The Great White North

A friend of mine says she's going hunting. She's cleaning her rifle. She's loaded for...groundhog. Yeah. That's right. Groundhog. Particularly the one who lives in the climate-controlled environment enjoying all of the amenities of life while the rest of us are slogging out the dregs of winter. Keep your head down, Phil. That's all I'm sayin'.

I can't say that our week began with the most auspicious preparations. A power outage the previous week had revealed that our generator, serviced over the summer, wasn't actually as ready as we had hoped. Fortunately, it had only been of a short duration and since we'd had no other outages this winter, there probably wasn't anything to be concerned over. The utility company had been ruthless in their pruning efforts this past summer, as the misshapen and mutilated trees lining the local rural roads could attest. Trees intrepid enough to grow within the easement parameters were hacked, hewn, and even hawed to almost shrub-like proportions. Yep. The power people were set. Right? Riiiight. And so we hoped that their readiness would compensate for our own rather shakiness in that department. I mean, you try finding service for a generator this time of year. Pick a number and stand in line.

I spent the first of the week in a flurry of activity, because before the end of Tuesday afternoon, there were goosefeather snowflakes wafting their way down to settle on the solidified masses of previous snowfalls. We had planned a winter outing that morning, but I canceled so that way I wouldn't have to pick up Tool Guy from work. I had no intentions of making anymore uphill hikes in heavy snowfall to collect him. Been there, done that, bought the sweatshirt. And, indeed, when Tool Guy came home, stomping in out of the snow, he affirmed that, like the Princess on the Glass Hill, it was possible to come down, but impossible to go up. Then the power went out. With a futzy generator. Greeeeeeat. Just great. Fortunately, dinner was five minutes away from hitting the table and so we had a warm meal for dinner. Given how the week would go, this was being thankful for large favors.

The Hobbits were all troupers. Nay, they were excited. They always celebrate occasions that are marked by lighting the hurricane lamp that has followed us from Louisiana. Something romantic and adventurous about the soft, warm glow. And smoking wick. Yeah, I'm still working on the knack of trimming it properly. Where's Jane Austen when you need her? Nonetheless, we circled around the table after dinner and resumed work on lessons and reading. Everyone was feeling quite Little House on the Prairie-ish. We had to flip a coin to see who had the honor of blowing out the lamp. Yeah. I know. Gotta get these kids out more often.

When I woke up at 4 am and the staring red light on our smoke detector wasn't glaring down at me, I knew that we were in for more than just an inconvenience. I looked out the window and saw the relentlessly gentle parade of flakes continue to come down. Buckle your seatbelts, passengers...

In the morning, Tool Guy decided that it was worthwhile to argue further with the generator and he was able to persuade it to be of his way of thinking. Happy day! Heat. Hot showers. Sanitary sanitation opportunities. Hot food. Cold refrigerators. A man who can coax a generator to start is a man of inestimable charm. Think I'll keep him around a while. I immediately filled up several storage buckets full of water in case his persuasive powers didn't hold. I've decided that among the canning activities in which I will indulge this summer, not the least of these shall include canning water. Yep. That's right. Water. If I'm going to have extra jars taking up space down in the basement, the least they can do is haul their weight by keeping us stocked with water in the future event that the choke on our generator decides to resume its recalcitrance. Besides, I want to be able to flush, okay?

Did I mention that I had a co-op order to coordinate during this week? Yeah. No stress there. Because even with power from the generator, when cable is down, cable is down. Needless to say, when, thirty-six hours later, the power came back on, I flew into action. I spent the morning catching up on phone calls, ordering, email, as well as grinding flour, setting up bread, and anticipating whatever else we might need. The forecast was predicting another front of snow. As it turned out, I had exactly twelve hours to get everything that I needed done done and then, like clockwork, the power went down again. Tool Guy turned to me and inquired about the prospects of relocating South. I asked him if that meant that I wouldn't be able to go grocery shopping in the morning. Nope. My week certainly wasn't going according to plan.

