Sometimes in life you try to do a good thing and sometimes that good thing backfires. Of course, since ‘good’ is inherently subjective, I suppose it’s a matter of perspective whether or not it was good to begin with. That’s not to say it was necessarily ‘bad’ either, since that would be a subjective analysis in and of itself. I can say, however, that it did not yield the desired result. Contextually speaking, the fact that the good thing might have been received as a bad thing by certain parties…

Wait- where was I again? Oh yeah – good thing backfiring. No more philosophy. Got it.

So I drink a lot of sweet tea. In fact, I have almost finished another post (fittingly my very first recipe post) (UPDATE: finished) on making that very beverage for yourself, so stay tuned for that. At any rate, since I drink a lot, I have begun to feel lately that I might just…perhaps ingest a bit too much sugar in my diet, and have considered giving it up in favor of sugar alternatives. I certainly couldn’t drop the drink altogether, but I was hoping I might be able to adapt my palette to a more non-glycemic-affecting variety of sweetener. I have tried tea sweetened with Splenda in the past, but it always leaves me lacking and has a pretty poor taste overall, no matter how much you use. Equal or any other aspartame is worse, and saccharin is completely awful and is almost unmentionable.

Recently, however, a new sweetener entered our household and has set itself up to be a sugar contender. My wife has already started sweetening her coffee (yuk) with it and we have even tried it in a few recipes. That sweetener is Stevia. If you are unfamiliar with this, just know it is just about the most potent sweet flavor I have ever put into my mouth. It’s so sweet, just a tiny bit of this fine powder will curl your tongue. In fact, an equivalence chart of the stuff claims that a half teaspoon is equal to a cup of sugar. While it doesn’t taste as pleasant as regular sugar, I believe the chart is accurate. Aside from benefiting my own health, the other part of my brilliant idea was to try and persuade the kids’ taste buds away from sugar so they never develop the…affection I have for sweet tea.

So I make the tea.

I drink it…

…and it sucks…

…and is so unsatisfying…

…BUT I’m strong-willed and insist I’m going to develop the taste and break myself away from sugar sweet tea so I can continue to enjoy my drink of choice without consequence.

My kids were having none of it. The first day they complained heavily, with “What’s wrong with the tea?!”, and “Dad, this tea is seriously not good.” Still I persisted. I wouldn’t relent and continued to drink the sweet-but-not-sweet tea.

Day 1 ends. Day 2 begins. We get up and get the day started and the first time I go to the refrigerator, I see this:

Message received. The tea was ‘fixed’ the same day. Like I said before – ‘good’ is subjective. (But not really in this case, it tasted pretty bad…)