Snacking State-by-State: Florida Part 1B (The Northern Half) - It's the only kind of tea that matters

As I said in the last post, the barbecued shrimp goes well with a certain ubiquitous Southern beverage that you simply can never find unsweetened. But it's just "tea" in the South.

Official Name: State of Florida
State Nicknames: The Sunshine State
Admission to the US: March 3, 1845 (#27)
Capital: Tallahassee (8th largest city)
Other Important Cities: Jacksonville (largest city), Miami (2nd largest), Tampa (3rd largest), St. Petersburg (4th largest), Orlando (5th largest)
Region: South, Gulf Coast; South Atlantic (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Cornbread & BBQ, Crabcake, Gumbo
Bordered by: Alabama (northwest), Georgia (north), Atlantic Ocean (east), Caribbean Sea (south), Gulf of Mexico (west)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: Key lime pie (pie), orange (fruit)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: Cuban food (southern Florida), Key lime pie, seafood (stone crab, shrimp, conch, crawfish, etc), alligator (northern Florida) typical Deep Southern foods (northern Florida), foods of New York/New Jersey especially Italian & Jewish (southern Florida)

I admit two things: 1) I hate drinking unsweetened iced tea; 2) Diabetes runs on both sides of my family. So usually I just grab some Splenda or Sweet & Low and put that in my tea. But once in a while you just have to have the real stuff. This recipe is even easier than the last, and takes far less time.

The Recipe: Iced (Sweet) Tea

For (sweet) tea, you'll need:


* quart size tea bags (I used Luzianne, but any tea bag will do.)
* sugar - I added a cup for a little more than 3 quarts.
* water - lots of water (I started with about 3 quarts, and then added a little more at the end to top it off)

Boil the water and steep the tea bags as usual.

Wow. This is hard.

Even harder.

But here’s the important thing: add the sugar while the tea is still hot. Also note that most recipes call for much more sugar per quart than this. Some recipes I’ve seen call for a cup of sugar for every 2 to 4 cups of water.


This is the sweet stuff here, a dessert you can drink.

Next we head south with the snowbirds, retirees and Golden Girls to explore what the southern half of the state has in store food-wise.

Sources:

Voltz, Jeanne, and Caroline Stuart. The Florida Cookbook: From Gulf Coast Gumbo to Key Lime Pie. Random House: New York, 1993.

Some information about the diversity of Floridian cuisine comes from the following websites, in addition to the Voltz and Stuart book:

Essman, Elliot. “Florida Cuisine”. Life in the USA, 2010. Copyright Elliot Essman 2010.

Rattray, Diana. “Florida Cuisine - The many flavors of Florida”. Southernfood.About.com, publication date unknown. Copyright 2011 About.com

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Florida" page and other pages, and theFood Timeline State Foods link to "Florida".