It's nice to know that there are some things that can come together even in sticky spots. We might have been low on coffee and cream--which might be characterized as a state of emergency in its own right--but we had plenty of everything else, despite an inability to get to the grocery store. Our storage shelves had a sufficiency of whatever we needed to get us through the tight places. Even bread baking went on as usual. Speaking of which, I've been playing around with making my bread egg-free. A few people asked me if it was possible. And I'll be honest...I'd never considered it, throwing as many eggs as was rational at the bread recipe in a desperate bid to have it succeed the first time. Which it did. And, for one who claims to cook dangerously, I had never worked up the nerve to leave them out and have it potentially flop. But when our egg supply disappeared, I had a greater incentive to see if it was possible. Guess what? It is. So for those who asked, here's the egg-free bread. My baking pans hold about four cups of dough, so the recipe is sized accordingly. Your needs may vary.

Everything (Including Egg) Free Sourdough Bread

These days, I'm making my starter with a blend that looks roughly like this:

1/3 cup adzuki bean flour
1 cup buckwheat flour
1 cup red quinoa flour
1 cup millet flour
2/3 cup rice flour

I measure heaping cups of these, because I want there to be a little starter left over to help feed the next generation. As I've mentioned before, teff or fenugreek makes a great lactobacilli magnet if your starter needs to be perked up or restarted.


4 cups sourdough starter
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup flax seed meal (opt.)
1/4 cup tapioca starch
1/4 cup potato starch
1 tsp. salt
3 tsp. guar gum

Mix ingredients together, bringing up to high speed once the batter and dry ingredients are incorporated. "Knead" for about five minutes. The consistency needs to be something between toothpaste and cake batter, so add water or a couple of tablespoons of flour as necessary to achieve this. Pour batter into pans lined with baking parchment. I've gotten quite addicted to the ability to pop the bread pans into the refrigerator and let them rise until I feel like baking them. To prevent a skin from forming on the surface of the breads, I lay a sheet of plastic wrap or baking parchment over the top before storing in the fridge and then peel off when I'm ready to put them in the oven. Bake at 350* for approximately 1.5 hours or until done. When baked, pop out of pan and onto cooling rack, waiting until completely cooled to cut.

The Hobbits have pronounced this to be my best bread ever. Yeah, I know. You've unearthed my secret. I keep them on such a short leash that anything new I do feels like an improvement. I have to say that I'm pretty fond of it, too, though. Prolly 'cause I keep myself on the same short leash. At any rate, when I let it rise sufficiently--and therein lies the art of it...how much is high enough without the bread collapsing--I get this towering loaf of bread that doesn't need the lift from eggs to make it lofty. For the egg-free folk, enjoy!

Bread in hand, we were well-provided for. In spite of twenty-four hours without government snow removal and an inability to achieve the roads to go anywhere, our widow's cruse of gasoline held out--with a bit of judicious rationing--until the power came back on almost forty-eight hours later. Which was two days before some of our other neighbors regained grid connectivity, Lord love 'em.

Secure provisions are reassuring when you have snow encroaching on your window sashes. Or the handrail on your entry stairs. This isn't for the faint of heart. The propane delivery person announced himself "too old for this" and refused to return until there was a cleared path to the backyard. Yeah...that's gonna happen... My die-hard neighbor, who has relationships with his walk-behind snowblowers that looks like other men's relationships with their classic cars, threw in the scarf and hired a back-hoe to clear his driveways.

The blizzard of 2010 will be something that the Hobbits will talk about when they are our age. They'll tell about the "roughing it" and the igloos they constructed--Princess has quite an architectural bent--and the tunnels they burrowed through the yard. When I was her age, we had two inches of snow and, in Louisiana, it left the same kind of impression as the footage does now.

Meanwhile, as I'm digging out from under, I'm also digging around for groundhog recipes.

They're gluten-free, right?

