Valerian Flower Tincture

I had something of a valerian-related Eureka moment last night! I finished typing the previous post yesterday evening and thought I'd just have a quick check of my email before signing off the computer. And there in my inbox was Susun Weed's weekly ezine, and one of the things she talks about this week is ... drum roll, wait for it ... using the flowers instead of the root for making valerian tincture!

How's about that for 'coincidence'? For me, personally, there's no such thing as coincidence on this scale - I truly believe (and have always found) that if you put stuff out there in the Universe, it will respond .. you will recieve what you need. So all those years I was letting valerian happily set up shop in the garden and thinking hmmmm, I'm not sure why I'm giving it space because I can't use it, and now I can keep it and love it and use it.

If you're interested you should go read Susun's information for yourself but the upshot is that tincture made from valerian root, which is probably the strongest and best known herbal sedative, unfortunately has the opposite effect in a certain proportion of the people who try taking it, stimulating rather than sedating them. I've seen that proportion given as anything from a tenth to a third - so its significant, and I guess you don't know if that's you until you give it a go. Apparently, the flowers give a much gentler effect and have been used successfully by people who were stimulated by the root.

So there I was this morning, snippers in hand, trug at the ready, harvesting those sweet-scented blooms to make my own tincture. I find there is nothing quite like picking and processing a herb to really get to know it. You get the feel and fragrance of the plant as you handle it, and really see the little details closeup. You get to see what the flowers look like just before and just after their best and learn how to tell when they're coming or going. You get to see what busy little creatures like to live, work and play in the plant. I met some rather impressive tiny spiders this morning, so completely green as to be invisible when sat on a floret. And a couple of ants farming aphids and a teensy tiny little beetley thing. By-the-by, with chives it was earwigs (be warned, potential scone-makers!!). So anyway, its not something to do if you've got a bus to catch, but though it took a while to pick the flowers from the heads it felt like time well spent.

Making the tincture is easy, you just fill the jar up to the top with herb and then fill it up to the top (again) with vodka. Then you label it and leave it for six weeks before straining it. Just one thing to mention, a tip which I wished I worked out a bit sooner(!) .. you can't tell really how much herb you're going to end up with, and you do need to fill the jar right to the top with herb. So collect glass jars of all sizes, not just jam jars - its a good idea to keep pesto jars, dried herb and spice jars etc and even those little mini individual portion jam jars that everyone buys each other in gift sets at Christmas. That way you won't kill yourself trying to collect enough plant and also, for general home use, how much of the medicine will you actually need in a year?

So the little bottle in the middle is the Valerian Flower Tincture made this morning, to the left is a little pot of rose petals in oil (will post about that soon) and to the right the Chive Blossom Vinegar I was telling you about the other day here. So now we wait .. I will be really interested to see how effective it is. Sleeping has never been a problem for me thus far in life, I'm one of those lucky souls who falls asleep the instant my head hits the pillow. And any slight excitement before bedtime can easily be sorted out with a mug of Ovaltine and ten minutes engrossed in a novel to switch my brain off from the day and any outstanding mental to-do list. But I've noticed of late a few nights around the same time each month I am lying there unable to sleep for some reason. This is highly annoying if its actually a night where the little'un sleeps through, as you can well imagine! Its always when I'm experiencing other symptoms of hormonal upheaval, so perhaps is a sign of things to come given my age.. so what a helpful thing to have in the cupboard. I'll keep you posted!

I know you guys that visit Earth and Tree often will already know this, but I just want to remind anyone interested in these posts to:

Please be sure you have the right plant before you use it

Consult a professional herbalist and/or doctor for health problems

Find books giving full instructions for making and taking home remedies safely

** I'm not a qualified herbalist .. what I do here is share my enthusiasm and experiences in the hope that others might get excited too and find resources for learning more and getting started**

Chives

I've got a feeling the titles for all the posts this month are going to start with the same word! We are dealing with an abundance of chives at the moment, following the stormy weather end of last week which horizontal-ised my lovely tall vertical flowering chive clumps. So what do you do with a forest of chives? Well you may ask! I've been scratching my head all day and here's what I've come up with so far..

Chive Vinegars
I had already made a fair-sized bottle of chive vinegar using an earlier harvest end of April this year, as part of a learning assignment on the Susun Weed course I'm taking. But since I'd bottled it, I'd seen somewhere to make a vinegar with the blossoms. So I have a large bottle of blossom vinegar brewing now too. Herbal vinegar takes 6 weeks to mature, most places say, so my end of April batch was about ready and I strained and tasted it this morning. Its good! And I think we can probably use plenty because its good as a general purpose vinegar for liberal use on your fish and chips for example, rather than just for salad dressings.

