Does the time get away from you like it does for me? People say "what have you been up to?" and I never know what to answer - just puttering around, in my own little universe, would be the proper answer I suppose. I guess I could say I became fascinated by tincturing bitters last year after a herb walk led by Jim McDonald last fall at the Ecology Center in Oxford. Then I could tell about how I made a large herbal wall hanging after Robin Mickiewicz demonstrated the craft at Crossroads Village this summer. I made a nice wreath from Silver King Artemisia and Costmary blossoms which was sold at the GCHS tea. And how I began collecting and gluing together junque glass into garden totems after seeing some at a craft show. I need to post a few more photos of them.
But as to what I've been up to? I dunno ... puttering around, as usual. How about You?
I'm posting the following overly long list of my 2010 herbal adventures which I began keeping track of as of June 22, although some of it was remembered and added from earlier this year (and which I may add to as the year goes on, just to keep it all in one place):
Over the summer I made 2 versions herbal tea, which I like to drink sweetened with a little of my home grown stevia or some local honey from the farmers' market:
1. "summer" blossoms:
red clover, german chamomile, primrose, thyme, oregano, savory, ironweed, Baikal scullcap
2. Lemon herbs and flowers for digestive, sedative, headache relief, tonic and nervine
rose petals, lemon verbena, lemon balm, lemon basil, lemon thyme, calendula, rosemary, mint
I made a bug repellent tincture which I'll dilute with witch hazel:
Catnip (fresh) flowers and leaves, pennyroyal (fresh) tops, a few (fresh) tansy leaves, and dry yarrow leaves.
This, after reading the label of a verry expensive ($9.00 for 2 ounces) "natural" insect repellent that Herb bought for golfing. Its list of ingredients: lemongrass, patchouli, peppermint, catnip, and Neem, in witch hazel.
I've been harvesting like crazy:
dandelion roots and crowns (screen dry and zipbagged)
kale leaves (dehydrated and zipbagged)
hawthorn leaves (May) and fruit (Sept-Oct) (screen dry, zipbagged leaves)
mugwort leaves (screen dry) (made sleep pillow with hops) (may still make tincture, oil, moxa floss)
hops "cones" (screen dry) (see mugwort)
monarda flowers and top leaves (hang dry and zipbagged)
Greek oregano leaves (hang dry, screened and bottled)
sage leaves (hang dry and bottled)
thyme leaves (screen dry and bottled)
bay leaves (screen dry)
lavender stems with blossoms (hang dry, zipbagged and bundled)
blue vervain "Simpler's Joy" tops (hang dry and zipbagged)
oenothera (evening primrose) (hang drying whole plant)
lythrum (loosestrife) tops (hang dry)
calendula tops and petals (screen dry)
veronica tops (hang dry)
motherwort leaves (screen dry)
heal-all leaves and flowers (screen dry)
borage leaves and flowers (screen dry, bottled)
southernwood branches, Silver King artemisia tops (hang dry)
red clover flowers (screen dry)
goldenrod tops (hang dry)
purple aster tops (screen dry)
sweet annie (Artemisia annua) branches, hang dry
sassafras leaves (from Ludington), hang dry, zipbagged
castor beans
pineapple sage leaves
mullein root and leaves from first year plant dug in October, hang dry
violet jelly (picked flowers with Aubrey) (gave some to Theresa, Ashley on Mother's Day, and Lois M. )
rose petal jelly (Tuscany and Mme Isaac Periere? check FB) (gave some to Tree and Ash on Father's Day) (gave some to Norma, Ulrike, and Lois)
rose petal honey (some for me, and tiny jars with Kayla and Aubrey) Red/Pinks Tuscany, Mundi, and Mme. I.P.
