Recovering from the holidays, nursing my resolve to eat better, I need help with one thing in particular: Night-time eating. I do so well all day long. I’m full of focus, fastidious in my choices.

And then the sun sets. My fangs sprout. My eyes go bloodshot. And I’m on the prowl for carbs. Anything sweet or starchy, or both. I work hard to keep busy at these times, write something, knit something, some yoga between commercials.

But while I’m in that warrior stance, I’m cataloguing the contents of my pantry and freezer. Food completely distracts me, no matter what I’m doing, watching, saying, writing, or reading.

I have one more trick when all else fails: The old bait and switch. I opt for a nice milky tea sweetened with stevia. It works so well my husband and I gave out this tea for our holiday gifts this year. We call it Monastery Spice. (We like to call our house the Monastery, because we want to imagine we can create peace and stillness through something as flimsy as a name. Poets and dreamers live here. There is no grasp of reality within these walls.) Here’s this year’s tea:

Monastery Spice
Makes 3 cups of tea mix
Monastery spice is a Midwestern chai designed to ease you past the excesses of the season. It’s a blend of Darjeeling and Ceylon teas spiced with ginger, cloves, cinnamon, pepper, cardamom, orange rind, anise, and cumin. It’s naturally sweetened with stevia, and is quite sweet. Put two teaspoons per cup into your teapot. Add boiling water. Let it steep for at least six minutes. Pour into your cup through a strainer. Add soymilk or milk or cream. It’ll distract you from your cravings for awhile.

.25 oz Darjeeling tea
2 oz Ceylon
.25 oz dried Stevia Leaves
1 oz dried orange peel
1.5 oz dried ginger root
.5 oz anise seed
.25 oz cumin seed
1.5 oz green cardamom pods
.5 oz whole black peppercorns
.5 oz cloves
1 oz cinnamon bark chips

Blend all ingredients together in a food processor for no more than 10 seconds, just to mix the tea well. Shake and rotate your tea jar to remix ingredients each time you make your tea.

(For my mix, I found the dried ginger root at Penzey’s. All other ingredients from Mountain Rose Herbs. But you can get much the same effect by adding pinches of these spices and fresh ginger root to your teapot. Then powdered stevia from your health food store. In fact just fresh ginger and crushed cinnamon stick and stevia with any black tea makesa very nice spiced tea.)

Kids love this tea, and you can feel good about giving it to them. You don’t need to tell them you never added sugar. I often drink it without milk, but it always makes me feel a bit indulgent when I include it. Steamed, frothed milk and another sprinkling of cinnamon can really add to that effect.

Using this tea to quell night-time cravinggs is not failsafe, of course. Because there you are, standing in the kitchen, waiting for the water to boil. And if you’re like me, all manner of things can accidentally land in your face under these circumstances. But if you can focus entirely on the tea-making enterprise, you just might succeed.

I will if you will!

Let me know if you try the tea and like it. And share your methods for killing the night-time cravings, will you? We need all the help we can get.

Penzey’s
Mountain Rose Herbs