Chive and Lemon Butter
Ok, so flowers taken care of. Now a good sort of the stems - young, fresh, newer ones can be preserved as herbal butter. My favourite one which I use lots of is just grated lemon zest and finely chopped chives. This is fantastic on the new potatoes we're eating at the moment, but is also really nice for a jacket potato in the autumn or for roast chicken (push the butter up underneath the skin, so it oozes out and bastes the bird while its in the oven).

All you need to do is mush the herb and lemon zest into the butter and just squidge it all about until evenly distributed. It helps if you remembered to get the butter out of the fridge a while beforehand (note to self!) and you might want to dice it to speed things along. Now you can do one of two things with your buttery mixture. Where I've followed recipes for herb butters in the past, they always tell you to place a dollop of mixture onto clingfilm or tinfoil and roll it into a sausage shape. You can then just twist up the two ends and you have a convenient parcel for storing your butter in the fridge, just slicing off segments as you need them, or in the freezer for longer term use.

Maybe its just my lack of finesse in these matters, but this method often leaves me struggling to extricate bits of tinfoil or worse clingfilm from my nice little butter rounds. Its alright for storing in the fridge, but if I'm going to freeze the butter I now always use the second method which is...

.. ice-cube trays. This is something I learned when making batches of babyfoods for the little'un when he was weaning. If you freeze things in ice-cube trays, then once they are frozen you just pop them out and into a freezer bag or container and they stay in handy little portions. You can then just take as many or as few as you need out of the freezer. I have to confess to having one little tray of heart-shaped cubes - this always goes down well if you have guests and want to put a little butter portion on the side of each plate or in a little dish on the table. But this pleasing little touch is entirely lost on my boys in everyday situations.

The more robust stalks I chopped finely and decided to just freeze in a bag - I will try adding to soups, to get that delicious onion flavour, where they will be cooked a nice long time so that they become tender. So now I'm left with bunches of stems that are somewhere between these two extremes - time to get baking! I've got a really nice recipe for savoury muffins which I'll share with you next time.

Chive and Marigold Scones

Well its June today, and officially summer! I've never really tried the edible flowers and petals thing before, but this seems as good a time as any to give it a go. And time to do something with the vast quantity of chives I have overflowing the veg patch (standby for more chive recipes to follow!).

A big thank you to Debs at Herbal Haven for this fabby Chive Flower and Marigold Petal Savoury Cheese Scone recipe which me and the little'un donned our aprons to try out this morning.

I'm a great cheese scone fan in general (hence the extra bit of grated cheese to top several of the scones!) and love the onion taste of chives, which I use to make Cheese and Chive muffins, but I've never used the actual flowers before. In previous years I've used the stems then let the plants flower and collected the seed to use in future. But since I took to digging up and dividing chive clumps I have achieved a chive forest and the flowers are everywhere, such a shame not to try and use them.

Because they are practically golf-ball sized, I pulled the petals out - this was fiddly until I got the knack of how to hold/pinch/squeeze to remove the green parts of each little floret. Still the marigold petals couldn't be easier - picked a flower straight from the plant by the back door, gave it a good shake and my assistant helped pull the petals out (nice and easy).

Here he is mixing the dough - look at him go, that spoon is just a blur!

And, voila! Savoury Scones.














Its a really good recipe: quick and virtually idiot-proof, but delicious. Although the colour of the chive petals vanished in the oven, you could really get the onion flavour coming through in every bite. We'll definitely make these again and next time use much more herb - the bright colour of the marigold petals looks really attractive, sunshine on a plate.

Share your herby recipes here ... especially chive ones, lol!

Gardening

It was so lovely to be out in the fresh air and working in the garden last week, such fine warm days feel like a special gift that musn't be wasted this time of the year, its almost like its your duty to drop everything and get out there!

Had a quandry, the boys had waved goodbye off to see Nanny for the morning .. no-one about, all quiet! What to do, hmmmm ... really ought to cook something lovely and warm and healthy for us all to have for lunch when they get back. But the pull towards the garden is so strong and cannot be denied.

So I stuck the remains of the roast dinner in a big saucepan - heated some oil and tossed the remains of the tray of roasted veggies in it (butternut squash, potatoes, carrot, parsnip). When that smelt all appealing I popped in the leftover gravy, the remains of the chicken and the leftover green veg (greens and leeks and peas). Topped up with water, brought it slowly up to the boil (while putting jacket on and sorting out my seeds) .. bit of salt and pepper .. reduce to v. gentle simmer .. and GARDEN!!!!

Popped in to check from time to time and an hour later, beautiful soup. Gave it a quick squash with the potato masher so's to thicken it up (and so's the little'un doesn't pick the carrots out) and there it was .. hearty fare for all and happy mummy morning in the garden! Hurray!

