LearningHerbs Blog

Lemon Balm Popsicles for a Hot Summer Day

Well, we just made up a batch of lemon balm popsicles.

Not only are they delicious and cooling they are also soothing and calming.

With all the excitement and activity of summer, some lemon balm can help bring the kids’ energy down a bit and allow them to settle into a quiet afternoon activity.

To make them, simply cut some fresh lemonbalm. You can use 4 tablespoons on dried as well.

I cut up enough for two loosely packed cups of plant material and added it to a half-gallon jar.

Then simply fill the jar with boiling water, and let it steep for about 20 minutes (for dried as well).

 

Strain and add honey to taste. I added about 2 tablespoons.

Pour into popsicle molds or simply into ice cube trays.

Freeze for a few hours and enjoy!

Enjoy!

-Kimberly

"I listened to my stomach!"

Rowan (8) was eating his oatmeal this morning and he came into my computer room, and said, "Mom, I listened to my stomach this morning, instead of my head and stopped eating when I was full." This feels like a huge breakthrough. He's been eating his oats and feeling sick after for the last week. (We put maple syrup in the oats, and he likes the sweet.)

For a mom working on how to teach her kids about following their intuition about eating and learning to make healthy choices this was quite a wonderful thing to hear!

Strawberry Mania!

Hailey and I picked strawberries this morning. With this flat we are going to enjoy homemade strawberry yogurt and ice cream. We are also going to try making lacto-fermented strawberry soda (look for a lesson with pictures in an upcoming Herb Mentor News). We'll freeze the rest so we can have some berries for winter yogurt and smoothies! We'll be picking strawberries at the local farm all week to keep increasing our winter store.

Hurray for berry season!

Kimberly

Rhythms of Healthy Eating

What I was trying to capture in that last week o f Daily Reflection blog posts were some of the rhythms of a typical week of cooking healthy. What I hope you saw was that there are rhythms around keeping cultures alive and thriving - like kombucha, kefir, and yogurt. There's also a daily rhythm of making nourishing infusions at our house.

What this week didn't show is that there is also a rhythm around making bone broth (or soup stock). That happens every couple of weeks around here, and then gets eaten as miso in the mornings or used to make various soups throughout the month.

There's also a rhythm of meal planning which allows for the necessary defrosting a soaking of ingredients to prepare a meal. (We also soak and then dry nuts when we get them home from the grocery store.)

Then there's the rhythm of acquiring quality food which for us includes a weekly raw milk and cream pick up, trips to the farmer's market and our local CSA farm, and a monthly trip to our buying club for getting quality meat. Also included here is seasonal herb, fruit and vegetable gathering, preparing, and preserving. I will do my best to blog our summer activities so you begin to get a sense of these rhythms in our lives too.

We're about to add weekly bread making to our list of rhythms and perhaps lacto-fermented soda making as well.

Right now, making fermented vegies is only an occassional project, but hopefully that will also become a rhythm and this will truly become a complex dance of cooking and eating well!

--Kimberly

Daily Reflection: Kombucha

Today, I noticed it was time to take my kombucha from May 27th out of the cupboard, and take out the scoby before the brew turned to vinegar. Nine days is really a little long for it to stay in the cupboard, but I hadn't finished drinking the last batch yet. I did just learn though, that if you want your kombucha to taste really carbonated like the kombucha you buy in the stores, you can bottle it (like you would root beer) and let it sit out a few more days after removing the scoby. So, I'm experimenting. I filled four root beer bottles with the brew and put them back in the cupboard. I put the rest of the new batch into the fridge for drinking. On Sunday morning I'm going to check the carbonation in the bottles and probably put them in the fridge at that point.

Today I also played nutrition bingo with Rowan and a friend of his who have been participating in a weekly nutrition class with me throughout this school year. I thought that would be a fun way to review some of the things we'd learned. Well, it was a hit! They had fun playing and I was impressed with what they remembered and loved the opportunity to review it with them in a fun way.

