season

Herbal Recipe: Sesame Orange Cookies

Herbal Recipe: Sesame Orange Cookies

Now that you’ve made your own food-grade herbs in the form of dried orange peel (see previous post with directions), here’s an idea of how to make something tasty with them! These black sesame, cardamom, and dried orange peel cookies are a wonderful treat to support digestion, nourish us in this yin time of winter, and open the new year.

Bonus: the ingredients help move and counteract some of the stagnation from heavy holiday meals (so these would also make a great dessert for Thanksgiving or December cookie swaps). Enjoy in moderation, of course.

Make Your Own Herbal Medicine: Orange Peel

Make Your Own Herbal Medicine: Orange Peel

Plenty of herbs in the Eastern traditional medicine pharmacopeia (collection) are very familiar to us: what we call food-grade herbs. These are items most of us have in our spice cabinets, vegetable drawers, and fruit bowls. Using some or only these ingredients in a formula can make for some seriously tasty medicine!

Herbal combinations don’t have to be administered only in tailored treatment for a condition. Cinnamon, fennel, ginger, and black pepper are only a few of our food-grade herbs, which means we are supporting our digestion almost every time we eat. Just as we reach for mint for cool refreshment in the summer, turning to some wintery staples is a great way to nourish your system even while enjoying a sweet treat or hearty meal. Understanding the functions of our food-grade herbs helps us understand why some of our food traditions exist and why choosing one taste over another makes us feel better at a particular time.

Despite the wide variety of ingredients and tastes, the stereotype of Chinese herbal formulas unfairly persists as bitter and unfamiliar concoctions. The best way to counter this is to make and use your own herbs and familiarize yourself with them. Since food-grade herbs are incredibly safe (we eat them all the time), there’s a lot of room for experimentation and finding your own experience.

One of my favorite ways to use food as medicine is with homemade chen pi or dried tangerine peel. Satsuma or mikan (aka California Cuties or those little peelable oranges) are a big New Year’s food in my Japanese-tradition household. It’s easy to make use of the peels so this is a true no-waste food!

What Autumn Holds for You

What Autumn Holds for You

Seasonal change isn’t instant. Especially here in the Bay Area, it’s gradual. 1 step forward, 2 steps back, until it isn’t. It takes a special focus to notice it as it shifts. We may yet get our warm Late Summer days that often show up in late September/ October, but Autumn has already been happening. There’s that chill in the air. A certain crispness. A lot of complaints of dry throats.

Eastern Medicine takes its cues from the natural world. As it is in nature, so is it in our bodies and emotional landscapes. Spring and Summer both have an energy of new growth and expansion. There’s a fullness and flourishing. In Autumn, we start to draw back into the interior.

There are five elements (sometimes also called Five Phases) in Eastern Medicine: Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, and Wood. The Five Elements have corresponding seasons, tastes, channels, energies, diseases, and so much more that there is an entire school of thought in Chinese Medicine defined by this focus.