Do you enjoy eating garlic bread? Does oregano always find its way into your spaghetti sauce? Do you garnish potato salad with paprika? Then you are participating in the ancient tradition of using herbs and spice rack medicine to enhance the health benefits and digestibility of your food. Herbs in the kitchen not only augment the flavor of what we eat, they support our overall health and wellness on a daily basis.
Did you know that stuffing your turkey with sage helps keep away the colds that begin circulating around Thanksgiving? Or that adding ginger to a fish meal kills pathogens found specifically in fish? And when you sprinkle fennel into your meat marinades, it helps you digest the fat in the meat more easily.
Spice Rack Medicine
Think of your spice rack as more than a source of flavor. It is also a medicine chest, full of healing remedies that can help you keep your family well. There is an extraordinary pharmacy waiting for you right in your own kitchen. With just a handful of herbs, you can begin to fortify the nutrient and therapeutic density of your meals. Adding valuable vitamins, minerals, and digestive aids to your food takes little effort.
Using medicinal herbs doesn’t have to be foreign and difficult or take years of college to understand. We can begin with what we have on hand and already have a relationship with. Most of the time you don’t even have to buy anything. You just get to realize the full array of benefits of the spice rack medicine that currently sits in your cupboards.
Think of your spice rack as more than a source of flavor. It is also a medicine chest, full of healing remedies that can help you keep your family well.
Let’s take cinnamon for example; most everyone has cinnamon and has used it to liven up their oatmeal or pumpkin pie mix. Cinnamon is a highly medicinal herb with hundreds of health and kitchen medicine applications. It is a first-rate cold and flu prevention agent and remedy, and it offers relief from menstrual cramps, allergy symptoms, coughs, and much more.
The same thing holds true for all the common spices: oregano, garlic, sage, cloves, and pepper all contain healing attributes that inspire good food and good health.
Food is one of our most powerful medicines. We create millions of cells every few seconds. What we eat is what we use to build those cells. Here are just a few benefits of many kitchen herbs:
- Promote nutrient digestion and assimilation, helping to increase the quality of the cells that make up our tissue and organs
- Activate the circulatory system, contributing to more efficient dispersal of beneficial nutrients
- Help to calm the body while eating, so you can relax and enjoy the amazing process of digesting life into life
When you understand the understand the comprehensive support that the spice rack offers, you realize the value of using herbs to practice preventive health care while you eat.
Adding ginger to increase the digestibility of chicken, pacifying the mucus-forming effects of yogurt with cardamom, whipping up a fennel tea when someone complains of a stomachache—this is the creative, health-giving art of having fun with herbs in the kitchen. Who knows how long that stomachache would have persisted or who else would have contracted it were it not quelled with a spice rack medicine?
The small act of adding healing herbs and spices to our food is one of many things we do to nurture and care for ourselves and those around us.
Herbal Allies in the Kitchen
Many people use herbs and spices in their cooking, often because these food combinations are what they grew up with, because a recipe calls for herbs and spices, or because it is just in the ether that you can’t make spaghetti sauce without oregano. Awareness of the health benefits is not in the forefront of why we use spices.
Often people serve food combinations without realizing the medicinal value of what they are cooking with. Whether we appreciate it or not, the use of herbs to support optimum digestion is embedded in garnishes, sauces, dressings, and condiments. It is common to serve chicken with curry sauce, garlic with eggs, and mint jelly with lamb. You will find cinnamon applesauce with pork chops, dill pickles with lunchmeat sandwiches, juniper berries with cabbage, and ginger with fish.
Mustard seed would sit in my mom’s cupboard all year. She didn’t often use mustard seed, but she always pulled it out for the special occasion of preparing corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day. She is of Irish heritage, and that is the dish that her mother and grandmother had prepared in celebration of the holiday. It is a good thing she used the mustard seed, otherwise that corned beef would sit like a wet log in the stomach.
Herbs and spices are our allies, not only enlivening the taste of our food but also working in hundreds of ways to keep our bodies healthy.
Herbs and spices are a gift from nature. We are nature, and plants have an affinity with our bodies. Herbs and spices are our allies, not only enlivening the taste of our food but also working in hundreds of ways to keep our bodies healthy. When I add thyme to spaghetti sauce, I think about how it is helping to keep my family from catching a cold or getting a stomach bug from something in the food.
We all have to eat, and we need whole, seasonal foods to be healthy. We need herbs and spices not only for flavor, but also to help us digest and assimilate what we eat. If you look through old cookbooks, you’ll see that each food is paired with specific spices. Sage goes with turkey, pepper spices cheese sauces, fennel accompanies sausage, celery seed garnishes root vegetables, mustard and horseradish are served with beef, and the list of spice rack medicines goes on.
Wisdom of Our Ancestors
Many family home medicine lineages in the Western world were lost in the last several generations. We were mesmerized by the novelty and scientifically proven “superiority” of synthetic food and modern medicine. We cast our grandmothers’ teas and herbal powders to the wind. I have often wondered how it must feel to a grandmother when her clan dismisses her ancient wisdom as an old wives’ tale.
This loss of ancestral food and medicine literacy is nothing short of tragic. I can’t count the number of students that have come to class talking about their grandmothers’ soups and herbal recipes that no one paid attention to and are now lost. Generations of observation of what herbs to use when and how to best prepare foods for optimal health traded for television advertisement medicine.
The current spice rack is a remnant of the wisdom of how to bring the earth’s harvest into our homes to feed and keep our families well. It is the accumulation of thousands of years of experience all powdered and packaged into convenient little jars. Take a closer look at your spice rack. The herbs come from all over the world, having touched many hands; they carry the lineage of our ancestors’ wisdom that using plants in our food helps keep us well.
The current spice rack is a remnant of the wisdom of how to bring the earth’s harvest into our homes to feed and keep our families well.
What is the value of garnishing your meals with herbs that rid foods of pathogens and aid everyone at the table in digesting their food with ease? Who knows how many bellyaches, headaches, and colds are averted with the skill of the spice-wielding cook? “Eat, drink, and be merry” is a well-known saying, but it’s hard to be merry unless what you eat is well spiced so you can digest it efficiently.
Our digestive process utilizes a significant amount of physical energy. When we eat packaged, chemical-laden foods, grouchiness sets in because our energy is siphoned into a discontented digestive system. When you are bogged down by foods that are difficult to assimilate, you don’t participate as much in the pleasures that life has to offer. If you are going to devour a heavy meal, don’t go it alone; use herbs and spice rack medicine to help you digest your food!
The spice cabinet is bursting with carminatives. It really is that simple. When you are supported in digesting your foods, you feel better, have more energy, and may even experience moments of exuberance and merriment after dinner.
Reclaim the Art of Using Herbs and Spices
Let’s reclaim the art of using herbs in our daily food routines and develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between what we eat and our wellness! Are you ready to transform your spice rack into a healing home apothecary? In my video-packed online course, you’ll learn how to use herbal medicine with the common kitchen herbs and spices that you already know and love.
You don’t have to have an herb garden or access to fresh herbs. Your spice rack is all you need! Join us in Herbal Kitchen Remedy Solutions