rose petal elixir ( a.k.a.preFB "rose petal cordial") Red/Pinks
rose petal infused oil - Red/Pinks - Mundi and Mme IP
rose petal vinegar - Reds/Pinks - in homemade organic cider vinegar
rose petal beads - You can use pale pink and white blossoms - it will turn black anyways! (still in progress)
rose petals (screen dry and bottled) for tea and other uses
(March) honey sweetened rose hip tincture with ginger honey from '09 dried rose hips, and (September '10) rose hip tincture from R. eglantina
and tinctured purchased dried elderberries with honey to make cough syrup
elderflowers (4 from my 3 2 yr old plants), fresh, tinctured
StJW tops, fresh, tinctured (began collecting on summer Solstice)
St. J's Wort tops, fresh, oil
holy basil tops, fresh, tinctured
Solomon's seal root, fresh, tinctured
purple aster tops, fresh, tinctured
juniper berries (from beach lot), fresh, tinctured in gin (what the heck?)
quince fruit, fresh. tinctured (for "ratatifa"?)
meadowsweet - dried 2 flower heads in full color (they dry out in the yard as the beetles attack them and they go to seed) as an experiment. Next year I will fresh tincture some.
peonies and sea oats -dried for arrangements
FRESH USE:
mixed flower bouquets, of course!
dandelion greens - cooked
rhubarb
asparagus
strawberries and alpine strawberries
chives
mixed lettuce salads spring and fall
basil leaves fresh as sandwich greens, cooked in pasta sauce, in tomato salad, in bruschetta, in pesto, froze pesto cubes (trying to be more conservative this year, I planted Genovese, regular sweet, lemon, holy, and 'Siam Queen' Thai)
parsley, part of my pesto recipe
dillweed in dill sauce on fish
lemon balm, purple aster herbal teas
garlic scapes - green dip
rosemary, oregano, marjoram, used cooked in pasta sauce, chili, oven roasted veggies, and so on
tomatoes, peppers (Herb made lots of fresh salsa),the freezer is full
garlic and shallots: dug on July 26 (big this year), replanted 30 cloves on September 30
Jerusalem artichokes to roast with a roast beef
I have Plans for:
comfrey - oil? dry some
marshmallow root and maybe the leaves
always more thyme!
anise hyssop - just planted a new one after having been without for a few years
feverfew? angelica? (there weren't as many seedlings this year as usual)
southernwood, absinthe (wormwood)
ginkgo leaves
Solomon's seal root, and false solomon's seal
rose hips
European betony (Stachys betonica or Stachys officinalis)
Baikal skullcap (the Chinese plant, not the native that all the herbalists are talking about)
and, when the plants are ready:
gogi berries (or wolfberry) from the plant I started from seed last year
elderberries from the plants I started last year
New Jersey tea from the seedling I transplanted this year.
What I missed so far and will try to use/make next year:
hawthorn flowers, lily of the valley flowers, lilac flowers, dianthus and apple blossoms, meadowsweet blossoms, and chamomile (pick with Aubrey to make Peter Rabbit Tea)
Rosa englatina leaf for tinctures
chervil, sweet cicely, valerian blossoms
Showing posts with label tincture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tincture. Show all posts
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Monday, March 15, 2010
Rose Hip - Ginger Cordial
This ought to be a fun, tasty and efficacious herbal cordial.
In response to an opening question by Linda Conroy on "how do people use rose hips", the following recipe was posted on Facebook by Heather Nic An Fhleisdeir, who makes a low alcohol tincture of rosehips and fresh gingerroot. She wrote this on Feb. 26:
"(Fill) a jar one third the way full of dried deseeded rosehips, pouring just enough hot water over them to reconstitute and let cool. Fill with 40% alcohol (I like scotch whisky) and let steep three weeks. It has a nice body to it and since it is low in alcohol it extracts a nice amount of the nutrients. I like to mix it with my fresh ginger tincture, mmm"
Linda Conroy had posted: "Rose hips, fresh harvested from the wild contain between 1500-2500 grams of Vitamin C per 100 grams of weight. This is 47 times more than an orange. which contains around 53 mgs of Vitamin C per 100 grams of weight."
Of course it is easier to eat an orange... but rose hips are local, free, wildcrafted or cultivated food (uncontaminated with pesticides), and when you pick and process your own roses' hips, you become a personal part of the process of nourishing life.
I wrote: (I make) "Rose hip jam, but I always wonder if I'm destroying the Vit C by cooking? It does taste good, though."
