Whole foods cooking

Simple Herbal Tonics: Brews for Beginners

Plants have been powerful allies for health and healing for as long as humans have lived. Herbal medicines can be effective remedies for ills as anyone who’s sipped on ginger tea for a stomachache can attest. They can also be powerful tonics for everyday health.

Many common plants are full of vitamins, minerals, proteins, antioxidants, essential fatty acids, and other nutrients. When you prepare them the right way, they’re transformed into nutrient-rich tonics, which boost health and well being. When I drink herbal tonics daily, my hair and skin shine and I feel calmer and more grounded.

Nourishing Herbal Tonics

If you’re new to using herbs, congratulations! Learning about herbalism is an amazing way to take charge of your health and form a deeper connection to nature. Check out my post Herbs Made Easy to learn more about the benefits.

I make herbal tonics using herbalist Susun Weed’s method. She advocates the art of simpling, which means using a single herb to make an infusion.

“In The Herbal Home Remedy Book, Joyce Wardwell lays out the four elements of simpling as follows:

Use mild herbs. These plants are commonly used as foods, safe for small children and the elderly, and they enhance the body’s capacity for healing.
Use large doses. Brew strong infusions, and drink them often.
Use the herbs that grow near you. The herbs that grown in your climate are the best adapted for the stresses the climate puts on your body.
Be patient. You’ll probably see some effects within three days or so, but sometimes it takes longer.

Pick an Herb to Infuse

Like Warwell, I’m a huge believer in consuming the plants that grow near you to help your body adapt to the environment and optimize your health. (You can learn more about the benefits of a local diet in my post Local, Seasonal Foods are Superfoods.)

Though a plant grows in your area, even outside your back door, it’s usually safer and easier for beginners to buy good-quality dried herb at a local health food or herb store. You can learn to harvest herbs later if you wish. (Check out my article Eating the Wild Plants in Your Backyard for a primer.)

Herbs are usually inexpensive by bulk. Look for herbs supplied by local organic growers or reputable wildcrafters, and make sure the store cleans and changes their jars or bins frequently. If you can’t get dried herbs where you live, mail-order them from Mountain Rose Herbs or another bulk herb company.

According to Weed, the following plants are highly nutritious, and side effects from consuming them are rare:

Alfalfa
Astragalus
Calendula flowers
Chickweed
Comfrey leaves
Dandelion
Honeysuckle flowers
Lamb’s quarter
Marshmallow
Oatstraw
Plantain (leaves and seeds)
Purslane
Red clover blossoms
Siberian ginseng
Slippery elm
Stinging nettle
Violet leaves

I usually stick to a few nutrient-rich herbs for my daily tonics, including:

Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica)

Weed calls nettles “one of the finest nourishing tonics known” and contends that “the list of vitamins and minerals in this herb includes nearly every one known to be necessary for human health and growth.”

According to Weed, nettle infusions supply calcium, phosphorus, and vitamins A and D, and they are in a readily assimilated form. Nettles also contain iron and vitamin C, and the vitamin C ensures the iron is well-absorbed by the body, making nettles an excellent remedy for anemia. Nettles are also high in protein. Their high vitamin and mineral content make nettles an excellent all-around tonic.

Nettles are also used to encourage the flow of breast milk in nursing women, lower blood sugar levels, slow profuse menstrual bleeding, treat eczema, heal arthritis and gout, and cure hay-fever allergy symptoms. Externally, nettle compresses can stop bleeding or heal hemorrhoids, eliminate dandruff, and slow hair loss. Does that sound like a lot of uses for one plant? Well, that’s far from all. Check out the book 101 Uses for Stinging Nettles by Piers Warren for more.

Alfalfa (Medicago sativa)

According to herbalist Michael Tierra, alfalfa means “father” in Arabic, perhaps referring to the plant’s “function as a superlative restorative tonic.” Alfalfa leaves are highly nutritious, containing vitamins C, D, E, and K, calcium, potassium, iron, phosphorus, manganese, and protein.

