Salad Days

All signs of blizzard long past, my plant friends are returning to visit again. Princess and I have meandered hand-in-hand around the yard and the neighborhood, looking for them. I don't think I've ever been so grateful for a springtime.

After two consecutive years of gardening disaster, I and my pantry are quite ready for a bumper year, thankyouverymuch. I continue to refine my favorites for planting. Still playing with Siberian strains of tomatoes to see if their yields and growing season will give me a leg up on the varieties from Southern hemispheres. Which doesn't mean I'm not hedging my bets. There's room for the handy-dandy hybrids that are tried and true. And delicious. There are plenty of arugula and deer tongue lettuce representing this year. I never got around to saving seeds when everything bolted last fall. Then I never got around to tilling, something that I'm trying to break myself of anyway. I'm enjoying the blessings of my neglect. Also I've decided to yield place to anything that volunteers. Even volunteer dandelion.

With spring in the air, herbal studies have taken on a new earnestness. During the wintertime, we were using the fruits of the summer and applying what we've learned, but with the expression of new yields, we have an opportunity to try new things and grow new things that we regretted not having explored the previous year. The first herbal studies group focused on dandelions and the first wild greens of spring. The group leader tasked everyone with bringing a dandelion dish to the class. She asked me what I had planned on bringing. "Um...kimbop?" It's my favorite pot luck dish and never fails to please. I never have left-overs. I meditated for a minute or two, then recollected that my kimbop tutor had always included spinach in her particular recipe. Hmmm...spinach...dandelion. Yep. That'll sub. I'll bet I'm the first person ever to make dandelion kimbop. Close your eyes, SMK.

We talked about dandelion and the terrific stuff it does for the liver, the lymphatic system, and as a diuretic. This is a fortunate serendipity, since Tool Guy has had some unhappy swelling in one of his feet that hasn't explained itself to his doctor, despite extensive testing. Can't think of many gardeners who celebrate having dandelion popping up in their greenhouses, but I'm one of them. It seems that chickweed, my latest favorite herb for lung support, also sparkles as a diuretic.

Ditto on sweet violets.

Sheep sorrel is another mild diuretic.
And guess what all grows in my yard? I never cease to be amazed at the reckless and extravagant abundance that is to be found just outside my door. See how much I have to be thankful for?

I have another ubiquitous friend invading my faltering asparagus bed which I've identified as garlic mustard. It's considered an invasive and noxious weed, which I've come to interpret as meaning, "We don't have a clue how to use it and the deer won't eat it." But in fresh salad, it has a terrific mild garlicky taste--without the garlic drawbacks. I've found references to the root being a horseradish substitute, something that bears future exploration...

Fresh is almost always best, so we're plunging into the salad days of spring. In order to make these oddities more acceptable to Philistinian palates, a salad dressing is required. Something light, yet compatible with the somewhat bitter and sharp flavors of the unusual greens. A while back, a foodie friend had made an off-hand comment about using orange juice in salad dressing and this sounded like just the salad to try it on.

Orange and Olive Oil Dressing

1/2 cup orange juice, best freshly juiced
3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp. Real Salt
1 tsp. dried basil
1 tsp. maple syrup
1/2 tsp. dried dill
3 grinds of whole peppercorn

Run all ingredients through a thorough blend in food processor or blender. Best served at room temperature. Not only does this make a wonderful salad dressing, but also serves as a terrific sauce over fish.

Intrepidly, I took to the yard with basket and scissors in hand. I'm sure I cut quite the figure. I've come to imagine that my neighbors have either given up trying to figure out what I'm doing or avail themselves of a front row and provide themselves with a tasty snack to sustain them during the morning's entertainment. When Tool Guy came home, I pointed out the separate containers of washed and chilled greens for his delight and delectation. He was duly impressed. He turned to my mother and said, "Most families throw their lawn clippings on the compost pile. We eat them." See what I mean? Philistine. But he's going to eat his words. Every. Single. One. With salad dressing.

