Tasty Herbalist

herbs for colds and rainy days

We've been sniffling, sneezing and coughing our way through this week and getting very little sleep. Garlic, ginger, parsley, lemon, sage and onions have featured heavily to help combat ills. Not a lot of people know that onions are good for the lungs...both strengthening and cleansing.  it's a combination of the sulphur and all those volatile oils (the ones that make you cry). Making up an onion and garlic syrup is a good way to take it. It's a good base for tailoring it to your needs. Add chopped thyme if you have a chesty phlegmy cough or sage if you have a sore throat. A tablespoon of fresh herb finely chopped and layered up with the onions, garlic and sugar should do the trick. If you don't have those herbs in the garden just buy them at the supermarket.  No one need know!

Thankfully appetites have not been lost and we are all craving foods which help fight infections.  Curries with ginger and garlic, pasta with garlic, lemon and parsley and sage and onion dumplings have all been consumed.

We've been keeping warm by layering up and sitting in front of coal fires. Duvets and hot water bottles may also be featuring highly.  Anything too cerebral is being spurned for trashy novels and staring into space and the spurt of creative thinking I had at the beginning of the year has gone on hold as tiredness robs me of more brain cells.  It will all pass though and we will emerge from our funk to be greeted by a dirty and untidy house and a never ending To Do list.

(Oh, and on never ending rainy days a cup of uplifting, citrus lemonbalm tea brings in a bit of sunshine. Sometimes though i simply sprinkle some rose petals in with my black tea as it brews).

Sage in the garden

(An old picture from the summer becuause there has been constant rain here for the last week)

There are many times I laugh at my ridiculousness. I realised on Monday that I am so fixated on plants that I can wild harvest that I have managed to ignore the garden herbs, those pigeon holed culinary herbs, which are miraculously still going strong in the garden.

The sage sits sheltered at the front of the house away from the winds and benefitting from the heat from the walls. It is looking only a little bedraggled and I understand, I feel the same way in the winter. I have both green and purple sage and interchange them quite happily; no point in getting hung up over it. I dried a lot of the leaves last summer thinking that winter would be as severe as last year. Not so, it's been so mild.

I don't use sage leaves on their own very often. They are so pungent and resinous and oh my goodness the taste lingers. Its a powerful herb, something which I think is overlooked. That's not to say we should be afraid to use it just that it's actions are strong. If my thoat is sore I will resort to a strong gargle of hot sage tea,it always works for me, but I don't drink it.

While training in the student clinic we would recommended cold sage tea to menopausal women with bad sweats knowing that its quite foul. It takes quite a lot of determination to make and drink 3 cups of cold sage tea every day. There are more palatable ways to help ease menopausal symptoms but it still requires equal determination . Most things do.

I'd rather eat my sage (it's a warming and stimulating digestive herb after all) and  It tastes so much nicer in a stew, sauce or winter salad dressing. It's wonderfully high in calcium, like all green leaved foods, and it's easy to forget that it is a nutritive dense food in it's own right rather than just a seasoning. Steeping the leaves in cider vinegar will make the calcium more accessible than in water alone. I should create a fact sheet on it because it really is wonderful.

(Sage has clearly been on the minds of others this week too and Lucy has posted a delicious way of eating sage: Sage and onion pie. )

 

molehills and the continual planning

 

We accused each other of playing a trick because the molehill looked so ridiculously impossible. How the mole get all that soil up between the cracks of the slabs we'll never know. It's on the move though and working it's way round the garden. I've not had to contend with moles before but I'm thinking they're bad news. A purple sprouting broccoli has already been upended in the vegetable plot. I see trouble ahead.

It's been another week of very little outdoor accomplishment although there has been some successful removal of the every expanding moss. It's been gradually taking over the path at the front of the house and now it's more lush and verdant than the grass. I wish it was a particularly useful moss that I could make something foul tasting but particularly good for me from but it's not. It's just moss (although maybe it is but I'm not prepared to experiment).

(sadly not my plan for the garden but definitely my inspiration)

I'm still planning the garden and trying to keep it realistic which is difficult when all I do is visualise a medieval herb garden meets cottage flower garden. I'm also creating a list of things I want to make this year which will help me to work out what I can gather from round about and what I will need to grow. This way I can concentrate on growing decent amounts of a few plants rather than one or two of many. My experience of gathering herbs tells me that a surprising amount of raw materials are required to make even a small amount of medicine. I'm probably better off focussing on large clumps of useful herbs but I'm sure, as usual, my head will be turned by something unusual and fragile which will no doubt fail in my cold, damp, shaded garden.

 

The winds here have been crazy

The winds here have been crazy taking the last of the greenhouse panels with them. We gathered them up and stored them away as there is just no point in reinstating them only to watch them disappear again. The panels had been hiding the state of both overgrowth and decay in the greenhouse and now every time I do the dishes I can see the dilapidation in the garden. The plots need dug over and mulched, the pots all need emptied, scrubbed and stored away and the whole greenhouse frame needs disinfected. So much to do.