De Ja Vu

This is always the most difficult time of year. The hackneyed complaints about cabin fever set in and the Hobbits are invariably bouncing off of the walls, but trenchant in their resistance to take the energy outside. By now, the romance of the fresh fallen snow has been stomped into pockmarks across the yard and so has the exhilaration of sledding. Even Bug's forays into converting his saucer sled into a snowboard has lost its shine.

And homeschooling. Picture me with a hag-ridden expression and ragged wisps of hair tufting a gleaming scalp. This is the time of year where the curriculum has lost its shine and everyone wants the year To Be Done. Tool Guy and Dog started the year with high hopes. They had collaborated on the purchase of a "school in a box" kind of curriculum and had, apparently, polled the masses with a product satisfaction survey, receiving very positive feedback. They must have found the very one consumer who liked the wooden material, since everyone that I asked actually shuddered at the mere mention of the books. Literally. I reasoned with the guys that it was not for naught that I found unopened boxes of this curriculum on the exchange table, free for the taking. Collecting dust. Sun-faded. But nobody listens. So Dog and Tool Guy are slogging their way through the remainder of the material, with Tool Guy dragging comprehension from Dog, piece by piece. They flirted with chucking the whole package and switching to more lively material, but decided that slogging was less work than catching up. Live and learn.

Bug is also bogging down. Before I whinge, I have to hand it to Bug that he has made enormous strides. I was listening to him during family time, reading from the teenage NIV with such ease and facility that I couldn't believe this was the same child who was stumbling over the easy readers just a year ago. But math? (See? It's even a four-letter word.) Not that math at his level is particularly hard, but it is when Someone (insert meaningful, pointed glance at a certain furry-footed shortling) is resisting the discipline of memorizing the times tables. Yeah, we've done the whole grouping/counting bears/multiplication-is-just-fast-addition theoretical exercises and he gets it. But there's nothing that replaces the actual instant recall and facile command of the multiplication tables. I'd given him a variety of tools with which to master the facts and left him to it. It wasn't met with cries of delight. By the time we got to this mid-point, it became clear that we weren't going further until he muscled his way through the memorization exercise. I had to get draconian, but he got there. It's been a rough couple of weeks.

Princess mostly flies through her stuff. Oh, she puts on airs and pretends that this is difficult. After all, she has the wailing and gnashing of teeth around her and we are nothing if not creatures of imitation, but the reality is that this stuff is a cakewalk for her. She makes me look good, but I didn't have anything to do with this. My first grader has set a goal for herself that she will read through the Magic Tree House series and she's been doing it at the rate of a book every day or so. Her main complaint at this point is the slowness of the library system to produce next book in the series--"Because, Mom, it's frustrating to not read them in order!" This loses a lot when you can't see the earnest expression and the accompanying gestures. I try not to smile too openly.

School matters aren't truly a vexation for Princess, but in recent months I've begun noticing some unhappy symptoms of a different nature. Quite a sinking feeling, since Princess has been my "golden child"--the one with whom I did Everything Right. Home birth. Breastfed. Gluten/casein free since before birth. Growing up with bone broth, fermented foods, and everything free. Everything augured well for her to sail through childhood without any digestive hitches. I only anticipated dealing with teenage mutinies when this dietary stuff started making them feel too different. Alas, no.

A few months ago, I noticed that she'd become much more emotionally fragile. Irrational. Then the Shoe Problem popped up. Shoes that had been perfectly acceptable--nay!--favorites suddenly became intolerable. At first, I thought she'd just outgrown those, but when I replaced them with the next size up, the problem persisted. And when I insisted on her accepting the shoes anyway, the frustration was displaced to the velcro. I personally have now developed a rash reaction to the sound of velcro ripping. I think there's probably even an IgE rast for it. This is due to the long and daily sessions of fastening and unfastening and refastening the velcro repeatedly on the shoes to get the tension Just Right. And when one shoe was Just Right, the other shoe's tension had to be the same exact Just Right as the other. Or the process had to be repeated again. And again. Did I mention repeatedly? And socks. Don't get me started on seams on socks that must be aligned with the ley lines in England at the same time as the Nazca lines of Peru. Just. Don't.

