Eat Those Onions!

Did you know that sulphur is in every cell in your body? I didn't, until this morning that is, when I was reading a Natural News article about it. It is one of those essential minerals, which do all the marvelous invisible things that contributes to your overall health.

Excerpt:
Sulfur is a mineral that is present in every cell of the body. It plays a key role in liver metabolism and the function of the joint cartilage and keratin of the skin & hair. It is also critical for metabolism and anti-oxidant defense systems that protect the aging patterns of the brain. Some of the healthiest cultures in the world have the highest levels of sulfur in their diet while the US has some of the lowest levels.
Industrial farming, that speciality of huge agribusinesses, depletes the soil of sulphur. Chances are, unless you are eating lots of a certain vegetable family, you may be sulphur-depleted.

And guess what vegetable family that is? Of course, the alliums! Onions, garlic, chives, leeks, shallots are all members of the allium family.

At our house, we eat garlic every day (or nearly every day--some days I forget until the Gruff Lord growls that he's being deprived of an essential health ingredient...). And I can't even imagine cooking without onions. I ran the dehydrator ragged last summer dehydrating onions, just to make sure we'd always have some around.

I have a wonderful cookbook, the Gilroy Garlic Festival Cookbook. If you think Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic is a bit garlicky, take a gander at this cookbook! All the recipes have lots of garlic: breads, soups, meat dishes and appetizers. All made with huge amounts of garlic. Here's one of my favorite recipes from the book:

Garlicky Tomato Saffron Soup
6 cans (10.5 oz. each) chicken broth (I use my homemade broth...)
1 cup boiling water
1/4 gram Spanish saffron threads
1 lb. Roma tomatoes, skinned, seeded and chopped in bits
1 bunch leeks (3 medium or 1 1/2 cups), white part only, well-cleaned
4 tablespoons virgin olive oil
5 large cloves fresh garlic
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
6 whole fennel seeds
8 large fresh spinach leaves

Place canned chicken broth in the freezer so the fat will rise to surface for easy removal. (Personally, I like a bit of chicken fat in my homemade broth so I skip this step.)
Bring water to boil. Add saffron threads and let steep, uncovered, off heat.
Skin tomatoes by putting them in boiling water for 1 minutes. Skin, seed and chop.
Chop leeks fine. Heat olive oil in soup pot over medium heat. Do not let oil smoke. Add chopped leeks and saute until limp but not brown. When leeks are limp, squeeze garlic cloves through press into the leeks and mix over medium heat for 2 minutes. Remove from heat.
Remove chicken broth from freezer and remove fat clumped at the top. Add chicken broth, saffron water including threads, tomatoes, thyme and fennel to leeks in soup pot.
Simmer mixture, partially covered, for 30 minutes. Five minutes before soup is ready, add spinach leaves.
Serve hot, room temperature, or cold with hearty, crusty bread. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Sounds good, doesn't it? It's one of my favorite soups for when I feel like I'm coming down with a cold. Delicious and it will beef up your sulphur intake too.

What is Garlic Mustard?

Garlic Mustard (Alliaria officinalis) is a hearty, dark green herbaceous plant. Its leaves are arrowhead to heart shaped, scalloped-edged and deeply veined, growing up to 5 inches across. A cold weather plant, garlic mustard flourishes from late fall to early spring. It can be seen in fields, ditches, disturbed soils, near creeks, on trail edges and in open woodlands. A biennial, garlic mustard spends its first year as a basal rosette, with leaves growing close to the ground. In its second year, it sends up a flowering stalk that grows to about 3 feet. The leaves have a strong garlic odor when crushed.

Garlic mustard is considered an invasive, noxious weed. The Plant Conservation Alliance posts it on their Least Wanted list, maintaining that it poses a severe threat to native plants and animals in forest ecosystems. Basically, garlic mustard out-competes other plants, using up available light, moisture, space and nutrients from the soil, leaving less for native plants. As deer don’t care for the garlic taste, they won’t eat garlic mustard. It is prolific and can take over large wooded areas.

On the other hand, garlic mustard provides a nutrient-rich somewhat bitter green that can be eaten raw in salads (a few leaves at a time as it is bitter) or steamed, sautéed or lightly boiled. Garlic mustard contains high contents of vitamins A and C and it is rich in folic acid, vitamin B6 and manganese. It is a good source of potassium as well. Old time mountain folks used to gather fresh wild greens and used them as spring tonics to spruce up their health after a long, torpid winter. That is still a good idea and garlic mustard fits the bill as a healthy, nutritious wild green.

While many people won’t care for the slightly bitter flavor of garlic mustard, others love it. A good use of this wild herb is in making pesto. Gather a good bunch of garlic mustard when it is at the young basal rosette stage, wash it and chop it up. Mix it with olive oil, chopped garlic, parmesean cheese and pine nuts or walnuts for a surprisingly delicious pesto. Freeze the pesto in ice cube trays and use the pesto cubes to flavor soups and stews. Or simply keep it in jars in the refrigerator. The garlic mustard pesto loses its bitterness prepared this way, but remains pungent and flavorful.

Medicinally, garlic mustard is antiseptic. Juice from the leaves can be used to cleanse skin ulcers or wounds. Garlic mustard tea contains most of the plant’s vitamins and minerals and gives a definite nutritional boost to anyone who feels depleted or slightly ill.

High Food Prices? Look Around Outside...

The cost of food just keeps going up and up. Just the other day we heard about peanut butter going up by 40%! (A national catastrophe! as my brother says.)

I was heading out on my normal afternoon's walk and took a look around. From where I stood outside the door, I could see plantain, dandelion, lady's thumb (pictured), a few remaining lambsquarters, now gone to seed, a bunch of some kind of mint, a really nice healthy looking mullein plant, lots of mugwort, some curly dock plants, a few red clovers, and a bit of wood sorrel.

