Cooking with Herbs e-book

We have again been cooking, feeding people and madly photographing to bring our latest book to the light --- we are pleased to tell you a bit about it and share one of the recipes with you (in the sidebar).

Making your food a herbal event doesn't take any more preparation time than to create an ordinary meal and changes 'dull' to 'delicious'. Herb leaves, seeds and flowers can be used in salads, seasonings, cakes, desserts and main meals, and by adding herbs to these foods we can help to ensure that our meals are attractive, tasty and digestible. Herbs add distinction and more: oregano and thyme are also digestives, peppermint and spearmint help to dispel wind, the seeds and feathery fronds of fennel help to digest fat. By adding herbs to your cooking you are using them in a preventive way. For instance, caraway added to cabbage, or coriander to beans during cooking helps to prevent flatulence, as well as giving the dish a delicious flavour. This seems to make more sense than drinking a cup of caraway tea after the meal to cure the discomfort. They can also add vitamins and minerals to the diet. In addition to recipes for meals there are sections for food for pets and a section on making herbal wines and liqueurs and this section even includes an aphrodisiac liqueur!

Tips on the medicinal properties of herbs are scattered throughout the book. here is a typical entry: TIP Rosemary can soothe a sore and upset digestive system where there is flatulence and liver inadequacy. It stimulates the production of bile and improves poor liver function. Rosemary contains about 14 mg of easily absorbed calcium (known to calm the nerves) in each teaspoon of chopped leaf so it acts a tonic and restorative to the nervous system. The book may be purchased from our website or from my Etsy shop