At this point I began having flashbacks to when Dog was a toddler. The sun was too bright. And none of the clothes felt right. All manner of sensory disagreements. It's amazing how easy it is to forget these things. Well, probably not forget. Rather say that it is easy to shove those memories to the back of the closet. Life has become too normal for us. These days, when Dog asks why he can't wear sweats to church, it is more about the teenage stuff than it is about sensory integration issues. Reluctantly, I faced the presentation of these dynamics with the digestive upsets she was experiencing and accepted that there's some food stuff going on with her. Sigh.

Before diving hog wild into testing, I've decided to do some judicious pruning to see if we can address this first with a bit of deduction. Beans was the most recent addition to the diet and although the boys are showing absolutely no problems to the daily inclusion of this in their food, it was the first suspect for Princess' reactions. This was discouraging to her, though she took it in good grace. She's well used to discussions about pulling food, though this is one of the few times it actually applied to her. While I continue to make a bean bread multi-grain blend for the boys, I'm making a bean-free version for her along with theirs. She's particularly mourning the absence of toasted garbanzo beans. I started wracking my brains for a comparable snack for her to enjoy. Something like honey-roasted nuts for the nut-free.

Buckwheat is my current new Favorite Thing. I'm exploring the different things that I can do with it. It's a dominant flavor in my current bread combo. It's got a viscosity to it that makes me think of gluten, even though its gluten-free, name notwithstanding, so I'm watching to see if it improves the texture of the bread as well as adding more nutrients. There are tons of papers out there where other people in lab situations are playing with the viscous potential of buckwheat. Why should they have all the fun? I've started playing with sprouting it, too. Sprouts up nicely and quickly, though that viscous thing is evident in the first day or so of sprouting, requiring particular attention in thorough rinsing. The nice thing about sprouting, aside from the obvious advantages of sprouting in and of itself, is that the sprouting eliminates that stickiness from the process when one goes about toasting the grains.

The Nitty Gritty Cooking class was playing with caramel corn using honey and butter, so duly inspired, I decided to extend the application to buckwheat. Princess loved the resulting crunchy, nutty-tasting snack. Kinda made me think of the old maids in those stale boxes of sticky treats that we mostly ripped open for the prize inside rather than the treat itself.

Cracker Jills (Caramel Buckwheat)

4 cups sprouted buckwheat
2 T ghee or coconut oil
1/2 cup honey

Toast in oven at 350* until nicely browned and no longer damp, stirring from time to time to allow for even toasting. In a heavy saucepan over a low temperature, melt ghee and honey, stirring to mix as thoroughly as possible. Pour over buckwheat and stir to completely coat. In tray or cookie sheet covered with a silicone mat or baking parchment, spread the buckwheat out as thinly and evenly as possible. Return to oven and toast for 10-20 minutes. As it cools, the crunch will emerge. This is one snack that was greeted with cries of delight. It makes a great finger food snack or a nifty breakfast cereal.

No magic bullets for Princess yet. Ramping up the bone broth and the coconut milk kefir and all things fermented. She's taking enzymes with meals, which seems to be helping. I'm giving bentonite clay a toss, too.

And I'm knitting again. Socks. The kind with no seams at the toes.

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.

Old Man Winter

Winter has taken its time getting here. We barely had snow for Christmas. The blizzard that socked the seaboard sniffed at our feet and ran south to christen everyone in that direction. But when Old Man Winter decided to arrive, he did it with quite the flourish. We had a week of howling...and I am not using a hyperbolic metaphor when I say "howling"...winds to make things "interesting" for us. Blasts of 30 mph winds sustained themselves for over a week. Everyone was comparing notes on how many times the winds woke them in the night. Tool Guy and I were comparing notes on what new location in the house was exhibiting drafts and we were regretting not being more extensive with our weatherstripping of this past summer. I shared a bed with Princess over the holidays because we had surrendered the master bedroom to guests for the month of December. During our "sleepovers," my feet would hang over the end of her mattress and act as lure for any stray draft that may have wandered in. I think I got frost bite. It was definite incentive for me to finish those black socks that I began in February of last year.