Living Well Is The Best

What's that expression? "Living well is the best revenge?" My spin on it is "living healthy is the best reward." I'll be honest, though, that it has taken a long time for us to reach the reward stage. Remember? I'm the unprofitable servant...I've only done what is required of me. I'll admit that most of this journey has been spent running from a stick of sufficient magnitude to make the effort worthwhile rather than the enticement of a theoretical carrot. I admire people who have the self-discipline to persevere and discipline themselves on that idea of a pay-off in the far-flung future. Shamefacedly, I admit that I'm not one of those. Stick, me. Big stick. Big, big stick.

Our journey was supposed to be only one of four to six months, but has extended to eight years now and still counting. We have a couple stubborn outlying foods that still evade our grasp, but we're getting there. These extended years, though, have afforded me the opportunity to begin to enjoy the carrot phase of the journey while still grappling with the stick aspects.

Tool Guy is the a shining example of what "clean living" will do. His weight was ballooning, as is typical with the men in his family, until he decided to low carb a dozen years ago. In was an inadvertent diagnosis because the carbs he found most dispensable was bread. After we stumbled into our familial gluten intolerance diagnosis, we were able to connect the dots and realize why he responded so well to a low carb diet. Since going gluten free, he has resumed carb consumption without any particular attention or regulation to his diet. And excepting when sugar allures, he is able to maintain a stable weight that isn't far from his low carb ideal. And those annoying eczematic rashes on his feet have mysteriously disappeared, never to return. Without any medical assistance. Ditto on those troublesome ear infections that responded only to aggressive irrigation with Betadyne solution. But those improvements took a long time to surface.

Some improvements don't take so long to manifest themselves. Tool Guy's dad, Pop, visited with us over the holidays. He arrived from sunny Florida, announcing that felt as if he'd aged ten years in the last few months and he moved as if, indeed, he had. The airlines, while very tardy in their scheduling, were at least very prompt in providing a much-needed wheelchair to portage him from terminal to terminal in a timely fashion. Bless his heart, his ditty bag bulged with thirteen different medications. No, not thirteen pills to take daily. Thirteen different medications that required multiple doses a day. Blerg.

During his visit, he reconciled himself to eating what we eat with a minimum of greasy-spoon diner runs. During one conversation, he asked me what was good for arthritis. As it happened, I had some black cherry concentrate in the pantry, since the Hobbits like it to flavor their smoothies, and it became part of his daily routine to have a tablespoon in a cup of water. Within only a few days, he demonstrated how he was able to flex his fingers, effortlessly and painlessly.

Consequently, I started poking around to find what other things might help reduce arthritic inflammation and make him more comfortable. There were a few truncated references to Chinese Star Anise seed pods and bells started going off.

Tool Guy had recently gifted me with a french press coffee maker that I haven't been using to make coffee. I've been using it to make herbal teas, since the press is equally lovely for straining out the herbals as it is for coffee grounds. And the Hobbit favorite is Chai Tea. They used to have to put up with the bagged chai from the grocery store until I was given a recipe for The Real Thing. Definitely met with cries of delight and the more I read on the constituent herbs, the more healthy it is appearing. In addition to reputed benefits for arthritis, Star Anise is the food source for Tamiflu. Cinnamon is in good reputation for diabetics and high blood pressure. Ginger, as I learned this past summer, has a wealth of goodies, just waiting to burst upon us. And the bonus? It tastes good. And isn't it great to be able to juggle things around so that they are safe for us, good for us, and dance on the tastebuds?

I pinched as many pennies as I could to get all of these ingredients in bulk and as fresh as possible. It was well worth the sacrifice. After tweaking the recipe to suit highly specific Hobbit tastes--Hey, I personally happen to like a heavy cinnamon overtone, but, whatever--they have been clamoring for it on a regular basis. I imagine that this will be just as popular during the summer season as it has been during the cold and flu season.

