Oh dear, where do I start? the thing is, I consider myself well-informed when it comes to food, drinks, nutritious facts and info regarding things I consume very often. So when I learn a fact that totally shatters one of the things I used to believe for over 25 years, I must say, I get in this weird state of shock and start doubting most of the info I know about the ingredients I use in my cooking, or when preparing my favorite drinks.

One of these “facts” that had a very strong impact on me was knowing that there are no trees that produce green olives and others that produce black ones, it’s the same tree and it’s just the stage in which you pick the olive and how ripe or not it is, that affects its color! I tell you, you should’ve seen my face when I first learned that, and how EMBARRASSED  I felt for not knowing this before!
But the shock of my life, is a recent one, and this took me a while to overcome the embarrassment it caused! See, I’m addicted to tea. Can’t help it, I just love it, and coming from the Middle East, the kind of tea we mostly use and prefer is the black tea (referred to as RED tea in our dialect). We drink it basically all the time; before meals, after meals, during meals, all the time, and I especially enjoy it during breakfast Being a tea-lover I used to also drink green tea, but the black one was my favorite. When I came to Tunisia, I still kept my black-tea-drinking-habits, but things got worse as I enjoyed the green tea prepared here as well, which is mostly drunk after meals and is full of yummy roasted pine nuts or almonds. So I ended up drinking same amounts of black tea plus green tea (and then a coffee addiction problem occurred afterward, but that’s a different story). Anyway, I remember that in one of the Bloggers Meetups, a few years back, and after we had some green tea, a fellow blogger, Karim, and I had a little chat about kinds of tea that are consumed more in the Middle East. And then Karim shocked me when he asked: the green and black tea come from the same plant don’t they? Not only was I shocked, but I proudly -and stubbornly- denied his argument, and started convincing our friend that there are 2 different plants… he was too polite to insist that he was right and I decided to double-check my info, but for some reason, I never got to do so. Until last week, and while watching a program about healthy foods and cooking, that the host of the program actually said that black and green tea come from the same plant! I still couldn’t believe it and did my own research, and now I have to be brave enough to admit I was wrong and that “all tea comes from the same basic plant, the Camellia Sinensis plant. The differences between teas arise from processing, growing conditions, and geography”… more info.

Ah, no matter how much we think we know, there are always more for us to learn… much more than what we already know!

Anyway, while we’re speaking of tea, here’s a nice quiz that will tell you What Kind Of Tea You Are!

This is the kind I am: