Herbs, soups and teas

9th Feb.2008
Saturday

Anderson used to have the sniffles whenever there was a change in season, especially from spring comes along. Added to that, I had a bad year where I was getting the cold so often. This was bad so I decided to look up some stuff on how to prevent colds, namely soups with herbs. While surfing the net looking for remedies, I came across two sites, Learning Herbs and The Soup Queen.

Learning Herbs had an article on Herbal Immune System Soup Recipe: a great cold home remedy and flu home remedy. From it, I learned about the astragalus root and some other herbs in the other pages of the website. We went shopping for it and discovered there was a range of quality and prices to choose from. We went for the mid range and would add it to chicken soup. It tasted great with shitake mushrooms. Off and on we would have the soup. I would like to say that since then we haven't had any colds or sniffles. Well, of course Anderson would like to add that it is also because of the added vitamin supplements we are taking. I guess it wouldn't hurt to try out stuff like this if it could help boost our immune system.

Another article on this site that I found amusing and insightful at the same time on garlic was Garlic: It’s not just for vampires anymore! especially the part about putting garlic on the feet or between the toes and how your breath would smell of garlic the next morning. Well, I haven't tried it yet so I can't attest to that.

The Special Tea is very nice and once in a while we have it especially when one of us feels like the cold is coming on. It's easy since we have the ingredients right in the kitchen - ginger, lemon (bottle of lemon extract) and honey.

It's a good site to visit if you are looking toward the herbal way.

The other site I have listed also uses herbs in her soups. I have tried out the Red Dates, Longan and Medlar Seeds Tea and it is nice and refreshing. There is a natural sweetness to it. If you are interested in porridge then you should try the Easy Chicken Porridge with Dried Scallops. We both love it. There are a lot of recipes in there and I have yet to even try 10% of them.