Tag: Cooking

Herb of the Day for July 7th is Agar-Agar

 

Herb of the Day

 

Agar-Agar

Botanical: Gelidium amansii (KUTZ)
Family: N.O. Algae

—Synonyms— Japanese Isinglass.
—Part Used—The mucilage dried, after boiling the seaweed.
—Habitat—Japan, best variety; Ceylon and Macassar.

—Description—-A seaweed gathered on the East Indian coast and sent to China, it is derived from the various species of Sphaerococcus Euchema and Gelidium. It is brownish-white in colour with thorny projections on its branches; the best variety, known as Japanese Isinglass, contains large quantities of mucilage. The seaweed after collection is spread out on the shore until bleached, and then dried; it is afterwards boiled in water and the mucilaginous solution strained, the filtrate being allowed to harden, and then it is dried in the sun. The time for collection of the Algae is summer and autumn when the bleachingand drying can take place, but the final preparation of Agar-Agar is carried out in winter from November to February. The Japanese variety is derived from several kinds of Algae and comes into European commerce in two forms: (1) In transparent pieces 2 feet long, the thickness of a straw, prepared in Singapore by treating it in hot water. (2) In yellowish white masses about 1 inch wide and 1 foot long. The latter is the form considered the more suitable for the culture of bacteria.

—Constituents—Agar-Agar contains glose, which is a powerful gelatinizing agent. It is precipitated from solution by alcohol. Glose is a carbohydrate. Acetic, hydrochloric and oxalic acids prevent gelatinization of Agar-Agar.

—Medicinal Action and Uses—Agar-Agar is widely used as a treatment for constipation, but is usually employed with Cascara when atony of the intestinal muscles is present. It does not increase peristaltic action. Its therapeutic value depends on the ability of the dry Agar to absorb and retain moisture. Its action is mechanical and analogous to that of the cellulose of vegetable foods, aiding the regularity of the bowel movements. It is sometimes used as an adulterant of jams and jellies.

—Dosage and Preparations—It is usually administered in small shreds mixed with fruit, milk or any convenient vehicle. It is not wise to give it in powder, as this gives rise to irritation in some cases. 1/2 to 1 ounce may be taken at a time. 1 ounce to a pint of boiling water makes a suitable jelly for invalids and may be flavoured with lemon.

—Other Species—Ceylon Agar-Agar, or Agal Agal, which is the native name of Gracillaria lichenoides, is largely used in the East for making soups and jellies. Gigartina speciosa, a variety found on the Swan River, was erroneously supposed to have formed the edible swallow’s nest, but it has been ascertained that this delicacy comes from a peculiar secretion in the birds themselves. Macassar Agar-Agar comes from the straits between Borneo and Celebes and consists of impure Euchema Spinolum incrusted with salt.

Happy, Happy, Happy Wednesday To Ya’ !

 

Good Morning or Afternoon my lovely readers! How are all of you doing today? As you know and probably noticed I have been rather quite since my momma wildcat was found dead in the field. She had been shot and then the people brought her over here for me to find, well on our property.  I am dealing with this rather well now. I am still trying to find where my hubby hide the gun cabinet key but life is good. He keeps telling me, “No way in hell are you getting that key now. You will go to the pen.” No, I won’t. Anyway we are having a battle over the key. I know he is right. But you know how we hate for men to know they are right!!!

I have to tell you something funny though, we found the little babies the momma left behind. There were three of the little devils and they are absolutely adorable. I found out something funny last night. I came in the house to get their food to feed them. Stinker was up on the table mad and jealous. So I took the time to love him and reassure him, he was the best cat on the planet. Well he had loved all over my hands and my arms. I didn’t think a thing about it. I went back outside and two of the babies thought I was their mother. They came running, meowing and looking for a tit. When I sit on the ground, I sit Indian style. These two little brats found my toes and they did everything they could to get milk out of them. Well I finally got them to bed. I came up the porch steps and at the back of the porch sit two of the big male wildcats. I came in the house to get their food and by the time I got back out there, they were eating the babies food. I reached for the one shotgun hubby will let me have (because it is filled with rock salt). I took it outside, aimed at their butts and let them have it. Rock salt won’t hurt them just stings like hell and scares them.  They ran off.  Well I had to come back outside and count the kids to make sure they were all right. When I did, I found two of them sitting on the steps. I noticed another tail under the car where I had been hiding their food. I thought this is strange. I went to check to see if this was the little runt that was missing. I got down on both knees and peeped under the car and looking back at me was the biggest skunk I had ever seen in my life. I screamed the skunk jumped up and hit its head and we both run. After I calmed down and got to thinking about how that skunk looked when he saw me, I started laughing. The poor fella, if he had sprayed me, he wouldn’t have been a poor fella. I thought about that also. What if he had sprayed me? Oh my goodness! I don’t even want to think about it. But this place has turned into wild kingdom. All I can say is, “Wish you where here!”

