Journal

Peri-Menopausal Tea?

A few weeks ago I enrolled on an old fashioned year long correspondence course with the Scottish School of Herbal Medicine. It is to become a home herbalist - so basically to gain the knowledge needed to treat (& not kill) myself, but not to treat anyone else. I wanted to do it because I found myself getting irritated by the slight wooliness of the herbal advice I kept seeing, the same cut and pasted mistakes, the lack of any advice about who shouldn't be taking things.

I found myself irritated at the way herbs - which I believe are incredibly powerful - were not being taken seriously.

One of the modules of the course is to study an area of ground and the plants that grow there over a full year. I have chosen a patch of about a mile between Croftamie and Gartness Road. I am going to be talking a bit more about this on Instagram and Facebook but here on the blog I am going to talk about the plants I am studying each month instead.

This month is Red Clover - Trifolium pratense (the Trifolium means three leaved, the pratense means meadow - so "three leaved meadow plant") - which grows in the verges alongside the path. It is a typical meadow plant, interesting in that its leaves low down look pretty much as we imaging clover leaves to be, but as the plant grows upwards - climbing through other plants up to 4 feet - the leaves elongate and aren't really recognisable as clover at all. It is a useful cover crop for farmers - fixing nitrogen in the soil - so is common throughout the UK and many other parts of the farmed world.

Red Clover doesn't really appear in many old herbal books. Where it does, it has the kind of listing where it cures absolutely everything from leprosy to UTIs, which pretty much guarantees that it cures nothing.

However - at some point in the last 20 years it was discovered that clover is one of the few plants with water soluble isoflavones - a kind of phytoestrogen - so potentially helpful for peri-menopausal women as their oestrogen levels dip.

To be honest - and this is the case with a lot of herbal medicine - there hasn't been great success with trials, though a couple were interesting enough for money to be put into research. There is also the issue that the research was done where large amounts of the active ingredients were distilled out of the plants in a way that would be inconvenient, maybe impossible, for the home forager.

However it was found that clover had significant levels of available calcium, which could be useful for peri menopausal and menopausal women to ward off osteoporosis. On the flip side - as a potential hormone replacement - red clover shouldn't be taken by women who are pregnant, or really by anyone whose oestrogen and calcium levels are tip top.

For the rest of us - here is a tea recipe - which is highly unlikely to completely turn around a depleting oestrogen supply, but which tastes nice, will do no harm, and which may help take the edge off those hot flushes.

Clover, Calendula and Nettle Tea

• 50 heads of red clover - picked when fully out but not browning
• 50 calendula flowers
• 50 nettle leaves

Dry all the flowers and leaves - you can simply lay them out on a metal rack or sheet and leave somewhere warm (a clean sheet over a spare bed works well), or, if you happen to have a dehydrator, that works well - 10 hours at 40 degrees.

Mix together and store in a jar. Add a large spoonful to a teapot, add just boiled water and leave to steep for 5 minutes.

You can add honey, but I find that the clover has a honeyed taste anyway.

The mixture will last for a year if kept in a cool dark place.

 

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Myanmar salad recipe for flowering salad leaves.

In February I went to visit my youngest daughter who is teaching in Myanmar for a year.

Before we went I was told by foodie friends that the stars of Burmese cookery were perfect for people wanting to eat in a more plant based way (though not vegetarian/vegan as you will see from the recipe below)

The thing that struck me most is that many of the salads were made from things that I would have regarded as either 'past it' or 'not edible'. The flowering stems - the 'gone to seed' stage - of mustards and kale were regarded as the best bit, the leaves and trailing vines of courgettes and pumpkins harvested as much as the fruit.

These are all things which I have plenty of in the garden, too much at times, but which I have never used for cooking.

Tourist travel within Myanmar is restricted but we visited Shan state, to the beautiful area around Inle Lake. We were able to visit markets and then to cook our produce at the wonderful Bamboo Delight Cookery School in Nyaung Shwe. The top photo shows a market stand - one of dozens selling the same home grown produce - here a flowering mustard green.

This photo is of a very similar bunch from my garden - one which I would have composted or fed to the rabbits. Now I make the following recipe.

 

Myanmar Greens Salad with crispy fried shallots.

This can be made with any tender greens - purple sprouting broccoli, kale, pumpkin leaves or any cabbagey green that has started flowering (mizuna, mustard, pack choi etc)

Burmese recipes use a few ingredients which we do not tend to have to hand - but which are easy to make and store.

1. Toasted chickpea flour - heat up a frying pan, add 8 table spoons of chickpea flour, reduce the heat and stir continuously until it begins to change colour. Make sure all the flour begins to toast. Do not let it burn. Leave to cool and put in a jar.

2. Crispy shallots/shallot oil - these are basically the same recipe separated out. Slice 5 or 6 shallots very finely and fry in 1 cup of peanut oil (or another flavourless vegetable oil) - you want them to gradually go brown and crispy, but not burn.

Take the shallots out of the oil and drain, store in a jar or storage box, then cool the oil and put into a different jar.

