Down With the Sickness

I have a cold.  A sore throat, running nose, and general malaise.  It comes at a crappy time, seeing as I have an exam to take today.  Why it couldn't arrive when I was grading exams, or standing around giving the exam, or grading quizzes, or doing something that didn't directly involve my personal success, I don't know.  But here it is.  

Besides the constant nasal leakage, the sore throat was making me very unhappy.  Thankfully, I have a weapon in my arsenal of cold-fighting tactics, older than Cold-Eeze and Airborne, possibly originating around the same era as parents the world over ladled chicken soup into bowls for sick children and found they felt better afterwards.  It is...  The Grandpa Calvin Drink. 

My mom's dad is my Grandpa Calvin.  Well, he was, at any rate.  What is the proper etiquette for referring to deceased relatives?  Just because he's not alive doesn't mean he's no longer my grandfather; I mean he's my grandfather in memory, right?  Well, whatever.  I'm going to use the present tense.  Anyway, he passed along this concoction to make sore throats feel good, and I'm a huge fan.  

The Grandpa Calvin Drink

- Fill a mug with milk, leaving a bit of room at the top.

- Sprinkle in some cinnamon.  I added dry ginger to mine just before, and it was very nice.

- Microwave until very warm.  Try not to boil it over like I did, but you want it to be hot.  Alternatively, you can do this on the stove, but then that's one more pot to wash.

- Add honey until it's as sweet as you like it.  I add what likely amounts to ~2 spoons.  

- Optional: stir in a small bit of butter.  This may aid the throat-coating, it may do nothing at all, or it may just taste nice.  I tend to forget this step... maybe because I like my butter on toast, but hey.  Whatever you like.  :)  

- Drink.  Grandpa Calvin knew his stuff, people.

If I didn't have to drive to school later, I'd alternate a cup of this with a cup of tea with honey and whiskey to clear out my sinuses.  You know, I've never been a fan of newfangled cold medicines.  The normal ones tend to make me drowsy, and the non-drowsy formulas make me into a hyperactive lunatic.  I'll stick to my Cold-Eeze, chicken soup, milk, tea, honey, and whiskey, thank you very much.  Definitely tastier, at any rate...

Smoothie Operator

Peaches are mo' in season, relatively local, sweet, and delicious. So here's a super kickass peach smoothie that I have for breakfast. This served 2 people drinkign from very large glasses.

- 3 peaches
- A few glorps** of yogurt.
- A little milk
- Dash of vanilla
- Honey to taste

Cut the peaches into rough pieces so you can get the stone out, shove into blender with everything except the honey, and blend. Once blender is off, insert finger and taste. If it's too tangy, add a bit of honey until it meets your desired sweetness. If you add ice to the blender, keep in mind colder drinks mask flavor as well as sour and sweet, so you'll probably need more.

(**Glorps of yogurt are heaping spoonfuls that go "glorp" when you toss them into the blender.)

I guess if you're looking for fullness, you can add your protein supplement of choice, but the yogurt and milk filled me up pretty well. If you use regular peaches (not white ones) you can see where the color "peach" came from! Hahah! Imagine that!

Ok!

Back to writing!

(Ugh.)

Honey, you so sweet, sugar got a long way to catch you...

I used to hate honey. It was gloppy, sticky, and while it was all right on bread with peanut butter, I much preferred raspberry jam.

Recently, I've rediscovered honey. First, when you have a cold and your head is clogged up, tea with lemon, honey, and a generous glug of snake-bite medicine unclogs EVERYTHING and is a hell of a lot more fun than Sudafed. It's also more versatile. You can drink it on a Saturday night with your friends AND on Sunday morning with your grandmother. The tea part makes it all ok.

Then I started adding honey to salsas - just a bit to round out the tangy spiciness and to bring out the sweetness of the veggies - and it was very good. I have vague memories of my dad's dad coming to visit from Israel, and he brought jars of it. I had never tasted honey as intense as that. So when I saw buckwheat honey at My Organic Market, I bought it. Let's talk about buckwheat honey for a minute because it rocks.

Buckwheat honey is to honey like Arnold Shwarzenegger is to Danny DeVito in Twins. It tastes a bit like buckwheat (I guess I'd describe it as rich and kinda smoky), the honey flavor is really intense, and it's a dark brownish-amber in the bottle. It tastes like it was made by
bees in the image of strong burly Ukrainian farmers harvesting grain and singing folk songs, after which they'd gather for a huge meal and drink vodka.

The farmers, not the bees.

(Actually, before the Russians came in, Ukraine was a hugely fertile farming region. I might have to read up on that; I wonder how they're doing these days on that front...)

So how else would I eat it? Honey on yogurt is going to be the next big thing. Drizzling just a bit on yogurt makes for a strangely delicious dessert. "Dessert?" I can hear you looking quizzically at me. "Isn't yogurt for 'dessert' solely within the realm of recovering anorexics?" Not with buckwheat honey and some almonds on top. Especially on Greek yogurt. Even the fat free Greek yogurt is irrationally rich; nothing that healthy should be that creamy, but happily the Greeks know how to foster some killer dairy and bacteria relationships. They've certainly had a lot of time to perfect it, that's for sure.

Honey on yogurt is coincidentally healthy enough to enjoy for breakfast. Scarf it down, run out the door with an apple and a small bag of nuts in your hand, and bam. You're set to start the day. Some calcium, some protein, and buckwheat honey. It's tasty.

Perhaps even more tasty - and I find it a little more filling - is a big slice of bread (I like mine toasted) with a generous layers of peanut butter, sliced bananas, and a drizzle of honey on top finished off by a glass of milk. To reference a probably soon-to-be revived bit of hippy-era wisdom taught to me by my mother, peanut butter and milk form a complimentary protein. What I think this means is together peanut butter and milk contain enough amino acids for a complete serving of protein. While I don't advocate total veganism or even total vegetarianism, it's not a bad thing to eat a little of everything and subscribe a little bit to a lot of different food philosophies.

So basically, buckwheat honey is awesome. You can cook with it like normal, but I find it so tasty, I'd rather have it as unadulterated as possible. As Erykah Badu sang, "Honey, you so sweet, sugar got a long way to catch you."