Ancestor Summoning

  1. Add one tablespoon of anisette liqueur to a glass of pure spring water.
  2. Place it on a table to summon ancestral and other beneficial spirits.
  3. That much alone is sufficient; however, to reinforce the spell add photographs of blood relative, even if they are not the ones whom you call.
  4. Provide food or other libations that the ancestors will find hard to resist, whatever is appropriate to your family or cultural tradition, or perhaps serve them whatever you would if they were truly coming to dinner.

Herbal Oil for Salads and Sautes

Enjoy this spicy oil for Mexican salad and rice dishes, or add it to a fresh garden salad.

1    cup oil

3    (2-inch) sprigs each of oregano and basil or rosemary and thyme

1    tablespoon each fresh oregano and basil or rosemary and thyme

1    (1/4-inch piece ginger

1    chili

1/2     teaspoon seeds, crushed with mortar and pestle

Gently heat oil 3 – 5 minutes. Pour into a glass jar with six 2-inch sprigs of herbs for each cup of oil. or one of the following fresh herbs, ginger, chili, or seeds. Cool, cover, and refrigerate up to six months.

*Note:  Only add garlic to oils to be used within three days,. Garlic forms a botulism in oil that can cause severe  diarrhea.

Florida Water with Water and Raw Herbs

Fill a one-quart Mason jar with the following:

      Spring water

2    slices orange

2    slices lemon

2    slices lime

      Fresh mint from the garden

      Fresh lemon balm from the garden

      Fresh hyssop from the garden

1     fresh rosemary sprig

1     fresh basil sprig

Pack jar with the herbs as full as you like. Boil spring water (enough to fill the jar). Pour into Mason jar (note: please use a canning jar or Pyrex brand glass container as these can withstand the boiling water). Make sure the jar is warm before pouring in the boiling water. Allow mixture to cool completely. Strain. Pour Liquid into a sterilized jar or bottle. Keep in refrigerator. Potent for three days.

Homemade Dandelion Syrup

Homemade Dandelion Syrup

posted by Melissa Breyer
 

I am wild about dandelions. Their greens deliver a fleeting sweetness at the first nod of spring (before succumbing to a load of bitterness) and inspired me to write about harvesting and eating them a few weeks ago, followed by a recipe for Cream of Dandelion Soup. So next up, I thought, I just have to make dandelion wine. I’ve tackled homemade paper and found making butter to be effortless, how hard can dandelion wine be?

Well. After reading about secondary fermentation vessels and yeast varieties and fermentation traps, I thought, uhmm, actually, I think it was dandelion syrup that I wanted to make.

Dandelion syrup can be used in many ways, on top of pancakes or plain yogurt, anywhere you use a sweetener, really, you name it. I started imagining dandelion cocktails come summer; homemade dandelion ice cream sweetened with dandelion syrup and speckled with dandelion petals; dandelion this and dandelion that. Dandelion everything.

In this country, dandelions abound–yet go unloved by most. I will spare you my conspiracy theories about the defamation of the dandelion; this rant includes evil-genius chemical companies, the accidental discovery of phenoxy type herbicides in the 1940s and the need to find a public enemy (that would be the dandelion) to ensure a long and profitable demand for the new herbicidal product.

Anyhow, the Roundup parade isn’t marching around my neck of the woods in Brooklyn. Here, the dandelions earnestly shimmy up through sidewalk cracks and inhabit even the most desolate patches of soil, which is really so heartening. This would all seem a great harbinger for my dandelion syrup endeavor. However, urban foraging has its own set of considerations, which include dogs and their lifted legs, roadside exhaust and the possibility of rodent poison. Which all kind of suck the charm right out of it. As chance would have it though, there is a large lawn at a nearby high school that is wonderfully unruly and thankfully untreated with chemicals. It is being organically planted with vegetable beds by the students, and the grass was rampant with dandelions. I asked, they said, “uhmm yeah, sure lady, take ‘em.” And take I did, 100 of them.

Once at home, my daughters and I, hands sticky with bright golden pollen, plucked off the petals and had a bowl of the loveliest plant matter: Soft, downy almost, and redolent with the scent of asparagus and carnations. What an oddly endearing base for a syrup.