Soup Magic

January has not been great... everyone is sick and/or grumpy. But there was a moment of magic today! In my constant effort to not waste food, eat more veg and cook from scratch, etc I knocked up a soup for lunch. I had a slightly wrinkled and unappetising-looking celeriac languishing in the basket of roots, so I looked up a recipe for celeriac soup. I wasn't expecting much - the list of ingredients looked so innocuous, nothing exciting. You know, an onion, a stock cube, a bit of milk.

But it totally rocked!

And so I am reminded of the power of soup to be more than the sum of its ingredients. We had it in giant mugs with crunchy slices of bread toasted under the grill with a drizzle of oil and pinch of thyme. It was full of flavour and it cheered me up and made me feel better about the world and everything in it.

And the little'un dunked his crunchy toast in the soup and scooped it up and yummed it down with great enthusiasm (before falling off his chair while attempting to imitate the washing machine which just went into spin cycle - its OK, I caught him by the ankle - no harm done!)

So there we are .. whatever the problem is, I think the answer is probably soup.

Apples and Pears (cont)

In case you were wondering what I did with all those apples and pears .. well, firstly I made mulled spiced pears and figs for Christmas presents. This was one of those torn from a magazine recipes now creased and splattered over time. We had the bit over that wouldn't fit into the kilner jars while it was still warm with a little vanilla icecream. Remains to be seen if the other jars make it until Christmas and actually leave the building!

Mulled Spiced Pears and Figs

200ml white wine vinegar
400ml ruby port
250g soft light brown sugar
heaped tspn mixed spice
a cinnamon stick
7 pears, peeled and cored and cut into 8 wedges
250g ready to eat dried figs, cut into halves

Put the vinegar, port and 200ml water in a pan with the sugar and spices. Stir, bring to the boil, then simmer for 35mins. Add the pears, bring back to the boil and cook for 2-3mins. Transfer the pears to a bowl and stir in the figs. Boil the liquid in the pan for about 10-15mins until halved in volume. Pack the fruit tightly into sterilised jars, top up with the syrup and seal.

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And I made these apple soul cakes from a marvellous apple recipe post at Tales of a Kitchen Herbwife (thankyou, Sarah!). We had them still warm from the oven with mugs of tea while watching fireworks outside on Bonfire Night. I had been reading about soul cakes and the tradition of leaving little cakes outside the front door to appease any wandering souls on Halloween, so was really excited to stumble across this recipe.

Black Cats

Here is Elsie curled up in her basket beside me as I type .. we celebrate her birthday on Halloween, because she came to us at about 6 months old (acc. to the vet) so we counted backwards and she must have been born sometime in October so we picked Halloween for her special day, being a black cat. She came to me at a turning point in my life and was my constant companion in difficult times. She was a proper alley cat, we watched her out in the snow with her mum crawling from beneath one car to another in the car park outside our Tottenham flat, as a warmer bonnet presented itself. Then we didn't see her mum anymore but she was around, always covered in an oily slick from the underside of the cars. I put cat food out for her .. people who knew about cats said it would take weeks if not months for her to approach, but the second day she ate while I sat and watched and then followed me indoors. Wasn't sure about anyone else at first, so the first night I slept in the lounge where she had set up camp rather nervously in the corner. As I dosed off to sleep on the sofa to my surprise she jumped up on top of me and curled up on my tummy. And there she stayed... that was seven years ago. She's not a sociable sort of cat. She doesn't suffer fools gladly. She is definitely her own cat. People are generally disappointed. But I like her style.

On the subject of black cats, we have a Hallowe'en story to tell.... when the little'un woke from his afternoon nap it was just starting to get dark, so we sat at the kitchen table with our milk and bic-sits and I lit the candle in our pumpkin lantern for him to see. As I turned to draw the blinds I saw a black cat outside the kitchen window .. as it saw me it jumped right up onto the windowsill. Straight away the little'un said 'Hello Elsie', but she was fast asleep upstairs. This was another black cat who technically lives a few doors down from us but is something of a wanderer .. we hadn't seen him since June. I daren't let him in (Elsie would never forgive me) but I took him out a bowl of milk. I can't remember the old sayings about black cats and which direction they have to cross your path in, but I'm taking his visit to us on halloween as a sign of good luck for the coming dark days ahead of us.

Many thanks to Zen Kitty for inspiring this black cat post.

Pumpkin and Spice

Made a pumpkin soup for Halloween, and it was SO nice to grind the toasted spices, the fragrance filled the kitchen. Carved the pumpkin into a little lantern, too.

Apples and Pears

We have been blessed this week with a rather wonderful crate brimming with apples and pears from mum-in-law's garden. Its been a bumper crop for both this year and I've been busy devising more and more schemes to make the most of them, having distributed the bounty as far and wide as possible amongst friends and neighbours. One of the things I love about this time of year and its abundance is the passing on of tips and recipes for storing, freezing, preserving and baking of produce.. I am learning so much. We eat a lot of porridge in the winter, so I have stewed and frozen plenty of fruit to put on top. We only have a small freezer, though .. already made a huge batch of chutney, so looking up new recipes. Please share yours if you know some good ones?