Chai Tea, adapted from a recipe by Aleese Cody, Help's On the Way

1 quart water
1 cinnamon stick
1 tsp dried ginger root
1 star anise pod
10 whole peppercorns
1/4 tsp. decorticated cardamom
1/4 tsp. whole coriander
1/4 tsp. whole cloves
1/2 whole vanilla bean or 1 dropperful of vanilla extract
1 tea bag

Combine ingredients except for tea and bring to a simmer for about 20 minutes. Cover and allow to steep for another 20 minutes, dropping the tea bag in during the last 5 minutes of the steep. Strain out spices and serve. Flavoring options favored by Hobbits include stevia and coconut milk. A tsp. of cocoa powder was trialed, but didn't pass the taste test. Your mileage may vary.

When Pop left, he was able to bend completely down and pick up anything that he may drop on the floor. And put on his own socks without a struggle. Something that was extremely difficult for him when he first arrived. On the return flight home, after two weeks in the extreme colds that New England is so generous with, he spurned the use of the wheel-chair, striding to his terminals alongside Tool Guy, who accompanied him to see him off. He plans on scaring up some black cherry concentrate.

Eating everything free isn't just about avoiding allergens, it's about eating well, enjoying the food, enjoying life. Living well. Pop has discovered that living free has freed him up from the bondage of the pharmaceutical. He left, down to only two medications. His blood pressure, his doctor tells him, is the lowest it has been in many, many years. Without medication. How's that for everything free? Let your food be your medicine and your medicine your food.

Living well is the best...revenge?...reward? Whatever. Living well is simply the best.

La Grippe or "Postcards From the Hankie's Edge"

It had to happen, right? It is, after all, an epidemic. We now consider ourselves officially epidemicked. Princess led the way, as is appropriate for royalty. It was heralded with a barking cough, quickly followed by a fever of 104.6. Bug, always a camp follower, wasn't far behind. Dog remained the stubborn outlier for a while, but eventually succumbed to peer pressure and decided to follow suit.

Once again, I'm hanging out our "plague" sign and quarantining us. The kitchen has gone into overdrive, making cough syrup, elderberry syrup, bone broth, and other such stuffs to soothe, satisfy, and otherwise stimulate the unwell. I'm pillaging my stores of elderberry, barberry, rosehips and assorted herbal matter. Tool Guy continually sniffs the air when he comes home, not sure if he is smelling dinner or medicine. The neighbors wonder at my frequent trips to the white pines in the yard as I jump for ever-higher branches, to strip off needles. What do I live for, but to be entertainment, no? Tool Guy is making sly comments about Marie Laveau and gris-gris. Philistine.

It is exceedingly hard to doctor by proxy and most of my dosing the Hobbits has been based on reading and the feedback they give me, both symptomatically and descriptively. Princess has gotten impatient with my queries about exactly where the irritation inspiring that cough is coming from. "I don't know how to explain it to you," she stated truculently. Sigh. I'm sure that this will be fuel for therapy down the road someday.

Happy day. I get to try all of this out on myself. The Flu Fairy came to visit yet again and I've been blessed. I haven't been ill-prepared, but I'm not best-prepared either; there were quite a few other things I'd wanted to have ready before coming to this. Still I've got enough tricks in my repertoire to at least do something besides lay there in a stupor.

So here's what I've found that works:

Elderberry is definitely wonderful. Something about the glistening liquid jewel tones pouring from the bottle is as reassuring as the thick sweet taste that coats the throat going down.

Andrographis continues to shine as an immune support. Gotta be right there in the cabinet next to the echinachea and astragalus.

Elecampane tincture helps to keep the congestion from building. Toward the end of our confinement, I dipped into the angelica that was maturing, to help ease the coughs. I think this one is going to be a staple in my cabinet, too.

Clary Sage and Red Thyme essential oils are definitely useful in damping down night time coughs.

Ginger continues to shine as my new favorite herb. Just prior to the onset of La Grippe, I decanted the herbs that I'd been researching while Dog was sick as a dog and had begun maturing. Ginger tincture was among the lot and, blessedly, I'd put up quite a lot of it, which freed me to use it without regard for supply.