So, dandelion syrup. I have long been intrigued by it—it’s at once kind of down-home American as well as cool French granny. It is a basic herbal infusion made into a simple syrup. I felt like I didn’t want to boil the bejeezus out of the blossoms, so I just brought them to a simmer and let them soak overnight. The puzzle for me was what sweetener to use. Traditionally white sugar is used, but white sugar lands last on my list of happy sweeteners. So, I played around with some other alternatives as well, all with quite different results.

• White sugar made a syrup with a faint taste of vanilla and very slightly nutty, it was really just mostly sweet and somewhat plain.

• Sucanat, one of my favorite sweeteners, was, as I expected, too heavy in flavor to let the subtle dandelion taste shine through. That said, it was very interesting; like an herbaceous molasses.

• Honey has that smooth edge that became more pronounced after simmering. I used a mild clover honey and the result was like a somewhat spicy and grassy honey.

• Agave syrup worked beautifully because it is such a clean-tasting sweetener—the syrup made with agave was sweet and clean, with bright green undertones.

So pick your dandelions, pick your sweetener and make some syrup. Many recipes call for lemon, which gives it a little kick of citrus. Suit yourself.

Ingredients

100 dandelion flowers, or 1 and 1/2 cups petals
1 cup sweetener (see above)
3 cups water
Juice of 1/2 lemon (optional)

1. Remove the petals from the sepal (the sepal consists of the small tight leaves that extend from the stem and grasp the flower). This takes a while to get the hang of, but gets much quicker as you go along. Be sure to not allow any green into the petals, it will add bitterness to the syrup.

2. Place the petals in a medium pot and cover with 3 cups water and bring to a simmer. Turn off the heat, cover and let sit overnight.

3. Strain dandelion water into a bowl, pressing on the flowers with the back of a spoon to extract all the liquid.

4. Return water to pot and add sweetener, and lemon juice if using, and simmer over low heat until thickened.

5. Allow to cool, and pour into a clean jar or bottle. Store covered in refrigerator.

Makes about 2 cups

Chicken Soup for the Soul: On Becoming a Grandmother

Chicken Soup for the Soul: On Becoming a Grandmother

Chicken Soup for the Soul: Grandmothers

BY: Terrie Todd

Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.
~Welsh Proverb

I thought I was prepared. I was a mother, after all. I already knew what it meant to love someone so much it hurt. I understood the old adage that to be a parent is to walk around forever with your heart outside your body. I had written in my journal, revealing all the emotions I’d discovered tag-teaming in my heart: happiness, melancholy, anxiety, joy, anticipation, worry. I had seen the ultrasound pictures. I’d crocheted a soft, fuzzy blue blanket, patiently undoing all my bungled stitches and doing them over so it would be a perfect square. I had memorized the verses in Psalm 139 that tell how God wonderfully forms us in our mother’s womb. I had prayed for this child and for his parents daily since I learned of his existence. I had written letters to his mom and dad, assuring them how proud I was of them both, how I’d be as supportive as I knew how to be, how they would be excellent parents.

I’d prayed for myself, too. I’d wrestled with the idea that I was going to be a grandmother. Shouldn’t I be wiser first? Or sweeter? Or at the very least, a better cook? How exactly did one cram for this event? I had even admitted to myself that I would soon be sleeping with someone’s grandfather. That idea took a little getting used to, let me tell you! 

I had bragged to my friends. I had celebrated with my mother. I had gifted my daughter-in-law with maternity clothes and bought the most irresistible little stuffed puppy for the baby.

I had done all of that. I thought I was prepared.

The day he was born, I rode along with his other grandparents to the hospital to meet our mutual little descendant for the first time. We were told to wait in the hallway while the nurses finished up whatever they were doing with him and his mother in the room. While I waited, I studied the instructional posters on the walls, filled with advice for new parents. I remembered how challenging those first few days could be. Given the hospital rules, I fully expected that my first sight of my little grandson would be in his plastic baby bed and I was prepared. But when I turned around, I instantly knew that no amount of groundwork could have prepared me for that moment. Instead of the expected baby bed, I was beholding my own firstborn carrying his firstborn in his arms.

I came unglued. Part of me was carried back twenty-six years to the day I first laid eyes on my son. But those twenty-six years had passed in an instant, and here I was looking at the next generation, with the same dark skin and the same head full of thick, dark hair. He was beautiful and I was smitten. I didn’t even try to check the tears running down my cheeks as I held him in my arms and hugged his dad as tight as I could with the baby between us. What a cherished moment!

