The Flu, "The Balanced Plate", Cliches

So I kicked what I am almost certain was the flu in a day and a half this October. Don't know if it was H1N1 but a flu made its way around our home and I had the least trouble with it, which is shocking because I always seem to be the lingering snotty, coughy, cleary her throaty person. Maybe that was the old me. Living in an arid climate has reworked my cellular make-up. I adore Colorado.

I made this magical elixir and I want to share the recipe here. It's from a book I use very often called The Balanced Plate by Renee Loux. On her web site she writes, "Start small. Start anywhere. Green living: it's contagious." Her book is thorough and deals with all manners of living well, living green, eating whole food and cleaning without poisoning your housemates and pets...basically it covers all the green cliches. As a rule, and like the rest of you, I don't like cliches. I kind of can't believe that people actually use them when they do. They do, though. People...But some things, while they're becoming cliche, don't mean to be cliche. Or maybe they're just excusable because I agree with their bones. But then marketing gets hold of them and suddenly. Well.

Don't you think that organic produce, for example, should be free of labels, stickers and marketing (the self-evident truth of "apple") and that our "conventional" foods should be marked the hell up with lists of which pesticides, modifications, etc. they contain? And, in a similar call for TRUTH (mine or otherwise), back in the early '90s, when our nation was deciding which Elvis stamp to issue (the cute healthy, hottie Elvis, or the bloated, old, fucked up looking Elvis) we should have chosen the latter, but we didn't.

There was a summer where my mom and Tom tried to speak using as many cliches as they could, which started off funny and got funnier.

Back to the f-l-u. I also drank a lot of elderberry tea with lemon. Here's the book cover of that book I was talking about:

 

Flu Buster Tonic

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

1-2 cloves garlic

1/4 cup finely shredded ginger

2 tsp wasabi powder, or to taste

1 tsp cayenne pepper, or to taste

2-4 tbs raw honey
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In a blender, combine the vinegar, garlic (if desired), and ginger and blend until smooth. Pour through a fine strainer and press wiht the back of a spoon to extract as much juice as possible. Discard pulp. Whisk in the wasabi, cayenne, and honey. Store in a glass jar in the fridge. Serve 2 tbs at a time on an empty stomach. Add to a cup of hot water for a warming tonic. 

*Mary notes: I'd call it a burning tonic, but I liked everything about how this tasted, and especially how well it worked. I finished a jar in a day in a half. This, with plenty of grams of vitamin C (like 5 or 6) and a good antioxidant (Carlson ACES, I like), gave me life. Also, and in my sickest hours, I couldn't taste or smell much anyways...so whatever taste reservations you may have might be self-resolving if your symptoms are similar. 

Also, lazy, I didn't strain out the ginger and garlic pulp so my version was pulpier than recipe version.

I hope the baby liked it as much as I did. (Hot hot fish and club, yo.)