Sure you can drink tea but what else can you do with it?

The World Wide Web is chock-full of alternate uses for tea; some good, some bad, all entertaining. Here are a few:

1. Soak your feet in strong tea bath to get rid of unpleasant odors.  You can also try the same for your dog by brewing up a strong footbath of black tea, it will strengthen the pads of your canines feet – that is, if you can manage to persuade them to stand still for longer than a second.
2. In the same vein as stinky feet, tea can also help eliminate stinky fish hands, just run lukewarm tea over your hands after working with fish.
3. Steep chamomile tea in a facial steamer and indulge your skin in an herbal facial.  And although we’ve all heard it a million times, cold tea bags help relieve puffiness around the eyes.
4. Use hot teabags on canker sores or fever blisters to help draw out infections.
5. Cooking with tea – that’s right, you can cook with it too. Here Ceremonial Matcha is a delicious sounding recipe for seared duck breasts with a citrus-tea sauce courtesy of Emeril and foodnetwork.com:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-lagasse/seared-duck-breasts-with-a-citrus-tea-sauce-recipe/index.html

You can also use tea as a spice. Just grind tea leaves of your choice (a quick survey of internet recipes mentions the use of green, red, and oolong teas) with a mortar and pestle or in a food processor along with basic spices of your choice: salt, pepper, thyme, paprika, etc. to make a delicious tea spice rub for chicken, steak, pork, or fish.

Another great trick: try mixing a teaspoon of matcha green tea powder – like Art of Tea’s Matcha -  into a pint of vanilla ice cream until well blended for an at home version of green tea ice cream.

Perhaps the most entertaining and unusual use for tea comes from lifehackery.com, a website that offers “Useful, Unusual and (Sometimes) Ironic Tips and Tricks to Hack Your Life into Shape.”

“Not sure what to do with your old teabags? Get the normal hanging plastic device but swap out the insides with a tea scent of your choice – there are plenty to choose from and it will almost certainly beat out ‘lemon mist.”