Have found this book from the Soil Association invaluable this year as it has good illustrations of the different varieties of fruit and vegetables and tells which are best for which sorts of thing. Also, as well as full-blown recipes, it has lots of quick and easy ideas for enjoying produce simply (which is ideal when you have a glut and aren't able to spend too many hours in the kitchen!), such as yesterday's upside down cake (recipe to follow)

Pear and Ginger Upside Down Cake

Thickly butter an 8'' sandwich tin and sprinkle liberally with light soft brown sugar.
Lay peeled, cored pear halves attractively on top (I did slices).
Beat 4oz each softened butter, light soft brown sugar, wholemeal SR flour with 2 tspns ground ginger, 1tsp baking powder and 2 eggs.
Spread over the pears.
Bake at 190degreesC(375degreesF/Gas 5) for 20 minutes until just firm.
Turn out.

Blackberries

What a wonderful morning! We went blackberrying in the sunshine yesterday and came home stained but happy.

Combined with some aged eating apples in a crumble, and have three bags stashed away in the freezer for future puddings and smoothies.

Also made a blackberry oxymel - this is a new thing for me, its from the 'A Year with James Wong' book. Have put the blackberries in a jam jar and covered with cider vinegar and in ten days' time I have to strain it and then it should keep in the fridge. Plan is to dilute it in hot water with honey for a vitamin C drink for the little'un in cold and flu season (and me too, come to that!).

Supermarket SOS

Got the chance to try out some remedies this week, in my battle with a horrible flu thing. Not having my usual stocks of herbs and remedies, for one reason and another, I was unprepared and at something of a loss - but its amazing what you can still do with just a quick trip to the local supermarket these days. Fresh sage, fresh lemon thyme, a squeezy pot of organic runny honey, a couple of lemons and a big lump of ginger. And a ferret around in my box of essential oils. Here are some things that really worked ..

Strong cup of sage tea with a dollop of honey stirred in for a sore throat - gargle with each mouthful before you swallow.

Lemon Thyme tea with dollop of honey stirred in for nose, throat and chestiness - this one was better made in a pot and allowed to brew for a good 10minutes.

Steam inhalation for congestion - washing up bowl, hot water and a few drops of Rosemary, Eucalyptus, Peppermint essential oils - towel over your head and inhale!

A few drops of the same oils in a table spoon of carrier oil (I used sweet almond but sunflower oil would do) as a chest rub and in the bath for when you start coughing and/or it goes to your chest.

For mornings when your cold is so bad you think you will never be able to get going: lemon juice and several slices of root ginger in hot water, strong as you can take it with a nice dollop of honey mixed in. I peeled and crushed some of the ginger to get the juice. You can feel this warm you up all the way down to your toes - and its great when you can't taste anything anymore, because you will definitely taste this.

And as soon as you feel the slightest suspicion of a cold coming, take a garlic capsule every day I'm sure this lessens the impact and gets rid of it faster. I also tried a Nigel Slater thing - roasted a whole head of garlic, then popped the flesh out of each clove and spread the puree onto toast. It was absolutely delicious and I sure being in the warm kitchen smelling the roasting garlic in the oven didn't do me any harm either.
Hope this helps someone else out there feeling poorly and miserable!!

Please contribute any tried and tested cold and flu remedies that you set store by?

Hey Pesto!

I had a great afternoon in the kitchen today, listening to the radio and knocking up a batch of pesto.

I have a basic recipe which gives the right proportions of the ingredients (see below), but I basically just keep adding olive oil until the consistency is OK. Oh, and I always put more garlic than it says, because I like it and its so good for me. Today I had two good handfuls of basil and one of parsley and I substituted the pine nuts with walnuts, which is a nice variation. Incidentally, I've seen a recipe somewhere lately for a three herb pesto with Lemon Balm which I might try in the summer.

The motivation behind today's pesto-making was Daughter of the Soil's wonderful post last week about growing peppers - especially the long pointy Ramiro peppers, my favourite.

http://daughterofthesoil.blogspot.com/2008/02/peppers-and-ice.html

I've never tried to grow peppers, but felt inspired to have a go so I decided to get some to roast and use the seed. No time to lose, as peppers need to get going fairly early in the UK so that they have chance to ripen - I think the advice was by early March.

I like to make roast peppers by halving and de-seeding them, then stuffing them with a mixture of cubed organic feta cheese, halved organic cherry tomatoes and home-made pesto. Cook for about half an hour in the oven.



Pesto Sauce

2 garlic cloves, crushed
8 tbspn chopped fresh basil
2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
50g pine nuts
100g grated Parmesan cheese
150ml olive oil
seasoning

Instructions: Put it all in the blender and press 'go'.. hey pesto!