honeysuckle honey

Kiss me, honey, honey, kiss me ...

Honeysuckle flowers surprisingly late in the year and with this beautiful Indian summer the flowers are pristine and ripe for the picking. Pick a few blooms - say about a dozen - and immerse them in a jar of honey. Set the jar in the sun for a couple of weeks on a south-facing windowsill. Strain off and you will have a perfect cough syrup ready for the colds and flu season. And it will taste yummy too.

INFLUENZA

That headcold turned nasty. By Friday I was running a temperature but it's only Monday and I'm already on the mend. Out came all the remedies. Blues and flu's tea worked just as well as Paracetamol to bring down my temperature but tasted much nicer. The elderberry based flu tincture also tasted nice and cut through the gunge nicely. Potter's Vegetable Cough Remover was brilliant with the tickle. Eucalyptus, Thyme and Lavender oils inhaled over steaming hot water completely soothed my inflamed chest - always a weak spot with me. Eucalyptus oil on my pillow helped me to breathe through the night. Chest rubs with the same oils brought antiseptic and anti-inflammatory properties to my lungs through my skin. I didn't smell of Chanel No 5 - my favourite perfume - but it was better than a chest infection or antibiotics. They bring you so low. Necessary sometimes but only if the above fail. Well - was it swine flu? How are we supposed to know? All the advice seems to be stay home, especially stay away from doctors, get yourself well and go back to work. They've even withdrawn the blanket Tamiflu. So thank goodness, yet again for herbs - hurrah! I'm on the mend and on the up. Damn that means I can no longer justify watching old swashbucklers in the daytime.........

Headcold? Try French Onion Soup

My blessed daughter, fresh from yet another night on the tiles, forgot her toothbrush. She then shared with me the privilege of using my own. As a result I now have her head cold and not a little resentment! Apart from lots of raw garlic (yes I do stink but am unrepentant), fizzy Vitamin C tablets (more digestible - always take with food for better absorption) and my own magic herbal flu/cold formula, my own favourite traditional remedy is home-made French onion soup.

We've had a particularly good harvest of onions this year, despite the monsoon in July and although the stems rotted so they can't be hung on strings in the kitchen looking pretty, there are plenty of them sunbathing in serried ranks in our greenhouse. Make this soup yourself, if you are still standing, and inhale the gutsy aromas. This will disinfect your lungs, throat and nose very effectively and is also highly therapeutic and if your eyes and nose run - that's GREAT! They are being sluiced out by all those wonderful antiseptic aromas.

Recipe:

Take at least 8 good sized onions and dice finely. Sweat (now this is the secret of a good French onion soup) for 20 minutes - yes TWENTY! in some good olive oil. Don't use butter at this stage as it will burn. Keep the lid on so they get really soft and watch for the sugar caramelising. You want them to colour up but not burn. A little (but not a lot) of stickiness is perfect. Take the lid off occasionally and inhale - it will do you the power of good. When they are soft and golden and almost mushy, add as much garlic as you can spare - up to one bulb (yes BULB not CLOVE). Also add, preferably fresh but dried (in which case halve the quantity) will do, about 5 sage leaves, 10 marjoram leaves, 20 little thyme leaves. Swirl about briefly and then add about 1 and 1/2 litres of good stock. The French use beef, you could try chicken or vegetable or even yeast extract is nice too. Now bring to the boil (inhale again) and then simmer gently for about an hour. Serve (without the stringy cheese bit as dairy will NOT help your cold) with lots of fresh parsley and chunky granary bread.

A variation on this is my late lamented but very wise grandmother's cough recipe. She had 10 children and died at 98 so I have plenty of faith in her. She only gave up work in her 88th year. Put some onions in some brown sugar in the lowest setting of the range overnight. Mash up the gloup in the morning and bottle. The resulting syrup is an ideal cough medicine with enough syrup to coat the throat and plenty of antibacterial properties in the onions. The above soup recipe further adds the effectiveness of sage, thyme and marjoram to the garlic and onions and these are all strongly antibacterial and antiviral. Trust me - it works!

Sloe, sloe, quick, quick, sloe - gin!

Chestnuts roasting by the fire, Nat King Cole on the stereo, Great Aunt Nellie asleep on the sofa, new noisy toys for the children and the batteries not yet run down, the tree lights already on the blink ....and a little toddy of sloe gin clasped in your desperate hand. A great softener for the claustrophobia of the traditional Christmas. Make it now as your personal insurance and insulation against the cold and the tension! It's so easy.

Above are all the ingredients you'll need. Pick ripe, slightly squeezable sloes in September. 2009 has been a cracking year for them in Wales - they must like rain! If you have 3 lbs of fruit, as here, you will need 1 lb of sugar and about half a bottle of gin. Give the sloes a sluice in cold water and prick them all over. Traditional recipes say use a darning needle but I find a sharp vegetable knife more comfortable because it has a good handle to grip. Pour the fruit into a wide necked jar, add the sugar and pour over the gin. Seal and resist for at least 3 months. Strain off the fruit, savour the aroma and decant into beautiful decanters - if you're richer than me cut crystal would be absolutely ideal and very pretty. Drink in sherry glasses - this is a liqueur - not a wine.

I once gave a dinner party to friends and at the end of the evening two of the blokes accepted my invitation to a little sloe gin as a liqueur to round things off. I put the decanter on the table with two sherry glasses, everyone else having migrated to the log fire in the other room. They looked askance at the tiddly glasses and I gave an altogether too gentle warning of the strength of the purple sweet liquid. "Mmmm, this slips down easily," said one of them, a respectable and usually teetotal doctor. I left them to it and joined in with the lively chatter in the other room. When we all came back some time later, the decanter was virtually empty and beatific smiles emanated from our two male companions, now truly bonded and replete. Alas, when they went to stand up and take their leave, their legs had turned to rubber. I am reliably informed their lives did not exist for a further two days when normal duties could be resumed. The fact that they seem to resent this just made me cross when I looked at the empty decanter. Lesson? Only ever pour guests out one glass and then hide it!