Honey-Ginger Tea (for when you’ve got a cold or just feel under the weather)

Oh, October, how beautiful you are, bringing the harvest, my lovely favorite quinces, beautiful colored trees, and the sniffles to my boyfriend’s nose… oh wait, that part is not so nice.  At all.

It’s also totally true that if you treat a cold, it goes away in a week, and if you don’t, it takes seven days.  However, no one ever said that said week has to be totally miserable.  I’m a big believer in not taking antibiotics for every sniffle you get – and an equally strong believer in yes, taking decongestants orally (so they don’t dry out your already abused nasal membranes).  I also know there’s a lot to be done to make a person with a cold much, much more comfortable than they’d be otherwise.  Like, by offering them a blanket, a book, a box of those (oh miracle invention!!!) tissues with balsam in them, and a cup of something warm to drink.

This incarnation of our kitchen's honey jar comes from Gotland

And this is definitely the cup you want to offer.  Or have offered to you, if you are on the receiving drippy end of the cold situation.  Unless you are allergic to honey, or hate ginger or both, in which case, go suck on a sugared lemon.  I mean it, I do that occasionally myself – but if you don’t hate ginger or honey, then you ought to make this.  In fact, if you’ve got a large teapot and the person who’s dripping is not yourself, make the large teapot and share it.  It’s really, really nice when you aren’t sick, too.  I’m eyeing the remains in my boyfriend’s cup right now and regret using the small teapot.

The recipe is essentially what it says above – a good piled spoonful of best-quality honey (you can really taste it in this!) you’ve got, and a finger of ginger, peeled and sliced thinly across the fibers.  I normally keep ginger root and lemons in my fridge, and we always have at least one type of honey around.  A good local set minimally-processed honey is a staple, and sometimes we also splurge on something like Provencal lavender honey, or Tasmanian leatherwood honey (mmm, now I want to order some of that again!).  So, chances are that I have the ingredients for making it on hand at any point, since ginger root keeps nearly forever in a plastic bag.

This (entire piece sliced) is enough for small teapot

Plunk the honey and the ginger into the pot.  Add a slice of lemon if you are so inclined (today boyfriend wasn’t), pour in freshly-boiled water, stir the honey off the spoon, close pot, cover with towel and let stand about 10-15 minutes.

A cork stand under pot helps keep the heat better, but it's not necessary

Why let it stand?  This isn’t an instant drink, people!  It’s raw root that you are steeping in boiling water to leech some of its juice and essential oil out.  It takes a bit of time, and the hotter you keep the pot, the better.  So stick that cozy on it, put a towel over it, whatever.

After the time (I recommend the full 15 min) is past, stir the contents of the pot and pour into cups.  If your pot is worth the ceramic it’s made of, it’ll still be hot, so don’t go burning tongue on this (ouch!), but you don’t want this to go cold – you want to drink it as hot as possible, because it’s nicer to your sore nose and throat, and also tastes better that way.  At least in my opinion.

Now, I sincerely hope you don’t get a cold.  Or a flu.  Which doesn’t mean you won’t, but hey, best wishes and all – it also shouldn’t deter you from making and drinking this, because it’s just nice as a good-night non-caffeinated drink.  I mean, even a faithful worshipper of caffeine such as myself can appreciate something I can guzzle down at half past midnight with no danger of having trouble sleeping afterwards.  Besides, it tastes good.  Really really good.

So yeap.  Make it.  I suspect it will go really well with some fairly plain shortbread cookies alongside it, too – the flavor is very warm and more than a little spicy, so you don’t actually need anything too strongly-flavored alongside.

Hot Cocoa For Grownups

Autumn.  Shorter daylight hours.  Hot chocolate.

Spiked and with cream, how else?

Need I say more?

Ok, in this age of hot cocoa coming from an instan-drink box and having, thus, lost its appeal to those above age twelve, perhaps I do.

I love hot cocoa and hot chocolate (the two drinks are not the same, though they can be drunk rather interchangeably – it’s the composition that differs***), but I rarely make either one at home.  Why?  Well, usually because when I reach for a hot drink, I want my fix of caffeine, or something to go with dessert – whereas these two are dessert in themselves.  But this is not me trying to tell you when to or not to drink anything.  Rather, I suspect I am just being my under-caffeinated self and thus babbling.