The coup de grace was when I went up into the attic to start returning the Christmas decorations to their storage places. And noticed that there was more visibility and sunlight...um...sunlight? in our attic. The high, sustained winds had trashed the attic fan and the hood was completely gone. Oh. That was the fragments of something that we had noticed out in the yard, but everyone was too wimpy to brace the winds and go find out what it was. Bug's theory was that it was a crashed flying saucer. Well. Almost. It might not explain the alien abductions, but it definitely explained the mysterious drafts that the house had begun to manifest. No need for a ghost buster here.

True to form, this discovery happened on...yep...a weekend. You knew that, right? We consoled ourselves that the 22" hole in our roof didn't coincide with any rain in the forecast. One of the consolations of 12* weather. One of the few. Tool Guy covered the hole from the interior with a spare sheet of plexi-glass and we ferreted around for someone willing to mush out to our remote waste of frozen Shire tundra and climb on our roof to fix this. One insurance adjuster and three visits later, we are the proud possessors of a low-profile (I'm beginning to appreciate the value of this characteristic) attic vent. And it is snowing.

The weather definitely has Tool Guy down. As a child of the Chicagoland, he has none of my romantic notions regarding snowfall. While I saw only two snowfalls of any moment in the bayous of Louisiana, he slogged through masses of this every year in his suburbian neighborhood--"lake effect," you know--and the childhood memories of such aren't of the cherished sort. Ours was not the generation of parents who drove children to the bus stop and sat, expanding their carbon footprint with a running motor to warm the car, until the bus stop arrived and the children dashed from warm car to warm bus to warm school. Nope. Ours was the one that said, "Bundle up, it's cold out there!" as we walked out the door, solitarily, to take on the quarter mile walk and the twenty minute wait at the stop. It was frigid enough in the swamps of the South. Bus stop huddles in this weather would certainly warp my view of New England winters. As it is, I'm free to enjoy my pink-hazed romance with the piles and billows that grace us without the jaundice of too much reality interfering. Heh.

This year, particularly, Tool Guy is grousing about the snow. He wants his motorcycle. The junkie and his crack. What can I say? He heatedly justifies this fervid attachment by expounding on how therapeutic riding is for his back. (You see what they do? Desperate justifications...) I nod. He continues to describe the relief. I nod. He waxes eloquent on the sense of well-being sustained riding provides. I nod. He gives up in disgust, muttering how I just don't understand. I nod. Poor guy. He is, however, hobbling around like a stiff old man, just a mite older than he actually is. So I took pity on him.

Mrs. Hostess (of Nitty-Gritty Cooking fame) is enjoying dabbling along with me into all things herbal. She came home from a visit out to Ohio this past summer with a salve that she declared the best thing since sliced bread...everything free bread even. She explained to me how she'd injured herself during the visit and had discovered this salve provided by an Amish farmer. Application of this salve had resolved the injury in an amazingly short period of time. The ingredients? Comfrey and chickweed. Et voila. Herbs that are readily on hand here.

We started our oil extraction immediately and when the leaves began to fall, we were ready to make the salve. We had planned that this would be our first venture into making a salve, myself heretofore being too lazy to make any of the herbal oils I've done in the past into an actual salve, but we decided that we'd try it together and planned a "salve party" at some point. However, A Series of Unfortunate Events conspired to prevent our party and the autumn wasted away before we got to it. And a few weeks after the bike's entry into hibernation, Tool Guy had commenced hobbling. Time to commence with the salve.

I'm beginning to understand the maddening vagaries of the herbalists whom I've been soliciting for wisdom. When one is accustomed to specific measurements, it sounds very elusive to hear things like "stuff a bunch into a jar." It grates on our Western sensibilities. But there it is.