This little boy is about to turn three years old and now has a baby brother. Every day brings new adventures, new things to learn, new memories to make, and new opportunities to wonder at the marvelous work of our Creator. These little guys have taught me that sometimes stopping to watch ducks is more important than getting in out of the rain. They’ve uncovered my own impatient ways, the ones I thought I had overcome. They’ve reminded me that time spent cuddling a sleeping baby in a rocking chair trumps pretty much anything.

Most of all, I’ve come to realize that no matter how hard I tried, I could not have prepared to love someone so profusely, or to learn so much from someone so small.

Lady A’s Spell of the Day for 4/5: ANGER BANISHMENT SPELL

ANGER BANISHMENT SPELL

The following ingredients are needed

One onion

This is the banish anger from yourself.

Take your onion and wash it in fresh spring water (purchased also from the witches’ friend, the local supermarket). This spell is best performed during a waxing moon. Wear earth colors to ground you and, if you wish, burn some sandalwood oil or incense. By the light of a black candle (black absorbs negativity, remember!) peel your onion at midnight. As the tears_come, take away a layer of the pain you are feeling with each layer of the onion that you peel away. Onions represent Mars, which represents war and feelings of angst and anger at our enemies, so peeling through the onion will open the heart chakra, allowing you to experience the feelings you have been hanging on to, and layer by layer, release them. This spell is all about not wishing to get even, or to obsess any longer over those who have harmed you. After you have peeled your onion, place the peels on a plate (stainless steel or silver) and put on a window ledge in the kitchen where overnight the moon’s energy will draw away the negativity banishing it from your environment for good._complete this simple spell with a long, languid bath into which you have emptied three handfuls of sea salt. This will purify, protect, and strengthen you further. As you lie there, think of how much better you feel now that the desire to get back at someone has dissipated.

Herbal Tips for Your Kitchen

Now that Spring is here, we will be having fresh vegetables and herbs shortly. Knowing how to use the herbs properly will give a new taste sensation to your meals. You can use tried and true recipes or make-up your own. Either way when you cook with herbs, you will have a fantastic meal the whole family will enjoy.

Hints for Using Herbs

  • Serving Rule:  Two teaspoons of minced, fresh herbs will flavor four servings One teaspoon dried herbs or seeds serves four. Delicately flavored herbs, like marjoram can be use more liberally.

  • For soups and stews, add fresh herbs during the last twenty minutes.

  • To develop the flavor of freshly dried herbs, soak them for ten minutes in lemon juice, stock or oil before cooking.

  • Before cooking rub fresh herbs between clean hands to release their unique flavor in the volatile oils. This will accelerate flavoring  as your entrée cooks.

  • Firmly press herbs into the flesh of meats, fish, or poultry before cooking to enhance aroma and taste. No sauce or further preparation will be necessary.

  • Flavor salad dressing by soaking herbs in it for thirty minutes to an hour before serving. Use one teaspoon of herbs to one cup of dressing.

  • Microwave: Whenever possible, saute herbal blends in a small amount of liquid, stock, butter or oil before adding to a microwave dish to assure flavor.

  • Sugar can be flavored by layering twelve to fifteen rose geranium or lemon rose geranium leaves on top of one pound of sugar.  Any flavor of geranium leaves will do. Keep it covered until ready to use. Flavored sugar adds a delicate flavor to biscuits, cookies and muffins,

  • A substitute for lemon peel in baked goods is finely chopped lemon balm, lemon thyme or lemon vervain.

Herbal Bouquets for Cooking and Magick

Fresh or dried, herbal bouquets are great for both magick and cooking! In magick, hang the bouquets over the altar or place in a conjuring bag, or dip in spring water to asperge an area, candle or other item. For cooking, just drop in the boiling water or frying pan for a great taste and easy cleanup!

To make the bouquet, simply gather the herbs together and tie with clean string, leaving a long tail (so you can easily pull the bouquet out of the cooking pot and toss away).

Happy Home:  basil, marjoram, and chives (for red meat or chicken)

Harmony:  parsley, rosemary, thyme, and savory (for red meat or flavoring for beans)

Uncrossing:  marjoram, thyme, sage, parsley, and bay (for red meat, pork, or chicken)

Love:  dill, tarragon, parsley, basil and lovage (flavoring for beans or fish)

Good fortune:  savory, sage, celery tops, and chives (Flavoring for beans, chicken, or red meat)

Growth and success:  tarragon, chives, oregano, and parsley (for eggs and sauces)

Healing:  sage, basil, onion tops and bay (for red meat)

Banishing and cleansing:  parsley, lemon verbena, rosemary, and red pepper (for fish)