Alfalfa’s historically been used to restore vitality and increase appetite in both horses and people. It’s also used to treat cystitis, prostatitis, peptic ulcers, fever, insomnia, inflammation, and arthritis, as well as to increase the flow of breast milk in nursing women, reduce inflammation, and regulate the bowels.

Oatstraw (Avena sativa)

Oats are rich in silica, magnesium, phosphorus, chromium, iron, calcium, alkaloids, protein, the vitamin B complex, and vitamins A and C . Oat straw, the stem of the plant, nourishes the bones, endocrine system, immune system, and nerve cells and helps the body cope with insomnia, anxiety, and nerve disorders.

How to make a nourishing herbal tonic

Here is Susan Weed’s infusion method:

Place one ounce of dried herb (about a cup) in a quart jar.
Fill the jar to the top with boiling water
Put the lid on tightly and steep for four to 10 hours. (I usually let it steep overnight.)
Strain and pour a cup, and store the rest in the refrigerator.
Drink two to four cups a day.
Drink the entire infusion within 36 hours or until it spoils. (You’ll be able to tell by the smell.)
Use whatever remains to water house plants, or pour over your hair after conditioning as a final rinse.

If you don’t love the taste of the infusion but want to reap the benefits, try adding a tablespoon of dried mint to the herb before you infuse it.

Nettles, alfalfa, and oat straw are mild herbs that have been ingested for thousands of years with excellent safety records, however they may not be for everyone. If you have a medical condition or take any medications, check with your doctor, an herbalist, or a pharmacist first.

It’s a good idea for everyone to be cautious about what goes into your body. Read about the herbs you plan to take, and be alert to the rare potential for an allergic reaction or side effects. But don’t forget to enjoy yourself! Nutritious herbal tonics are amazing additions to a healthy and happy life.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Load up on vitamins without supplements by making simple, restorative herbal tonics. #health #herbs” quote=”Load up on vitamins without supplements by making restorative herbal tonics.” theme=”style1″]

Sources:
The New Age Herbalist by Richard Mabey
The Herbal Home Remedy Book by Joyce A. Warwell
The Way of Herbs by Michael Tierra
Herbal for the Childbearing Year by Susan Weed
The Herb Book by John Lust

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[Editor’s Note: This is an updated and revamped version of a post originally published on June 3, 2009, Photo credit: Caitlin Regan, modified]

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Eat Bitter Foods for Better Health

By Abby Quillen

Your mouth probably puckers at the thought of eating something bitter. But according to many experts, including clinical herbalist Guido Masé and integrative physician Tiearona Low Dog, a small dose of bitter can prevent and cure a litany of complaints.

Why do we need bitter foods?

Masé explains that plants developed bitter compounds to stop mammals from eating them. Then mammals developed detoxification systems, i.e. our livers, to deal with the bitter compounds. So bitters are the reason we have a liver, and it doesn’t work right when we don’t eat them.

Masé and Low Dog say ingesting more bitters, particularly before we eat, can:

Improve digestion

When there’s no bitter flavor in our food, Masé says we run the risk of poor digestion. “We see fat and cholesterol synthesis problems in the liver. … We see food passing untouched through the digestive system.” He recommends that instead of trying to “restrict, restrict and remove, remove” for concerns like toxicity, chronic inflammation, liver dysfunction, and digestive complaints and sensitivity, we “reincorporate bitterness.” When we activate our taste buds with the bitter flavor before a meal, the pancreas secretes enzymes, the liver secretes bile, and the valves through the compartments of the gastrointestinal tract work better. “As a result, the drama of incomplete digestion is really tempered.”

Nix heart burn

The mouth is not the only thing that puckers when we eat bitters. According to Masé, the valve at the bottom of the esophagus also scrunches up, keeping acid in place.