***Note: The difference beetween hot chocolate and hot cocoa is that hot chocolate is made from actual shaved chocolate – meaning, it has the cocoa butter in it.  Hot cocoa is made from cocoa powder, which had the cocoa butter removed from it – making the drink no less wonderful, especially if you have full-fat milk or cream on hand.  Or, preferably, both.

Where was I?  Ah right, hot cocoa.  You should make it.  It’s rich, it’s luscious, it satisfies the chocaholic in you me, and it’s easy to put together from on-hand stuff.  To me, it’s an instant (or well, taking a few minutes, but nevermind that!) fix of a dessert when there is absolutely no dessert at home, and I can’t be bothered to bake.  I don’t know about you but I always have milk at home, and heavy cream (it keeps well and goes into many good things!), and there is always a box of cocoa lurking in the back of my pantry even when the supplies of chocolate have dwindled (or else I may just dwindle those on their own right out of existence!).

If you have that, a pot and a whisk, you have the makings of really good hot cocoa – and with a few other storecupboard things like vanilla sugar and the booze of your choice (Rum!  Rum is amazing in cocoa, says I… you can plonk in what you like!), it becomes a really, really amazing thing on a darkening autumn (or winter!) evening.

So, how do you make hot cocoa?  I do not recommend microwaving the milk.  One, because then you’d have to pour it into a pot anyway, and two, because milk can heat unevenly, form a film on the surface while the bottom is cold, etc.  Not worth the bother.

• Put your milk into a small cookpot and start heating it on medium heat.  While WATCHING it and stirring it with a whisk.  THE ENTIRE TIME.  I really mean it – my beloved boyfriend had near-ruined three perfectly good pots by putting milk into them, putting that on the heat and promptly burning it to the bottom of the pot by ignoring it.  So, watch the milk.
• When the milk begins to steam gently and foams some when beaten with a whisk and it hot to touch when you touch it with a finger, it is hot enough.  You do not want to boil it.  Turn heat down to medium-low and add 1 slightly-heaping teaspoon of cocoa powder per each 1dl of milk, whisking furiously after each spoonful.  To avoid the cocoa clumping, don’t dump the entire spoon into the milk but scatter the cocoa a little, and whisk-whisk-whisk.
• After whisking all the cocoa in, add the desired amount of sugar or arificial sweetener (I go for the latter), whisk until sugar is dissolved completely, and turn heat to minimum to keep the cocoa warm.
• In the meantime, whip 1 dl of cream with 1/2 teaspoon vanilla sugar (I use real-vanilla vanilla sugar, but heck, use what you’ve got.  Or a drop of vanilla extract and a teaspoon of powdered sugar if that’s what you have.) until soft peaks form.
• Stir the cocoa, mix in 1-2 tablespoons of your favorite booze per each 2.5dl (1 cup), turn off the heat, and ladle it into your mugs.
• Top with whipped vanilla cream.

Drink.  Achieve cozy cat-on-blanket state of bliss.

Capturing The Scent Of Summer

It’s 8am and my hands smell of elderflower and lemon.

Elderflower aka Fläder (Sambucus nigra)

Why?  Because it’s Midsummer, and it is both, traditional and opportune to go hunting for the short-blooming elderflowers, and capture the scent of summer.

For the uninitiated, Midsummer is a major Swedish holiday celebrated the weekend after Summer Solstice (June 22nd).  It involves a lot of drinking, normally at summer houses or parks or anywhere, really, food (salmon and various seafood is traditional).  It is a fertility festival, and therefore sex is also encouraged, though, of course, not obligatory.  Swedes are just not dogmatic enough to make it so, you know?  Other traditions of note are dancing around a flower-decorated phallic symbol while pretending to be little frogs (don’t ask, I don’t know, but seeing old men do it ought to be prescribed as anti-depressant treatment – I’m not depressed, but that much laughter has got to be good for anyone!).

Among other things, it is around Midsummer that Elderflower (aka fläder, or Sambucus nigra) flowers for about a week or two – the bloom may come earlier further South, or later in the North, but here in Stockholm, it is in full bloom right now, and the scent is simply put, amazing.  How does it smell?  It’s hard to describe, but citrusy, spicy and aromatic is the best I can come up with.  If you are really curious, buy a bottle of elderflower cordial and sniff it – then up that by an order of magnitude and lushness, and that is what fresh elderflowers smell like.  Better yet – unlike the (usually expensive) cordial, if you are lucky enough to have a bush around, they are also for free (or for the price of effort of going up to the bush with a bag and ripping the freshly-opened inflorescences off into said bag).