We also made a chickweed salve with oil we had prepared together earlier in the year. Rowan's friend got to take a small jar home with him. The boys liked watching the beeswax melt in the double boiler. It was fun for the to watch the water bubbling around the beeswax, but not touching it. They also liked how the beeswax re-solidified when we added the cool oil to the pot.

That's it for today.

--Kimberly

Daily Reflection: New Grain Mill

Well, today was a bit of a slow day on the nutrition front. This cold, rainy weather has me feeling pretty sleepy...

I did make an herbal infusion for myself in the morning - oatstraw, nettle, horsetail, seaweed.

And, I made some iced tea - rosehip / honey.

I also picked up my new grain mill so that I can begin grinding my own grain for bread. I bought it second hand from a woman here in Carnation. It's a Magic Mill and is very heavy because it actually has stones that do the grinding. I'm excited to give it a try. It's still in the back of my car, though, as I don't have a place for it yet.

I also talked with a friend on the phone about lacto-fermented soda making and got some ideas for my first brew - nettle / lemon soda? I'll let you know how it goes.

Finally, I also picked up my raw milk for the week - one and a half gallons from the Dungenous Valley Creamery. I froze one half gallon and put the rest in the fridge for drinking right away.

--Kimberly

Daily Reflection: Local Food

Well, I realized that I forgot to include my trip to our local farmer's market in yesterday's recap. We have a great market here in Carnation every Tuesday this time of year. At the market I bought artisan rustic sourdough bread, and some minimally pasteurized cheese, as well as a beautiful bouquet of flowers for our table.

Today, I picked up my weekly box of vegetables from our local CSA farm, Jubilee. We're getting LOTS of greens right now. My vegies drawers are now stocked with spinach, chard, kale, lettuce, and even some basil - all grown locally. Also included in my box were 2 dozen local, organic, free-range eggs. We go through eggs fast at our house. Most days we eat them for breakfast, and then we also love quiches and soufflés. In fact I'm planning to make a soufflé for dinner tomorrow night.

Today, I also started another batch of kombucha. I put the tea on to steep this morning and then tonight once it had cooled down I added the scoby and 1/2 cup of my last batch of kombucha and put it in the cupboard to ferment for about a week.

Oh, and of course I made a nourishing infusion for myself and Hailey. Hailey had her standard one, and I had oatstraw and nettle with a little seaweed.

I made those yesterday, too and forgot to report on them. Mine was oatstraw, chickweed, horsetail (which I'm using to heal my receding gums) and a little seaweed.

Daily Reflection

Today was John's birthday and actually ended up being quite busy for me in terms of food preparation. I made bacon and omelets for breakfast -using more of that local, grass-fed pig, and local, free-range eggs.

After breakfast Hailey and I made a carrot cake for John's birthday - sweetened with honey and maple syrup.

I made strawberry frozen yogurt (from yesterdays homemade yogurt), and strained my kefir, returning the grains to my fridge for storage.

I also had my bread making lesson and learned a few interesting things, including that there are two types of hard wheat berries that can be used to make bread, red or white, and that the red produces a darker bread with a stronger flavor.

Also, I learned that most of the nutritional value in the wheat berries are in the wheat germ oil in the center of the berry. This is extracted out of commercial flour in order to increase shelf life (it's the wheat germ oil that can go rancid), then the flour is "fortified" - supposedly adding nutrients back in. This helps explain why grinding your own flour is ideal.

Also, wheat berries can be stored successfully for a year or more, so it's easy to buy them in bulk if you have your own grinder. I will soon be buying one...

We made a loaf of bread together and I got to feel how the bread should feel when well kneaded, and observe this experienced bread maker's kneading technique. She helped me see that it's better to work toward the edges of the bread when kneading, rather than the center. The bread came out great!

I'll report again on my next loaf by myself.

-Kimberly

Daily Reflection

Well, I've not been blogging for a while now, but have become re-inspired in the past few days.

