Cold Comfort Food

This post is part of the Natural Cures Blog Carnival hosted by Hartkeisonline.

We were still fighting a cough thing when Blair said her upper teeth hurt when she bit down—a sinus infection? So, I dug out my nutritional materia medica and tossed together this lunch:

Cold Comfort Lunch

Chop 2 garlic cloves, set aside. Chop a small onion, six shiitake mushrooms and eight green beans into tiny bites. Steam those veggies in a steamer basket for about 5 to 7 minutes, or until crisp tender. Warm up two cups of leftover cooked rice or sprouted grains and garlic for 5 minutes in some good homemade stock. Toss the veggies in a large bowl, add rice and a handful of crispy pine nuts. Strip the leaves from eight or nine stalks of fresh thyme, grate 2 carrots and add the thyme leaves and carrots to the bowl. In a separate small bowl, stir together 2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, 2 tablespoons of fresh lemon juice, 2 tablespoons of homemade chicken broth and 1/4 cup raisins. Add that in and toss all together. Serve with a little parmesan on top.

Garlic and onion are prized for their immune-boosting and infection-killing abilities. Shiitake mushrooms have antiviral properties. Thyme is a miracle worker when it comes to calming coughs (we have a bowl of boiling water with thyme for the kids to “tent” their heads when they start coughing.) The fresh lemon juice is a great source of vitamin C, and raisins are alkaline. Of course, homemade stocks are the original health food. The leftover rice is filling, and the small pieces of veggies are easy to chew and nutritious, making this meal a real “comfort food” for when colds strike.

At snack time, I didn’t want the kids eating a bunch of immune-suppressing sugar, but they wanted something sweet. I also wanted a big nutritional “BANG” for those who are not feeling well enough to eat a lot. So of course, I turned to sweet potatoes! Ah, all that orangey goodness. You just can almost feel the vitamins working their wonders on you. Of course, they taste great, or they wouldn’t get eaten!

I just peeled and sliced 3 large sweet potatoes in 1/8 to 1/4 inch slices and tossed them in a big bowl with a tablespoon of melted pasture butter. Onto a cookie sheet, into a 500° oven for 20 minutes, and voila! Snacktime! They were crispy on the outside and sweet and chewy on the inside. They didn’t even need salt.

I wanted something for dinner that would be soothing on upset tummies, cough-relaxing and warming, but not overly filling, and this chowder fit the bill.

I call it The More (Vegetables) The Merrier Chowder

I mixed together 3 cups of homemade beef stock, a large chopped onion, a tablespoon of stripped thyme leaves, a teaspoon of cumin, 2 cloves of minced garlic and got it boiling. I turned the heat down to simmer and covered it for five minutes. I tossed in a half cup of frozen corn with a handful of frozen peas, four stalks of chopped bok choy, three stalks of chopped celery, a chopped up red bell pepper, two chopped carrots and two chopped zucchini. I had a loaf of sourdough french bread that needed using, so while the soup simmered for about 15 minutes, I warmed the bread in the oven. In a separate bowl, I mixed together 3 cups of raw milk, three tablespoons of homemade peanut butter and a dash of Tabasco. I added that to the soup and stirred it around. It was the perfect eating temperature almost immediately. We had elderberry preserves on the bread, well, the kids did. I dunked my bread in the chowder!

I’ve come the long way around to nutritional healing. I started by learning homeopathy, then became a home herbalist. Supporting my family’s health through nutrition seemed the next logical step.