Eliminate food allergies and excema in adults and children

“I’ve seen big changes in the skin when we focus on enhancing digestion and restoring the microflora in the gut,” writes Low Dog in her book Healthy at Home. She prescribes children’s bitters for kids with food allergies, to be taken a half an hour or so before dinner. She also recommends bitters for adults with seasonal and environmental allergies.

Curb sugar cravings

According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, we shouldn’t seek to eliminate the sweet taste from our diet, but to balance all five tastes. In the same vein, Masé is convinced that ingesting more bitters is the solution to sugar addiction. “Just make sure you get a little bit of bitter every day and you’ll find that your relationship with sugar is a whole lot easier.” He carries a tincture of bitters in his car and takes a little bit before he goes to the grocery store. That way, he insists, it’s easier for him to keep the chips and sweets out of his basket.

5 ways to ingest more bitters:

Greens

One of my favorite foods — dandelion — is a bitter. You can learn more about how awesome dandelion is in my (all-time most popular post) Dandelions are Superfoods. Chicory, arugula, radicchio, escarole, turnip greens, mustard greens, watercress, endive, and other bitter greens also make delicious pre-dinner salads.

Coffee and Tea

Coffee is probably most people’s favorite bitter food, and it’s been shown to be amazing for the liver. (But it’s the bitter taste that’s healing, so don’t sweeten it up too much!) Dandelion root, burdock, milk thistle, hops, gentian and other bitter herbs make excellent pre-meal teas.

Tinctures

Urban Moonshine, Herb Pharm, and other companies make bitter tinctures and tonics that you can take with a glass of water as a quick before meal ritual.

Dark chocolate

Dark chocolate is a delicious way to add some bitterness to your diet, and it was featured in this week’s People’s Pharmacy because of its many other health benefits.

Cocktails

Bitters are a common bar ingredient. Look for bitters at your grocery store and learn how to mix up a Manhattan, Rob Roy or Old-fashioned.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Are you eliminating foods? Instead, try adding more bitter foods to your diet. #health” quote=”Are you eliminating foods? Instead, try adding more bitter foods to your diet.” theme=”style1″]

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Do you like bitter foods and beverages? Have they helped you solve any health issues? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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The Best Fast Food You’ve Ever Had

By Abby Quillen

Here’s my article about Portland’s food cart revolution, from the current issue of YES! Magazine. We’ve had a week straight of ice-cold fog, and these photos, taken last July, are making me delirious with summer longing (not to mention hungry).

Portland’s Food Truck Heaven: How a New Kind of Fast Food Brings Jobs, Flavor, and Walkability

Immigrants and other restaurant workers get a way to rise in local economies. Communities get the best fast food they’ve ever had.

by Abby Quillen

At noon on a sunny day in Portland, Ore., in what not long ago was a vacant lot, customers roam past brightly painted food carts perusing menus for vegan barbeque, Southern food, Korean-Mexican fusion, and freshly squeezed juice.

The smell of fried food and the tent-covered seating bring to mind a carnival, but a number of Portland’s food carts take a healthy approach to street food. The Big Egg, for instance, serves sandwiches and wraps made with organic farm-fresh eggs, balsamic caramelized onions, and arugula. Their to-go containers are compostable, and next to the order window is a list of local farms where they source their ingredients.

“We don’t have a can opener. We make everything ourselves, so it’s very time-consuming. And that’s the way we want it,” says Gail Buchanan, who runs The Big Egg with her partner, Emily D. Morehead.

The Big Egg usually sells out, says Buchanan as she hands a customer the last sandwich of the day, one made with savory portobello mushrooms. And on weekends, customers form a line down the block, willing to wait up to 45 minutes for their food.

Buchanan and Morehead dreamed of opening a restaurant for years. They had food service experience, saved money, and spent their free time developing menu items. “Then 2008 happened,” says Buchanan. Difficulty getting business loans after the recession convinced them to downsize their dream to a custom-designed food cart. When a developer announced he was opening a new food cart lot, Buchanan and Morehead jumped in.