I found that I wanted ginger tincture at my bedside so that when I woke up coughing in the night, a couple of droppers (approximately 30 ml) eased things sufficiently for me to return to sleep. This, paired with the essential oils, allowed me a reasonably restful night. Princess is right, though. It does burn all the way down. Heh.

And all of this has accelerated another bout of experimentation. My herbal mentor quoted Rosemary Gladstar as telling a story about going overseas to study with an herbal guru. The first two weeks of the study required absolute silence after which she would be allowed to ask one question. She spent the two weeks wondering what she would ask. What popped out of her mouth isn't what she had anticipated, but I'm glad it was the question she asked: "What is your favorite thing for lungs?" The answer? Juice up ginger, bury it for three months and let it ferment.

While the herbal class discussed this remedy, I began to envision what this project would look like. I immediately decided that an unglazed earthenware vessel was the container of choice. Why bury something unless it was to share the biota of the soil with the ferment? Like traditional kimchi. The Herbalist suggested that if I were going to do this, try one in a glass jar and one in the earthenware and see if the resulting ferments were appreciably different. Sounds like a plan.

Juicing ginger is a bit more of a muscular activity than juicing, say, grapes, but pretty soon, I was watching a chartreuse river flow from the mouth of the juicer into the jar. I divvied the yield up between the glass jar and the pottery. Given that ferments produce expanding gasses, I endeavored to keep the glass jar's lid as loose as possible to prevent subterranean explosions. I contemplated sealing the pottery with bee's wax, but opted out.

I dug up a likely spot in our woods--"likely" being any place that is more earth than rock--and buried the experiments. I put a rock marker on the spot, knowing that ginko might not help me remember the place on my own. The neighbors probably thought I was burying a pet. Oh, the things that they don't know...

Next postcard in three months.

Things That Go Cough In the Night

Elecampagne Plant

He never has been a cooperative child. Even before he was born, Dog refused to change his presentation to accommodate me and the OB. In a stubborn transverse position the entire final trimester, the best compromise he would yield was a single footling breech. He's been digging his heels in ever since.

We've been fighting Dog's cough off and on for over a year now. Tried lots of stuff, including pulling the passionately favorite ghee, thinking that the dairy was a contributing factor. For once, though, it wasn't a food issue. Go figure. Getting rid of that musty-smelling mattress did improve breathing conditions for the remainder of the winter. Bug and Tool Guy are sequestered in the shop, cranking out a bunk bed set reminiscent of Stone Henge to replace the former sleeping arrangements.

However, we are now in the height of pollen season. My email inbox is daily peppered with pollen reports of maximum measures of oak, hickory, birch, grass and other delectables which have left their yellow evidence sprinkled over every conceivable surface. When pollen counts aren't spiking, this very chilly, damp...I believe the season might be considered "summer"...is yielding sky high mold counts. So I'm breaking out all of my big guns to deal.

Our first line of defense is a neti pot. This cute little pot hasn't been welcomed as a best friend among the Hobbits, but application three times a day has certainly reduced the nightly wheezing and coughing. For such an intransigent child, Dog is really pretty good about putting up with my whack-job remedies.

This is the season to forage and what I'm looking for grows in abundance where we live. A few plants that are historically used for coughs are mullein, elecampagne, and coltsfoot. The Herbalist says these are her "go-to" plants for lung complaint.




Mullein

Foraging can be a relaxing outing, but when one is on a mission and there's mileage to be covered, many hands make light work. One sunny (rare, this year) afternoon, the four of us set off with totes in one hand and clippers in another in search of some off-road infestations of coltsfoot and mullein. A bit of land that fell to the ax of tax arrears has just opened up to public access for fishing in our neighborhood "kill" (shirespeak for "creek"). Rich pickings there, not only in coltsfoot, but also mullein. Off the road yet. It's always recommended to try to harvest plants that live at least eight feet off of any roadway, in order to avoid any toxins that the plants may absorb from proximity to passing vehicles. Score! I'll be watching for these mullein plants to be flowering soon. Earache season will be here before we know it and it never hurts to plan ahead.



