goji berries

Lycium barbarum, dried into small ruby berries, and a member of the Solanaceae, the nightshade family that also holds the tomato and the chili. Three teas in this library simmer it, always at around five grams: 5 grams in the Woman Well-Being Brew, 5.5 grams in the Upgraded Rose Milk Tea, where it simmers together with jujube in the same pot, and 5 grams in Velvet Ember Tea, where it sits beside black tea, ginger and cardamom rather than the rose-and-milk base the other two use.

The color it leaches into the pot is zeaxanthin, a carotenoid pigment simmered out of the dried berry: the recipes describe it tinting Velvet Ember Tea amber and the Upgraded Rose Milk Tea's base ruby, carrying a fruity sweetness the recipes read as immune-supportive nourishment rather than a sharp flavor of its own.

The one documented interaction sits outside this kitchen's teas but not outside goji itself: a 61-year-old woman stable on the blood thinner warfarin developed an INR of 4.1, well above her therapeutic range, after four days of drinking three to four glasses of concentrated goji tea a day; stopping the tea brought her back into range within a week, and she stayed there across seven later readings. Several further cases have been published since. None of the teas here are dosed anywhere near that concentration, but anyone on warfarin or another anticoagulant should treat a daily goji habit as a change worth mentioning, the same way a new medication would be.