The upside of all of this is that the greenhouse should be easier to clean and I can ensure that the panels go in extra snuggly this year. For the last two years water has managed to leak in through the roof rotting the plants. As soon as that starts the mould begins to spread and then, like this year, everything is ruined.

Every time i see the skeletal greenhouse my spirits sink a little. I'll need to get onto all of this soon as I want to start off some of my herb and vegetable seeds as early as March. Right now I can't see how it can all be done. I am craving that first spring growth though and the chance to harvest again. Wild garlic, nettles, beech leaves and dandelions aren't that far away...or so I keep telling myself. I'll be making salads, juices, savouries and infused gin in no time.

not really the new year at all

(New Year's Eve deer)

While I know that technically it's the New year i never feel it is until spring. It's not right that a new year begins half way through a season.

If you've read last years winter newsletter you'll know I don't do new years resolutions until spring but I have  implemented changes to my daily routine which are already starting to become habit. Nothing dramatic, just organisation, but, oh my, what a difference it makes! How has it taken me so long to realise that being tidy and organised is actually a lazier approach to life than chaos and mess? Less time is now spent searching, tidying and feeling generally overwhelmed. With the baby it takes so long to do anything but as long as I don't set time constraints we can potter around stress free. Planning things well in advance seems to be key so I'm starting to think of various garden, home and herbal projects I want to start and/or finish this summer. I've already dug out the layout of my garden which was carefully measured out last year and then nothing planned and out has come my favourite herbal which has the most wonderful design for an edible/medicinal herb garden. I know I'll be inspired.

winter is here

(sadly not my house)

Winter is most definitely here. The warm spell which momentarily confused my roses into blooming is long gone.

There's not much happening on the gardens surface, it's all below where the seeds and bulbs lie waiting. That's OK though as I don't really have the time yet to dedicate to the much neglected garden. I'd like to sit with my notebook, seed catalogues and gardening books and write lists of plants that would probably never survive and draw grand plans of a cottage garden bursting with herbs. Instead the inquisitive hands of a crawling baby dictate that all my garden fantasies must play out only in my head. That is until baby is old enough to hold a trowel and reliably not eat the soil...maybe when she's eighteen then.

Orange slices

The dried orange slices are like exquisite gems glistening in the firelight. Part of me feels the oranges should have been put to better use, perhaps juiced and drank, because turning them into decorations is somewhat frivolous. I dismiss these thoughts quickly as the smell they made on drying was pure aromatherapy for my winter weary soul. They continue to perfume the air even now.

Hawthorn

The hawthorn branches are haphazardly stuffed into vases their berries starting to droop and shrivel without the life support of the tree. I should have gathered many berries to make a sweet and sour dipping sauce but I left them for the birds this year and truth be told I still have some in the freezer from last year. I always think they would add delicious sour note to so many recipes but the thought of sieving the seeds out dissuades me from trying. Next year When I pick them I'll cook them and sieve them en masse before freezing the purée in icecube trays. Experimentation will be easier this way.

My appalling circulation would benefit from some hawthorn especially at this time of year. A teaspoon of gently crushed berries infused in a mug of hot water along with a couple of slices of ginger would do the trick.

I've thought about it long and hard...

...and I'm going to be revamping this blog.

When I started it I really had  aclear vision in my head of what I wanted it to be like, what I wanted to post about and the information I wanted to share. For a whole host of dull and cop out reasons (work, redundancy, pregnancy, baby) this hasn't happened and I feel I'm posting any old crap rather than the good content I had planned. 

So, I'm going to take some time away from this blog to really organise my posts and get things presented the way i want them. You might find that things vanish for a while or reappear in a different format but it will be all for the better and I'll feel so much happier about what is available here.

I plan more tutorials, more newsletters, more recipes for practical as well as unusual ways of using both herbs and food to treat yourself but...

...what I would like to know is What would you like to see here? Post a comment and let me know

In the meantime if you want to be updated on when this blog is back then drop me and email: tastyherbalist(at)googlemail(dot)com     (sorry for strange format but it stops spam mail)

So I ate all the food I was supposed to photograph which is a shame because while melon and mango was eaten solo there was also a rather spectacular mango and sweet potato curry consumed. My only explanation for lack of photos is that I have very limited time between feeding baby, putting baby down and then eating all my food before baby screams!

As well as that a few days of not so much sleep has left me bemused about what else I was going to write about. I know it was something to do with flavonoids (they are common in all yellow flowers and foods) and it was probably to do with how good they are at strengthening and repairing the capillaries. This would make them great foods for people with poor circulation especially the elderly and particularly the elderly who have failing eyesight due to the macular area of the eye. 

Anyway I'm sure I had something useful to say