Coltsfoot*

As we clipped, Bug began to unpack his own personal recollections of herb lore, surprising me with the amount of information he'd retained. Things I either didn't remember telling him or assumed he never processed. Astonishing, since this is the child whose lowest scoring domains are in listening skills. Guess it requires the right motivator.

Eager and enthusiastic hands make light work of filling our bags. The dehydration process didn't finish quite so quickly, but at the end of three days, the yield was such that I felt we'd collected enough.



Elecampagne Flower

Elecampagne is another big gun for respiratory difficulties. It rocks for things like pneumonia, bronchitis, and this coughing that is plaguing Dog. It certainly helps to clear up the gunk that clogs his lungs. This is one that has to be harvested in the fall after the second hard frost, since the tincture is made from the roots.

Every day, we check the pollen and mold counts the way some folks check their stock portfolios. So far, no single remedy is the silver bullet for us, but a combination of applications...and some cooperation from the "participant" and all of us, Dog not the least, are breathing easier and sleeping better at night.


*Peterson's Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs has this to say about coltsfoot:
"Contains traces of liver-affecting pyrrolizidine alkaloids; potentially toxic in large doses. In Germany, use is limited to 4 to 6 weeks per year, except under advice of a physician." p. 147

The Unkind Cut

One of the Herbalist's favorite axioms is "herbs grow most where they are needed most." And it is an interesting proposition. I mentioned earlier that I've identified a large stand of blue bugle in my back yard and smaller clumps scattered across the rest of our property. I even poked Tool Guy about it, since it has been labeled the "carpenter's herb," being hemostyptic in nature. This was simply whistling in the dark on my part, because in the seven years since he has resumed wood working, he's never. ever. cut himself. Now, me on the other hand...well, I do talk about cooking dangerously, don't I?

Less than a week after identifying bugle and discovering its purpose, I had the quintessential opportunity to field test its efficacy. There I was. In the kitchen. A banded bunch of green onions in my hand. A very sharp knife. Let me say in my defense that at least I had the blade pointing upward and I was cutting away from myself. Alright, alright, but at least I feel slightly less stupid, okay?

As I wrapped up the cut and watched it rapidly soak the bandage without any indication of abating, I dizzily chanted to myself that I didn't want to go to Urgent Care at that particular moment. Somewhere in my scattered wits, the remembrance of bugle floated to the surface and I dashed out of the back door and onto the lawn to snatch up a couple of leaves. I stuffed them in my mouth, munched them into a macerated paste and peeled open the bandage, plastering the pulp in place and resealing the bandage. Two minutes later, the bleeding had stopped completely. It wasn't even hurting. Cross my heart and hope to die. That night, I applied a couple of plantain leaves to the cut for the astringent and antiseptic properties. In the morning, I was able to abandon the bandage altogether.

It was rather interesting that within a few days of this experience, I was settled in the bedroom, doing some studying when Tool Guy called to me with a strained note in his voice. When I answered, he told me that he needed me to drive him to Urgent Care. I darted into the bathroom where he was sluicing out a vicious cut where he'd been momentarily distracted and lost an argument with his miter saw. Fortunately, it wasn't his band saw or he would have lost more than the argument. Once again, I made a mad dash for the bugle patch, followed closely by Hobbits who were eager to assist me in the collection. Once again, it performed as previously, though his cut was much worse than mine. Whew.

I've certainly decided that, since cuts are not a seasonal hazard, bugle needs to have a place in our medicine cabinet. Toward this end, I gathered up runners of it with the leaves still attached rather than snipping off individual leaves. These I dried on racks in my oven, set on 100*. After drying, I store the leaves in a mason jar, vacuum sealed with a packet of desiccate inside.

Both of our war wounds are healing up nicely. Tool Guy is still accommodating himself to the green stores that are filling our medicine cabinet these days. After the bugle application, he insisted on scrubbing out his wound with commercial antiseptics and plaster on antibiotic-impregnated bandages. I'm trying not to be smug about the fact that his cut isn't healing quiiiiiite as cleanly as mine. When I pointed this out to him, he told me to talk to the hand. The uncut one. Heh.