Ingredients.

1 lb greens cut into manageable pieces that will fit in pan.

2 tbsp chopped peanuts (blitz in a food processor or chop very very finely)

1 tbsp toasted chickpea flour

1 tbsp shallot oil

1 tbsp sliced shallots soaked in water and drained

2 tbsp lime juice

1 tbsp fish sauce

1 tsp shrimp paste/1 tbsp shrimp powder - (powder more authentic but I had paste for Thai curries in the house already and it worked fine)

Fried crispy shallots

Bring a pan of water to a fierce boil - add the greens and cook very briefly - 3 minutes should be fine for most things, and fine stems take only a minute.

Drain, then when cool enough to handle, cut greens into 5 cm pieces and arrange in a shallow bowl.

Add the raw sliced shallots to greens.

Sprinkle on the shallot oil, lime juice, the chopped peanuts, the shrimp powder/paste and the chickpea flour and use your hands to massage them evenly and lightly into the greens.

Add fish sauce to taste then sprinkle with some crispy shallots to serve.

This can be served as a side dish or with rice as a light meal.

If I was going to alter this to make it vegetarian/vegan I would replace the fish sauce and shrimp with a mix of shiitake mushrooms, fermented beans and miso using this recipe from Alice Hart (it is in her New Vegetarian cookery book)

Store Cupboard Lentil Soup

When you come home from some time away and you haven't had time to go to the shops it is nice to have a good hearty soup recipe that can be made from store cupboard ingredients.

This is my go to recipe. It is also a great cheap and easy lunch to rustle up for unexpected guests.

Store cupboard ginger and lentil soup.

Ingredients

• 250g red lentils
• 1 onion finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• chunk of ginger grated (about 5 cm)
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika
• 1 litre of stock (stock cube or bouillon powder is fine)
• 2 tins of tomatoes
• Coriander and yoghurt to serve (optional)

Gently fry the onion in the oil until soft, then add the grated ginger and spices - keep stirring to make sure it doesn't burn at this point - you want the spices to cook slightly - if it is sticking then add a glug of water to the pan.

Add the lentils and stir so they are coated in the spicy onion mix, then add enough stock to cover the lentils.

Simmer until lentils are cooked - this depends on how old the lentils are 15-30 minutes should do it though. Add the tomatoes.

Simmer for another 5 minutes then blend the soup until smooth.

Add some chopped coriander and yoghurt if you happen to have them

Serve.

Making dried apple rings with a dehydrator

Working from home a lot I have a bit of a snacking issue.

When work gets difficult, when a design isn't working or when I have a daunting email to write, I pace about the house and often mindlessly snack.

I decided to come up with a solution just as our apple trees produced a bumper crop.

I love fruit - it is my most usual snack food - but the speed I eat it at is the problem.

I can easily get way over my five a day by lunchtime.

So I decided to invest in a dehydrator and see whether I could transform our apple harvest into a much nicer form of dried apple rings than you can find in the shops.

Our apple trees are pretty feral. I planted a selection of old varieties when we moved here 15 years ago.

I carefully selected them by pollination dates and sentimentality - we have Stirling Castle, Katie, and five others I can't even remember, though their names were vitally important at the time.

We planted them in the area around where the workshop is now, staked and mulched. Within a week they had been grazed to stumps by deer who merrily munched through the deer guards on the trunks.

Then, a couple of years ago I spotted bright red and green apples in the rough ground that links the workshop to the woodland and realised that the apple trees had simply grown on, warped and twisted by the attention of deer, but that they were happily fruiting away.

Most of the apples are half way between cookers and eaters - probably originally eaters but sharper than modern eating apples tend to be. To make the apple chips I gathered smallish windfalls.

I didn't bother peeling or coring them, just sliced them 1mm thick on my mandoline cutter (I just have a very cheap plastic one - nothing fancy but incredibly useful).

I love the flowery centres that the slices have.

Then - to stop them discolouring - I put them into a bowl of water with a tablespoon of honey in it. You can also use lemon in the water but my apples are really sour so I went with the honey. They were just in there for the time it took me to slice up all the apples.

Then I layered them up in my dehydrator - arranged so that the slices don't touch at all. My dehydrator is by Andrew James and I like its big rectangular trays - it does make a noise though so I have it in the spare bedroom rather than the kitchen.

I put the dehydrator on at 70 degrees for 5 hours - As the slices are very thin they don't take a long time to dry out.

Once the apple rings are crispy, take them off the racks and store in an airtight box or jar.

I got about 40-50 apple rings per apple, so hopefully that will slow down my snacking a bit. The apple rings should store fine for a month or so - it depends on how dry they are.

If you don't have a dehydrator you can bake the slices on wire grids in as cool an oven as you can manage. If you happen to have a 4 door Aga the warming oven is ideal - otherwise just put the oven on as low a setting as possible and keep an eye on them. They are unlikely to take as long and will be more 'cooked' but will still be very tasty. Baking them in an oven is easier if you cut the slices thicker to begin with - 2mm rather than 1.