Walking down the road, I saw walnuts galore from the black walnut tree, and some Queen Anne's Lace. And persimmons from the persimmon tree. And pine trees across the road.

While the cost of grocery store foods have surged ever upward, all of the food plants mentioned above are still free and available for the harvest with a wee bit of work on my part.

While I find plantain a bit too fibrous to eat, if I needed or wanted its nutritional value, I'd add it to a pot of water for a vegetable broth. Ditto with all the plants I just mentioned. If you're feeling run down and sickly, pick a bunch of these wild vegetables and green and make yourself some healing broth with them.

Some of these plants are greens for eating, some have medicinal uses, but all have a lot of nutritional value, full of vitamins and minerals.

It can take a while when you're new to identifying plants in the wild. But I will tell you this--I first starting learning this stuff about 5 years ago. While there's still zillions of plants I don't know, there's now a lot of them that I recognize easily. Once you're had that EUREKA moment and identify a plant--you'll then see it everywhere for a while. And you'll know it from then on, like a good buddy.

With grocery costs spiraling higher, consider learning to forage some of these green plants, nuts, berries. Learn which have edible roots (like Queen Anne's Lace--but be careful, there's some toxic lookalikes of Queen Anne's lace, so leave this one to experts). Learn which greens are better at what times of year. When you learn some of this, you can start harvesting and cut your grocery bills.

We all love lambsquarters here. It's a spinach like green and quite tasty. Highly nutritious--better for you than spinach, actually. So when it is flourishing, growing wildly everywhere, I harvest it, blanch it, freeze it, and we eat this lucious green instead of the $1.70 package of frozen spinach or $1.99 to $2.99 bags of fresh spinach from the store. See what I mean? That's money I don't have to spend, I can keep it (or more likely, spend it on something else...)

I gotta go, but I'll be back. I think for a while, I will focus on various plants ...

HM

Time to Start Blogging Again

I figure by this time, all who used to read this blog have departed for other blogs/websites. Can't blame them one bit. So, I'll just start up again, keep the focus on herbs, foraging wild foods and all my usual chatter about things consequential and not-so.

It's funny--I've gone back to read some of my old posts, and find that the information is good stuff. I'm pleased with what I achieved here, as there's good information that can stand the test of time. But now I plan to do more.

I won't be able to post every day, but there'll be a good post every week.

Thanks, everybody. Y'all come on back if you wish!

Side Effects

Oh Lord, this is a hoot! Seen on the back of a Tshirt at Secrets of Natural Health blog: I take aspirin for headaches caused by the Zyrtec I take for the hayfever I get from Relenza for the uneasy stomach from the Ritalin I take for the short attention span caused by the Scopederm Ts I take for the motion sickness I got from the Lomotil I take for the diarrhea caused by the Zenikal for the uncontrolled weight gain from the Paxil I take for the anxiety from the Zocar I take for my high cholestrol because exercise, diet and regular chiropractic care are just too much trouble. PS Just so you're warned, Secrets of Natural Health does try to sell you stuff. But there's some good info there. HM

Iodine for Radioactive Fallout

Ok, found the article I was talking about in my last post. Iodine for Radioactive Fallout by Donald W. Miller, Jr. MD. Whew!

If You Don't Have Potassium Iodide. . .

I don't know if a huge radiation cloud is coming our way, but I suspect that's the case, considering the news. I've learned to listen to Mike Adams, the Health Ranger. I never trust *anything* I read 100%, of course. I've a skeptical nature after all. But on this and many other health related topics, Natural News picks it up, reports on it, analyzes it, takes it apart and dissects it, often with wit, sometimes with disgust at the current government-mandated medical paradigm (we're here to make money off of you peasants, so just shut the hell up and do what we tell you) deal. So check out this Natural News report, check other sources and make up your own minds about it.
I'm not telling you to do anything. That's up to you as always. It is driving me nuts that I can't find the article I am looking for. This was an article posted on Lew Rockwell's excellent libertarian news and commentary page a week or so ago. Written by a doctor, it was about radioactive iodine, and how to prevent your thyroid from absorbing it. The trick is to get enough good iodine to your thyroid first, and then your thyroid will basically ignore the radioactive crap. But if your thyroid is hungry for iodine, it will take up the radioactive stuff.
If you haven't gotten ahold of any potassium iodide pills (130 mg) here's a rather simple thing you can do that's cheap and easy. Head to any drugstore and get that wound-cleaning iodine stuff called Povidone (at least that's the generic I bought). It is a 10% iodine solution for use as a topical antiseptic/batericide/virucide. The doctor's article that I haven't managed to find a link for said if you use a cotton ball and spread a goodly patch of this stuff over your stomach and chest, your skin will take in enough iodine to protect you 95% or so from your thyroid uptaking any radioactive iodine.
Now please, folks. I'm NOT giving you medical advice. I'm simply repeating something I read. However, I'm a bit uncomfortable relating even this as the fed.nasty.govs might want to smash anyone causing panic among the sheep. However, I rather doubt that any sheep would be reading this, as I'm sure Charlie Sheen and Britney and all those other otherwise useless celebrities MUST be doing something dumb enough for the media to be lamb-basting them. (HAH! Pun stumbled upon serendipitiously!)
I'll see if I can find the damn article. In the meantime, consider at least getting some of that 10% iodine stuff. If nothing else, you can use it to clean wounds with. Again, I am not a medical person of any variety, not an X-spurt, not an academic, not anyone important enough for you to listen too. :)
Onwards, take good care, wash all produce before eating, and live prayerfully and as well as you can. And don't worry about stuff you can't fix. ONLY worry about things you can do something about and even then, dinna fesh.
HM