Tea

This cool, refreshing drink tastes wonderful, and can also help combat nausea.

Sweet tea never tasted so good—especially for those bent on unwinding after a long workweek. Try it with a lunch of fried chicken and deviled eggs and see if you don't agree.

The recipe below is part of a healthy and delicious spa menu developed exclusively for Epicurious by Ananda spa in India. Darjeeling tea and herbs, including star anise, cinnamon, and ginger, flavor the smoked duck breast, which is served with nutrient-packed pears, sweet potatoes, vegetables, and blueberries. If you are watching calories and cholesterol, take a small portion of duck and fill the rest of your plate with the veggies and fruit. If you are following an Ayurvedic diet, the experts at Ananda recommend this for vata and pitta doshas. Be sure to start this recipe one day ahead.

Why serve plain iced tea when you can punch it up with healthy, natural flavors like ginger, mint, lemon and peach, as in Bonaparte's version here? A good reason to steep and sip: Tea's polyphenols may lower your risk for cancer.

Just as a touch of bergamot brings hints of floral and citrus to the blend of teas in Earl Grey, the essence of Seville orange and lemon scents the Lady Grey brew. Here, lime and tarragon provide yet more layers of fresh flavor.

Healthy bonus: Antioxidants from tea, 5 calories per glass

This is a refreshing drink for the cocktail hour. Use any kind of black tea you like; fruit-flavored ones are particularly nice.

Here's a warming drink for a chilly day.

A refreshing herbal iced tea with a nice crimson color. For a frosted look, freeze the glasses ahead of time, and dip the rims into sugar before pouring the tea.

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less but requires additional unattended time.

Almonds, pistachios, raisins, ginger and a touch of tea team up in a luscious sauce.

This is one of those recipes that has pretty much disappeared in the United States, but those who remember it rave about it. A fluden, which comes from fladni or fladen, "flat cake" in German, is just that, a flat, double-or often multilayered flaky pastry filled with poppy seeds, apples and raisins, or cheese. It was originally common to southern Germany and Alsace-Lorraine, later spreading east to Hungary, Romania, and other Eastern European countries. Often flavored with honey, it was eaten in the fall at Rosh Hashanah or Sukkot and is symbolic, like strudel, of an abundant yield. I have tasted apple two-layered fluden at Jewish bakeries and restaurants in Paris, Budapest, Tel Aviv, and Vienna, sometimes made with a butter crust, sometimes with an oil-based one. But only in Paris have I tasted the delicious fig rendition, a French fig bar, from Finkelsztajn's Bakery. (Figs, my father used to tell me, were often eaten in Germany as the new fruit on the second day of Rosh Hashanah.) This recipe is a perfect example of the constant flux of Jewish foods. Today, with the huge population of Tunisian Jews in Paris, it is no wonder that the Finkelsztajn family spike their fig filling with bou'ha, a Jewish Tunisian fig liqueur used for kiddush, the blessing over the wine on the Sabbath. You can, of course, use kirsch or any other fruit liqueur instead.