One of my chapter ideas for a book on nutrition is Nourishing Rhythms: The Dance of Eating Well. I find that preparing nutritious foods day in and day out is a sort of rhythmic dance that takes some advance thinking and planning.

I am doing quite a bit toward preparing nutritious food, and thought it might be useful for me to include a daily reflection of some of my kitchen and planning ideas here on the blog as a sort of catalogue of my current dance.

Today I made kefir and yogurt with my raw milk from last Thursday. Usually this happens Friday or Saturday, but it was a busy weekend. Now, by Monday it was important to get it done in order to preserve that high quality milk. By Tuesday or Wednesday it can start to go off. So, this morning I put a quart of kefir to ferment in the cupboard and made a quart and a half of yogurt. One quart to eat and the 1/2 quart to make strawberry frozen yogurt. The yogurt was ready this evening, but I'm saving the frozen yogurt making for tomorrow morning as I have more energy for cooking then.

Also in the morning, I made nourishing herbal infusions for John, Hailey, and myself. These are teas made with nourishing herbs left to steep for at least four hours. Mine was oatstraw, red raspberry and sea weed. Hailey's (3 years old) choice right now is oatstraw, linden, seaweed, with a little bit of peppermint. John's was oatstraw, nettle. Rowan (8) is choosing not to drink infusions right now. These are our dinner drinks, and Rowan opts for a glass of the raw cow milk.

Today, I also cut up the ham I got from a pig raised on a local biodynamic farm so that we could use it in sandwiches and meals throughout the week, and made a meatloaf with organic, grass-fed beef for dinner.

I planned out our dinners for the week. I also made a call about a bread making lesson I scheduled for myself tomorrow, and researched the making of lacto-fermented sodas.

Everything Under the Sun!

Well, I gotta tell you... I was extremely excited to get my copy of Tina's new book, Under The Sun, The First Five Years.

For those of you on HerbMentor.com that do not know Tina Sams, it means you have not been participating much in the Forums. So, get on over there. :)

Tina is the editor of the Essential Herbal, which is the only herbal mag I actually read cover to cover. There are other herbal magazines..you know the glossy ones. AND granted they are pretty to look at with all the photos, but they spend more time on graphic design that meaty content. Either that or they try to hit too wide of an audience. So, the result is usually a publication that I read only a couple of articles in.

For herbal learners like us...meaning the hands-on, Earth based type. The kind of herbalist who uses the actual plants in making home remedies rather than use supplements... who stays healthy by learning how herbs nourish us rather than to use herbs as drugs... who wants to connect with how our ancestors were staying healthy and related to the world rather than finding the new fangled exotic wonder herb that will cure all diseases... well, that's the Essential Herbal.

So, in that regard, Under the Sun is just for our kind of herbalist.

This is not a gardening book. This is not an herbal cook book. This is not a book on herbal remedies, nor is it a crafts book, a body care book, an herbal gifts book, a soap making book, an herbal history book, a book on herbal stories and poetry, nor is it a book on herbal lifestyle or philosophy.

So what is it a book on? ALL THESE THINGS!

In this 220 page, 8 1/2 x 11 publication, you feel like you are meandering in an old herb garden on a warm summer evening. Just like an issue of the Essential Herbal, it goes  wanders down many paths of herb beds, leading you to wherever your passion lies.

As you may know by now, herbs are a limitless area of study. Just as you can spend your whole life using herbs and never repeat the same recipe twice, you can also spend you life using this book and never repeat the same recipe twice. There are just SO many ideas in here.

However, do not let that overwhelm you. Herbal books are not meant to be studied cover to cover. You have them on your shelf, you pull one down from time to time, flip through it, find something that inspires you, and then do it.

This book is FULL of inspirations and I promise you it will be one that you WILL pull down more often than not.

There is NO other herbal book like Under the Sun.

Being a more recent subscriber, I am excited to have access to ALL these back articles. Pick up a copy right now, and you truly will have everything under the sun.

You can visit the EssentialHerbal right here and pick up a copy today.

Thanks Tina for this amazing resource and labor or love!