I--forgive me--stuffed a bunch of comfrey leaf and chickweed in relatively equal amounts (how's that for specificity, eh?) into a quart jar and covered with olive oil. The plant matter need to be completely covered with oil, packed densely enough to have a substantial amount of herb in the oil, but not so tight as to prevent the circulation of the oil through the plant matter. A favorite trick of mine is to vacuum seal the jar with my Food Saver. As the vacuum seal is taking effect, the air bubbles rise from out of the leaves and oil and the leaves, particularly when fresh, will visibly darken. Goody!

Leave this jar in a handy, reachsome place, but out of the sun, for 4-6 weeks. When you walk by, shake it. Alcohol tinctures work on this same principle, but they are easier to shake. Shaking an oil extract is more like playing with a lava lamp and you have to give it a bit more of your time and attention than a tincture. If you have Hobbits running around who would be fascinated with the process and not so fascinated as to want to open the jar, you may want to recruit them. This has inspired not a few in-depth conversations that expanded into actual instructional sessions. Bug and Princess particularly have become adept at identifying plants and their uses from such spontaneous conversations.

An herbalist mentor of mine says that when making an extract or tincture this way, 80% of the virtue of the plant has been imparted to the liquid or "menstrum" after only two weeks. The remaining two to four weeks will net you the last 20% of what the plant has to offer. This is useful to know when one is in a hurry for the final product.

To decant the preparation, pour into a cheesecloth lined strainer. After the excess oil has run through, bundle up the herbs into the cheesecloth and squeeze aggressively. I'm actually drooling over a machine that will press this for me, but the price renders it a hopeless romance. Sigh. Ah, well. The strained oil is then the essence of your medicine.

Aches and Pains Salve

Beeswax
Herbal Oil
Rosemary Essential Oil (opt) or Benzoin Tincture (opt) for preservation
Fragrance oils, if desired
Salve jars, prepared and ready ahead of time

Measure out the desired amount of herbal oil. The ratio of beeswax to oil is approximately 1 T to 1 C, more or less depending on how soft you want your salve to be for usage. I tended toward a stiffer salve; your preferences may vary. In a double boiler, I melted the wax. I'm not sure if I regret using my double boiler. It melted wonderfully well without the requisite hovering that characterized the salve session in my herbal classes, but it did leave wax residue in the ring around the waist of the pot that required a not insubstantial amount of elbow grease to remove.

Oh, and a word on wax. In an effusion of enthusiasm, I bought a fragrant chunk of beeswax and romanced it for quite some time before I breached the wrapping. I was quite in love with this brick. Until I needed to melt it. Wax, despite its ductile reputation in candles, is actually a very hard substance and requires aggressive...hm..."downsizing" to expedite the melting process. Unromantic hacking away at the boulder was necessary--and a bit risky--if not to say messy. For the more discriminating salve-maker, wax beads are available that render this a less muscular and more genteel activity. And they melt faster. 'Nuff said.

While the wax was melting, I gently heated the medicinal oil so that I would be able to mix the two without the wax immediately setting up upon contact with the cooler oil. Turning off all heat, I combined the two and added about 10 drops of Rosemary EO. Any fragrance oils would be added at this point. Rosemary is a relatively popular food additive and when you see "natural preservatives" on food labels, you can bank on it that it is probably rosemary. The herbalist I studied with recommends a few drops of Benzoin tincture for the purpose (which I didn't have on hand) and another herbalist recommends a capsule of Vitamin E oil. I opted not to use this since most Vitamin E caps are based on wheat or soy. Besides, I had a sneaking suspicion this salve wouldn't last long enough to go rancid, so I decided to experiment with the Rosemary EO.

Stirring the ingredients together before the whole can congeal, pour them into the waiting salve jars, being careful about drips and spills. Allow to cool--a dimple will form in the surface of the salve--and then cover. Label with ingredients and date and store in a cool, dry place.

I waited until Tool Guy began to worry about the status of his back. "One bend away from it going out," was how he phrased it and I presented him with my finished product. That night, he anointed his back and went to bed in his favorite spot. The next morning, the hobble was noticeably absent and he didn't feel as if he were on the brink of the precipice anymore.

Yeah, it ain't his bike. But it beats codeine.