Each morning, I like start my day with a cup of chai latte. I started drinking chai a few years ago, first just from packaged tea bags and then from a lovely loose blend I picked up at the Tea Leaf, Inc. in Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal. When I ran out of the loose blend, I decided to start making my own. I searched the internet for recipes, cobbled a few together, and tried making my own blend. The first result was disastrous. My friend Sharon Lacey spends time with Geshe Dakpa Topgyal at the Charleston Tibetan Society and gave me his chai recipe. I played around with it and came up with a tasty blend, but there was still something missing. Another friend, Christopher Liberatos, was in India years ago studying architecture, and knew he’d written down a chai recipe somewhere. He turned it up after digging through his travel journals and revealed the missing ingredient that would give my blend the zing it was missing: pepper! (more…)