it's an interesting concept that the people over at Inventor Spot found. I definitely recommend this for adults only, as I wouldn't want to encourage smoking for youngsters. For those of us who gave up the habit but miss it, though, this could be a nostalgic bit of fun.

I'm sure I've mentioned a few times that I love tea. I drink it almost every day, and I tend to go for that beverage even when I go to a "coffee" shop.

While roaming the blogs today I came across a great list of tea tips over at the Accidental Hedonist. The list is fairly long, but not overly so. It is also pretty thorough. You get advice on several things, from switching to loose leaf tea to cleaning tea stains.

There are one or two tips I don't quite agree with, but over all these are some pretty good things for a tea drinker to know. Check out the whole list and see what you think. Do you have any good tea tips? I'd love to know about them.

Of course, that headline makes it seem like I'm no longer sick. That's not the case at all. I'm still under the weather, though not nearly as bad as I was a few days ago.

I've been sick for the past week. It really wiped me out (which you can probably tell from my lack of posts here). If you haven't been sick this season yet, just wait, I'm sure it's coming. I know some people who had the throw 'n go (I hope that's self-explanatory), but I was "lucky" enough just to have a fever, body aches, chills, coughing, a scratchy throat and complete and utter exhaustion. So I spent most of the week just sitting on the couch, wrapped in a comforter, watching TV. And also trying to decide what the hell to eat or drink for the week. Just about everything I tried to eat or drink tasted funny.

After the jump, the four items I ate the most while sick, and the four I didn't/couldn't eat.

Try Honibe's Honey Drop, which the company claims is the first non-sticky solid honey product.

Each drop contains about a teaspoon of honey, and comes in a little packet just like your typical sweetener. But unlike your typical sweetener-in-a-bag, it doesn't contain any artificial ingredients. The product comes in a regular and a lemon flavor.

Even though I keep reading the company name "Oh-KNEE-bay" instead of "honeybee," the solid honey drop seems like the perfect solution to a problem that has plagued all tea drinkers at some point or another: sticky fingers.

Check out their aptly-named homepage, NoStickyFingers.com, for more info.

If it walks like espresso and talks like espresso...

Okay, fine: if it's not made from coffee beans, it's not technically espresso. But it's still a fun alternative for the tea drinkers amongst us: Cape Town, South Africa's Red Espresso is rooibos tea (a sweet red) ground especially for use in an espresso machine.

The resulting shot is a gorgeous deep red tea with a deep yellow crema on top, and the taste is a strong, nutty flavor - all of the presentation, just without the caffeinated edge.

The idea seems to take away from one of the points of drinking espresso as opposed to a cup of coffee, and that's the jolt of caffeine that accompanies the drink. In that sense, a single shot of the rooibos seems like more of a novelty than anything else.

However, the site suggests using the product to make things like lattes and cappuccinos, which sound more intriguing. Plus, as long as you don't add too much sugar, you're getting great health benefits: rooibos contains five times the antioxidants in green tea. And in that sense, at least, tea definitely trumps coffee.

I don't know about you, but I drink tea every day. I believe that some of our other bloggers are also big tea drinkers. Well, I guess that's part of the problem. There are too many people out there who drink tea.

I'm only joking about it being a problem. But the fact is that the price of tea is going up. The global demand for tea has gone way up. And for the first time, China has surpassed India in its demand for tea.

Add to that the political turmoil in key tea producing areas (Kenya especially), and you have a problem. Circumstances driving up the prices of tea are reversing a decades old trend. The price of tea has been going down since the '90's.

I guess I'll have to get used to paying more for that morning cup.

One of my pet peeves, which I've ranted about before on this site, is tea bags that have staples in them.

Now, since I've switched to loose tea and infusers/filters, this isn't as much of an annoyance as it once was, but I still wonder about it. Last year I had a staple tear off of of a tea bag (one of my fears that became reality). That would have been nice to swallow. So I wonder why, in this day and age, do tea companies still use staples? Many companies, such as Tetley, don't use them, but I've noticed Red Rose, Twinings and Lipton (and many others) still have them. Why? We have the technology to create a staple-free tea bag, people!

We were once promised that we'd have our own jetpacks by now, but since that isn't going to happen anytime soon, can we at least have a tea bag without metal in it? Thank you.

Thanks to the huge role the media plays in our daily lives, pregnant women now have way more to worry about than even ten years ago. Getting pregnant means you are suddenly victim to tons of fear-inducing claims and studies, each new one seeming to contract the last. Exercise! Don't over-burden yourself! Eat chocolate! Go easy on the fat!

And now, claims that a little bit of caffeine probably won't hurt you are challenged by a recent study in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology that suggests that women who consume more than 200 mg of caffeine (one small cup of coffee) a day are at a greater risk for miscarrying.

In the study, documented in a NY Times article, 1,063 pregnant women were interviewed about their caffeine intake. Out of the total, 172 women had previously miscarried. The rate of miscarriages was higher in those who consumed 200 mg or more per day (24.5% out of 164) compared to those who drank no caffeine during their pregnancy (12.5% out of 264 women).

But of course, miscarriage occurs for reasons other than caffeine, some which can't be explained away through a study. But I'd love to hear from women who were once or are currently pregnant (or their significant others) to get their take on this news. Do reports like this make you nervous? Do you drink caffeine now? If so, would this study make you think twice? Or do you eschew science in place of good ol' common sense?

If you pay any attention at all to celebrities or fashion or celebrity fashion, then you might know something about Anya Hindmarch's "I'm Not a Plastic Bag" bag that created quite a mad rush when they hit US stores. Many designers took advantage of the cheeky eco message, some simply creating more re-usable shopping bags, and others taking and tweaking the "I'm not a ___" message, like Decor Craft Inc., which has created the "I Am Not a Paper Cup" cup. Naturally, coffee mugs are reusable, but DCi's "I Am Not a Paper Cup" reminds coffee drinkers that even when taking coffee to go, you can help the eco cause by not using the disposable paper cups that will end up in landfill somewhere. The cups are porcelain with a silicone lid