Linda responded: "I do believe that some of the vitmain C is lost in each step of processing. The ultimate way to prepare roseship for optimal vitamin C is to prepare them fresh and not heating or drying them. This is why I like to steep them in honey or vinegar when they are fresh. But there are other nutrients that roseships offer when cooked, such as carotenes. (And since carotenes are fat soluable, roseship pie or cheese cake as mentioned above is ideal!)
Next year - rose hip honey, for sure!
Well, with all of that fresh knowledge, I decided to tincture some of my dried rose hips and in three week I'll add them to some ginger root honey I made.
Here is my method:
1/2 cup dehydrated rose hips
1/2 cup hot, not boiling water
Cover rose hips with water, allow to cool. Then add:
1/2 cup Jack Daniels (43 percent Alc. by vol.= 86 proof)
Cover and allow to tincture for 3 weeks in a cupboard, shaking the bottle every day.
At the end of 3 weeks,stir in ginger honey, made by infusing 1/2 cup honey and peeled sliced gingerroot.
I'm not sure if I'll bother straining out the healthful solids to get a clear cordial - I'll try to keep this updated. However, rest assured, the rose hips and ginger won't go to waste.
In response to an opening question by Linda Conroy on "how do people use rose hips", the following recipe was posted on Facebook by Heather Nic An Fhleisdeir, who makes a low alcohol tincture of rosehips and fresh gingerroot. She wrote this on Feb. 26:
"(Fill) a jar one third the way full of dried deseeded rosehips, pouring just enough hot water over them to reconstitute and let cool. Fill with 40% alcohol (I like scotch whisky) and let steep three weeks. It has a nice body to it and since it is low in alcohol it extracts a nice amount of the nutrients. I like to mix it with my fresh ginger tincture, mmm"
Linda Conroy had posted: "Rose hips, fresh harvested from the wild contain between 1500-2500 grams of Vitamin C per 100 grams of weight. This is 47 times more than an orange. which contains around 53 mgs of Vitamin C per 100 grams of weight."
Of course it is easier to eat an orange... but rose hips are local, free, wildcrafted or cultivated food (uncontaminated with pesticides), and when you pick and process your own roses' hips, you become a personal part of the process of nourishing life.
I wrote: (I make) "Rose hip jam, but I always wonder if I'm destroying the Vit C by cooking? It does taste good, though."
Linda responded: "I do believe that some of the vitmain C is lost in each step of processing. The ultimate way to prepare roseship for optimal vitamin C is to prepare them fresh and not heating or drying them. This is why I like to steep them in honey or vinegar when they are fresh. But there are other nutrients that roseships offer when cooked, such as carotenes. (And since carotenes are fat soluable, roseship pie or cheese cake as mentioned above is ideal!)
Next year - rose hip honey, for sure!
Well, with all of that fresh knowledge, I decided to tincture some of my dried rose hips and in three week I'll add them to some ginger root honey I made.
Here is my method:
My Version Rose hip and Ginger root Cordial
March 11, 2010
1/2 cup dehydrated rose hips
1/2 cup hot, not boiling water
Cover rose hips with water, allow to cool. Then add:
1/2 cup Jack Daniels (43 percent Alc. by vol.= 86 proof)
Cover and allow to tincture for 3 weeks in a cupboard, shaking the bottle every day.
At the end of 3 weeks,stir in ginger honey, made by infusing 1/2 cup honey and peeled sliced gingerroot.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
My version of Elderberry Cough Syrup
It's really pretty tasty! And I think it's working during this germ-y season... I'll let you know.
I made some elderberry tincture last winter after taking a class by Jim McDonald that turned me on to tincturing, and then finding dehydrated berries for sale at a reliable beer-making supply shop.
Oh! BTW, a little news: Herb just learned this week that he won a third Silver Medal in the 2009 Great Lakes International Cider & Perry Competition, for his locally sourced, homemade (non-commercial) spiced apple wine. It really is good!
Back. Anyway, my tincture seemed nice, but I never really had a need to use it. I seem to be awfully healthy for such a broken down old gal (knocking on wood).
The only elderberries I've been able to find 'growing wild' are so near to roads that I don't trust their safety. This spring I planted a couple of tiny shrubs from the Conservation District in my backyard, but of course they need some time to grow.