Portland’s permissive land-use regulations allow vendors to open on private lots—food cart “pods”—like the one that hosts The Big Egg. Local newspaper Willamette Week estimates there are about 440 food carts in the metro area.

The food cart scene has taken off in Portland in a way it hasn’t in other cities—transforming vacant lots into community spaces and making neighborhoods more pedestrian-friendly and livable.

Recent features in Sunset, Bon Appétit, Saveur, and on the Food Network have pointed to Portland’s food cart pods as tourist destinations. There are even food cart walking tours.

Despite their success, Buchanan and Morehead have found that running a food cart isn’t easy money. They both work 70 hours a week, most of it prepping menu items—their fire-roasted poblano salsa alone takes three hours to prepare. But they’re grateful for the experience. They plan on opening a restaurant soon, like a growing number of he city’s most popular vendors.

Many of those vendors are first-generation immigrants who’ve found a way to make a living by sharing food traditions.

A few blocks from The Big Egg, Wolf and Bear’s serves Israeli cuisine from Jeremy Garb’s homeland. But it’s Israeli cuisine with a Portland influence, says his co-owner, Tanna TenHoopen Dolinsky. “It’s inspired by food in Israel, but we sprout our chickpeas and grill everything and don’t use a deep fryer.”

Wolf and Bear’s has grown to two locations and employs 12 people, and Garb and Dolinsky are considering opening a restaurant. “There’s a feeling of opportunity in Portland, and I think the rise of cart culture is representative of that,” says Dolinsky.

Nong Poonsukwattana has made the most of that opportunity with her food cart, Nong’s Khao Man Gai, famous for her signature rice and chicken dish. She describes hers as the best kind of fast food: “Fast service but not fast cooked. It’s fresh. I serve happiness.”

Poonsukwattana arrived from Bangkok, Thailand, in 2003 with $70. She waitressed at five different restaurants, working every day and night of the week, before buying her own downtown food cart in 2009.

Now she has two carts and a brick-and-mortar commercial kitchen and employs 10 people. Recently she started bottling and selling her own sauce.

Poonsukwattana likes the sense of community in the food cart pods, “even though competition is fierce,” but especially the cultural exchange with customers, many of whom she knows by name.

“I think it’s always good to support local business, mom-and-pop shops, or small businesses with different ideas. It’s beautiful to see people fight for a better future for themselves.”

Abby Quillen wrote this article for How To Live Like Our Lives Depend On It, the Winter 2014 issue of YES! Magazine.

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My New Favorite Cookbook

By Abby Quillen

I’m smitten with this cookbook right now. I’m not sure how I missed Deb Perelman’s popular blog all these years, but it’s almost worth denying myself all of that goodness to stumble upon these recipes for the first time in this stunning book.

Everything I’ve made so far — Slow-Cooker Black Bean Ragout, Kale Salad with Cherries and Pecans, Harvest Roast Chicken with Grapes, Olives, and Rosemary — is mouth-watering. As you can see, the photos, which she took herself, are delectable.

But the very best part are her one-page introductions to each recipe, where she reveals morsels of her personality. It’s hard not to fall in love with her. For instance, here she is on zucchini:

Can we promise to never talk about the weather? For example, New York in July is hot. So very hot. Also humid. And unpleasant. And have I mentioned this heat? It’s unbearable. But tomorrow the weather will change, and you’ll have spent fifteen minutes talking about something that you don’t even remember. In my mind, this is infinitely worse than spending an evening discussing the finer points of different vegetable-roasting temperatures. (You are welcome to pity my husband right now. I understand.)

But if I were going to discuss the weather — which I won’t, I promise — on those days in July when the zillion inhabitants of this tiny island are squeezed into structures coated with heat-soaking concrete from floor to sky, while vehicles weave through the grid in a way that makes living in New York City challenging, I would suggest an antidote in the form of a cold, refreshing salad. One that required no heated cooking and, even better, helped us with summer’s real torment — zucchini population control.