Where am I going with it?  Well, not very far.  The bush is just across the street from our house, after all!  And then, to the kitchen.  Where I have a few pressure-lid glass jars mildly sterilized by rinsing them out with boiling water, a lemon, and a bottle of vodka.  Today, I am making elderflower infused vodka, and elderflower lemonade.

The general directions for infusing vodka with fruit are in this post, but elderflower has a few specific quirks that I feel I should address before getting to the recipe and directions.

One, elderflowers open at sunrise, and so should be harvested before noon, and preferably early in the morning, because after the heat of the day starts, the fragrance deteriorates and fades.  Hence the trip out to the bush before 9am.  The inflorescences snap off easily, so you do not need anything but your hands and a bag or basket to collect them into.  You also do not need much – the scent is strong, and you can only pack so many of the flowers into a jar without squishing them.

…Which brings me to point two – elderflowers are as delicate as they look.  The flowers and fragrance deteriorate quickly if they are heated, or left open to air, or distressed in any way.  Which, by the way, is why I still haven’t figured out how to make elderflower syrup – how would I do it without heating?  On the other hand, I do know how to make elderflower-infused vodka.  And lemonade.

Let’s begin with the boozier option!

So, what do you need?

• A jar with a press lid (glass with a rubber band to seal hermetically), sterilized by a boiling-water rinse.  I use a 500ml jar.
• A glass bottle (for putting the finished product in – I save the bottle the vodka came in)
• A coffee filter (single-use paper, or a multiple-use plastic, which is better)
• A funnel
• for 500ml jar, 350ml plain vodka.  Otherwise, increase proportionally to size of jar and desired quantity of alcohol.
• 1/3 of a lemon.  Obviously, more of said lemon for larger amount of alcohol/bigger jar.
• 6-9 elderflower inflorescences (enough to pack into the jar nearly to capacity without squishing) – size of those varies, so get extra (you can always use the remaining ones to make elderflower lemonade – recipe follows)
• 1 tablespoon sugar (optional)

What to do?

• Make sure your jar is cooled down to room temperature (do not use hot).
• Scizzor the flowers off the larger stems into the jar – they will fall apart into 2-3cm clumps.  Cut enough flowers to fill the jar to within 2cm of the top (for my low jar – it can be as much as 5-7cm if you are using a large jar, say 1L).  Prod lightly with fingertips but do not pack hard, nor, little green apples forbid, squish them!
• Cut off 1/3 of a large lemon and squeeze the juice over the flowers.  Slice off a thin ribbon of zest (no white pith if you can avoid it) and add to the jar.
• Pour in your vodka and make sure the flowers are all covered.  You can prod them into the liquid with a finger or the back of a chopstick if they are not cooperating.
• Seal the jar and put in the back of the refrigerator for 2-3 weeks.  You can take it out and shake it occasionally but do not open during that time.
• Once the 2-3 weeks are up, remove jar from fridge, filter through a coffee filter and pour into a bottle using a funnel.
• If using sugar, add that to the liquid by putting it into the funnel and rinsing down into the bottle.  In case of using sugar, bottle should stand in a dark spot (fridge or pantry) until sugar is dissolved.  If no sugar is used, the vodka is ready to use immediately – or as soon as you get it ice-cold in your freezer!

Elderflower Lemonade (or, a way to use up all those extra flowers you I have picked so greedily)

(Which, as an added bonus, does not take weeks to be ready!)

• Snip remaining flowers into a pitcher or large jar.
• Slice a couple of slices off the remaining lemon and reserve.
• Squeeze the rest of the lemon into the pitcher on top of the flowers.
• Add 2-4 tablespoons of sugar per 1-1.5L, depending on how sweet you like it.
• Fill the pitcher with cold water, or (if you are using a closing jar or if your pitcher has a good lid) sparkling water.
• Drop the lemon slices on top of the flowers in the pitcher, and cover.
• Place in the refrigerator for 4-6 hours.  Filter through a mesh sieve before drinking – this will be a little more cloudy than the coffee-filter filtered alcohol.
• If the day is very hot, serve over ice.

Elderflower Lemonade

Happy Midsummer!