Mrs.  Mango’s Hibiscus Flower Tea is an herbal and spice tea typical of the herb shop from Rockledge Florida.

Mrs. Mango’s Hibiscus Flower Tea

By Sue Lau | Palatable Pastime

It has been thirty  years, almost to the day since Bill and  I packed up the car  with our dog and cat and made the drive from Columbus Mississippi down into  Florida to make it our new home. We’d  been down there before,  as tourists, but I never really paid attention to the  people there and how they lived, so  on the drive, I wondered what life would be like.

Our home would be  in  Satellite  Beach,  since Bill was going to be working on the military side of the Eastern Test Range, which you  guys know as Kennedy Space Center where NASA does  it’s  launches. All of that is under the control of Space Command, a section of the Air Force.

Most of our stomping ground there was between Melbourne and Cocoa and we lived in between. One of the places we found to shop there was over in Rockledge near an orange grove. It was a little shack called Mrs. Mango’s that sold herbs, teas, and a few antiques along  with the orange blossom honey she produced (remember, she was  right  next to an orange grove, so how advantageous!). The place looked like it might fall into the ground at any moment,  like something that had weathered a hurricane, but never really repaired. I liked it because  it had antiques, which I collect, and also the owner, Anneke Langendonk (immigrated to the USA from the  Netherlands), specialized in herbs, botanicals and tea. And since I’d been doing a lot of work with  dried botanicals as a floral  designer, it interested me. And Anneke, being an herbalist who  found not much in the way of herbs and herbal practitioners here in the USA, found her own niche on  the side of Rte. 1.

One of the nice things Anneke did was to serve visitors with cups of her hibiscus flower tea. And my young  daughter also enjoyed the windmill cookies the she set out for customers. It made an emotional attachment for my daughter, and for me as well, as I used to have a little miniature tea set as a small child and as part of serving tea, windmill cookies were often  part of it.

Of course, over  the years, we moved away. I’ve heard  Anneke passed away  in 2013, but her daughter and granddaughter  now run the shop (which amazingly) still stands there along the highway for passers-by.

Visit Mrs. Mango’s Website

Today I am sharing a version of her Hibiscus Flower Tea, which can be served  hot or iced (along with windmill cookies of course!), but this is not about me, or Mrs. Mango or tea, except to  sit together and sip it while we discuss what must be done.

In my entire life  I have never seen so many hurricanes befall the  United States and our Caribbean territories. It was the year before we’d moved down to Florida that I watched Hurricane Gilbert, a category 5 storm, bear down on Jamaica. I was safe up in northern Mississippi with the comfort of seeing it from the television, with my cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee in  hand. Jamaica  was devastated. The coffee plantations with my favorite java beans destroyed. It would take years to get the coffee plants  producing again.

And here we are, watching Texas flooded. US Virgin Islands turned into  a moonscape. Florida ravaged and flooded, even in parts that did not expect it (like Jacksonville). And now Puerto Rico. People died. You  know they say get out, it’s just stuff that can be replaced. But some people could not get out. Seniors  in nursing homes, without power  or the power to leave, falling under the sweltering heat.

It’s hard for me to imagine any of the  things people are going through right now. Places where it doesn’t matter if you had insurance because the entire infrastructure has been destroyed. Places where hope was torn away  in 150mph winds.

My food blogging friends and I want to  bring more attention to the charities that are available to help these people in at least some small way. So we  are blogging about  Florida foods (for me  it’s  Mrs. Mango’s teas, which is a special Florida memory for me).

I hope that some  of you will  at least consider donating to some charity listed below. It doesn’t have to be a lot. You know, a storm  is made  up of many raindrops. Just one has no impact, but you can see what happens when many raindrops coalesce into a single force. All  of our small dollars combined can be the counter action  to the deadly storms.

It’s going to take time  to restore the hope and faith those affected have in their daily lives,  not  to  mention the water, electricity, food,  medical supplies, roads, power lines, jobs, peaceful sleep. The storms have passed. New ones form. But we hold  steady in our fortitude against  it, hand in  hand with our fellow humankind. We hope for recovery, and we remember what must be done. We do our part.

Time may  pass,  storms may come and  go, but hope and memory always remain.

Friends, we got started with this little chat over tea, now let’s get started repairing the paradise of our world. One dollar at a time.

~Sue

#FoodBloggers4FL

Here is a list of reputable organizations compiled from group suggestions

as well as Charity Navigator:

• Volunteer Florida
• Miami Diaper Bank
• Harry Chapin Food Bank of Southwest Florida
• South Florida Wildlife Center
• Heart of Florida United Way
• All Faiths Food Bank
• Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida
• Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency
• Fondos Unidos
• Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands
• St. John Community Foundation
• Anguilla Beaches

Visit the other Food Bloggers participating in today’s  event by clicking the blue link (It’s safe!):