Elderberry has been talked about by so many herbalists, especially during the recent season of flu scare, that I thought I'd try my hand at making and using 'it'. Most of the cough syrup recipes I've seen seem similar enough, so I thought I'd do my own riff and let you know how it turned out.
What I did
In a large saucepan combine:
1/2 cup dried elderberries
2 cups hot water
Bring to a boil while stirring constantly, then lower the heat and simmer about an hour, mashing berries occasionally.
(If you used fresh berries, you would only need a little water to keep from burning the berries initially, and you could simmer just long enough to juice the berries, but that's another recipe.)
Keep the lid on while simmering, and don't boil. If you can smell the berries in clouds of steam, then valuable essential nutrients are escaping into the air.
Remember, mash occasionally.
Pour it all into a cheesecloth lined 4-cup measuring cup to strain. Let sit to drain thoroughly.
Squeeze gently and discard berry pulp. (I set it aside to feed to my worm bin.)
Measure liquid and pour back in saucepan. To 1 1/2 cups juice stir in one generous cup of honey, heating briefly to blend well.
Remove from heat. For enhanced keeping quality, stir in 4 oz.* vodka, brandy or tincture.
Here is my innovation: I added that Elderberry tincture that I had made last fall. Double the berry, double the fun!
*By volume 8 + 12= 20 oz. : 20%= 4 oz.
I bottled mine in a quart canning jar with a plastic lid. It's pretty nice syrup - it's be good over ice cream or cake, or for an aperitif or a nightcap.
But to use 'medicinally' in the folk tradition, an adult dose would be a teaspoon a day. But look at the ingredients - a Tablespoon wouldn't hurt either, or stirring a teaspoon into a cuppa tea more often than once a day wouldn't hurt, might help build your resistance to cold and flu.
I made some elderberry tincture last winter after taking a class by Jim McDonald that turned me on to tincturing, and then finding dehydrated berries for sale at a reliable beer-making supply shop.
Oh! BTW, a little news: Herb just learned this week that he won a third Silver Medal in the 2009 Great Lakes International Cider & Perry Competition, for his locally sourced, homemade (non-commercial) spiced apple wine. It really is good!
Back. Anyway, my tincture seemed nice, but I never really had a need to use it. I seem to be awfully healthy for such a broken down old gal (knocking on wood).
The only elderberries I've been able to find 'growing wild' are so near to roads that I don't trust their safety. This spring I planted a couple of tiny shrubs from the Conservation District in my backyard, but of course they need some time to grow.
Elderberry has been talked about by so many herbalists, especially during the recent season of flu scare, that I thought I'd try my hand at making and using 'it'. Most of the cough syrup recipes I've seen seem similar enough, so I thought I'd do my own riff and let you know how it turned out.
What I did
In a large saucepan combine:
1/2 cup dried elderberries
2 cups hot water
Bring to a boil while stirring constantly, then lower the heat and simmer about an hour, mashing berries occasionally.
(If you used fresh berries, you would only need a little water to keep from burning the berries initially, and you could simmer just long enough to juice the berries, but that's another recipe.)
Keep the lid on while simmering, and don't boil. If you can smell the berries in clouds of steam, then valuable essential nutrients are escaping into the air.
Remember, mash occasionally.
Pour it all into a cheesecloth lined 4-cup measuring cup to strain. Let sit to drain thoroughly.
Squeeze gently and discard berry pulp. (I set it aside to feed to my worm bin.)
Measure liquid and pour back in saucepan. To 1 1/2 cups juice stir in one generous cup of honey, heating briefly to blend well.
Remove from heat. For enhanced keeping quality, stir in 4 oz.* vodka, brandy or tincture.
Here is my innovation: I added that Elderberry tincture that I had made last fall. Double the berry, double the fun!
*By volume 8 + 12= 20 oz. : 20%= 4 oz.
I bottled mine in a quart canning jar with a plastic lid. It's pretty nice syrup - it's be good over ice cream or cake, or for an aperitif or a nightcap.
But to use 'medicinally' in the folk tradition, an adult dose would be a teaspoon a day. But look at the ingredients - a Tablespoon wouldn't hurt either, or stirring a teaspoon into a cuppa tea more often than once a day wouldn't hurt, might help build your resistance to cold and flu.
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