Culinary Oil for Everyday Health

Want to know the best way to increase your daily dose of herbal medicine? It’s all about infusing herbs into the kitchen staples that you use every day. You probably already use oil in your cooking, so let’s get some herbs into your oil! Infused with anti-inflammatory herbs and spices, this culinary oil for everyday health has fed my family’s wellness for decades.

With a bottle of infused oil ready to go, even on those days when you’re tired or just don’t feel like taking care of yourself, you can have flavor, nutrition, and medicine at your fingertips. You can drizzle it on potatoes, winter squash, rice, or scrambled eggs. Or you can add vinegar and turn it into a salad dressing.

This culinary oil for health recipe is from my book, The Herbal Kitchen. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of the ingredients.

Olive Oil Benefits

Fat, such as olive oil, is an incredible medium to steep herbs into. The fat draws out constituents from the herbs. Olive oil has a great shelf life and is incredibly medicinal in itself. Olive oil is antioxidant and antimicrobial. A long-term study found that “people who consume higher amounts of olive oil may lower their risk of premature death overall and from specific causes including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and neurodegenerative disease.”

Make sure your olive oil is organic and cold pressed. You don’t want to use heated oils because once you start heating oils in the production process, you get rancidity and oxidation.

Anti-Inflammatory Spices

Chronic inflammation is one of the main culprits in degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes. Getting anti-inflammatory spices into your food is one of the best things that you can do to take care of yourself and the people you love. This culinary oil for health features not just one, but five anti-inflammatory spices:

• Turmeric: Along with its many healing benefits and anti-inflammatory actions, turmeric helps with the dispersal of nutrition throughout the body.
• Paprika: Red foods are heart medicine! Flavonoid-rich paprika protects the cardiovascular system and calms inflammatory responses like allergies.
• Coriander: By fortifying digestion, coriander has an anti-inflammatory effect throughout the body. It also brings all the spices together into a tasty blend.

• Mustard seed: Rich in omega-3s and antioxidants, mustard seed helps to reduce systemic inflammation and softens the effect of damaging free radicals.
• Cinnamon: Cinnamon reduces inflammation, enhances circulation, and may improve risk factors for heart disease, such as cholesterol and blood pressure.

The shelf life of this oil is about a year. If you stick this in the refrigerator, you’re not going to remember to use it, so keep it out on your table!

Ready to dive into turning your spice rack into an effective home apothecary? Check out Herbal Kitchen Remedy Solutions

Print Recipe

Alchemy Oil

Author: Kami McBride

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp powdered turmeric
• 1 tbsp powdered paprika
• 1 tbsp powdered coriander
• 2 tsp powdered mustard seed
• 1 tsp powdered cinnamon
• 1 tbsp vodka
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 cups olive oil

Instructions

• Put the turmeric, paprika, coriander, mustard, and cinnamon in a bowl and stir in the vodka. Mash and stir the alcohol into the herbs until all the clumps are worked out. Rehydrating the herbs with vodka enhances the extraction of medicinal properties and savory flavors.
• Put a sealing lid on the bowl and let rehydrating herbs sit for 30 minutes.
• Put the rehydrated herbs, salt, and olive oil in a blender.
• Blend together for 5 to 10 minutes, or for as long as the blender doesn’t get too hot. If the blender starts to smell or smoke at any time, stop the blender and let it cool down completely. Once the blender is cool, blend oil and herbs together for 5 to 10 minutes until blender becomes warm.
• Pour oil mixture into a sterilized glass Mason jar and let sit for two weeks. Then your oil is ready to use.
• When making oil with dried herbs, it is not necessary to strain the herbs from the oil.
• Once you have used the oil, pour the remaining oily dried herbs into a marinade.

I would love to hear from you! How do you integrate herbs into your everyday health? What’s your favorite way to use culinary oil? Please share in the comments below.