“Maybe we should try to cook every recipe in here this summer,” I remarked to my husband as we salivated over the aforementioned kale salad for the second night in a row. Yes, salivation-inducing kale salad — seriously, a wonder!

And he agreed. So apparently, Perelman’s recipes manage to strike the perfect blend of crunchy and full of vegetables (me) and rich with butter and cream (my husband) to beguile both of us. It’s a marvel. I definitely recommend checking out The Smitten Kitchen. And now you’ll find me over at her beautiful blog catching up on what I’ve been missing over the past seven years.

What’s your favorite cookbook right now? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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Ten Top Chefs Dish Up Local Cuisine

By Abby Quillen

Travel Oregon is promoting Oregon right now with the Oregon Bounty Wanderfeast:

From the wine crush in Applegate Valley to the chanterelles hiding in the Coast Range to the fish and game that frolic in every nook and cranny of Oregon, ten top chefs will chase after ten of Oregon’s finest epicurean products. It’s ten weeks of foodie bliss, from one end of Oregon to the other. And you’re invited to come along.

During Week One, a chef visits a farm , milks a cow, picks fruit and herbs, and makes a soft cheese. Week Four features a chef, who harvests heirloom pears near the base of Mount Hood, and prepares a local fish dish with them. And check out Week Five, where my sister brews up a one-of-a-kind “Artisan Spirits” out of juniper, purple thistle, and sage she finds near the Painted Hills of Eastern Oregon.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=r_19rmzSH_M]

In Search of Healthy Cookies

By Abby Quillen

Anyone who’s spent any time with my son Ezra in the last six months has heard about his favorite food: “Hookies!” (The rest of us call them cookies.)

Ezra turns to me at least a dozen times each day and says with the utmost seriousness: “I need a hookie.” Dog, Bear, Turtle, and Seal eat a lot of hookies when we play make-believe. And as Ezra spins the steering wheel on the jungle gym at the park, he invariably explains, “I’m going to get some hookies.”

Back when I was pregnant and scarfing down organic salads, wild salmon, wheat germ smoothies and the like, I never imagined how many cookies this child of mine would eat. But he loves them. He really does. And as much as I’d like to see him develop a fondness for say, alfalfa sprouts and endive, I can’t help but enjoy seeing the sheer pleasure this boy gets from a cookie. Oh yes, he delights in them that much.

I have a couple of favorite cookie recipes, which are easy to make and produce cookies that are tasty and as healthy as cookies can be. They are in heavy rotation around here these days, and I will share them below. Oh please say you also have a favorite healthy cookie recipe you’d be willing to pass on.

Honey Peanut Butter Cookies

(From Laurel’s Kitchen)

1 cup natural peanut butter
1 cup honey
1 egg, beaten
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups whole wheat pastry flour

Cream peanut butter and honey together. Stir in egg and vanilla. Sift together salt, soda, and flour, and stir in peanut butter mixture.

Drop by teaspoonfuls onto oiled cookie sheets. Mash each cookie slightly with the back of a fork.

Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 8-12 minutes. They burn easily, so keep a close eye on them.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Walnut Cookies

(From Feeding the Whole Family by Cynthia Lair)

1 1/2 cups rolled oats
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/3 cup chopped walnuts
1/3 cup chocolate chips

Combine oats, flour, and salt together in a large bowl; set aside.

In a separate bowl mix together maple syrup, butter, and vanilla.

Add wet ingredients to dry mixture and mix well. Stir in nuts and chips. With moist hands form dough into 3-inch cookies and place on a lightly oiled cookie sheet.

Bake for 15-20 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Do you make healthy and tasty cookies? Will you share a favorite recipe? (Links to blogs or online recipes more than welcome.)

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