I am happy to report that I am much better from the cold I had last week.  I attribute this to thrice daily doses of elderberry syrup as well as a lot of other herbal remedies.  When I first started working with herbs, I was surprised by how effective they were.  A physician friend said physicians used to use herbs because they didn’t have anything better.  He is very much into pharmaceutical medicine.  

I agree that during the early days of pharmaceutical medicine, physicians had wondrous experiences of apparently fatal cases of bacterial infections, where after receiving penicillin, the patients sat up in bed the next day drinking tea and eating toast, clearly on the mend.  Sadly, those days are over.  

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria now need to be treated with a cocktail of newer antibiotics which are all losing the evolutionary race with bacteria quite quickly.    Antibiotics don’t last long anymore and are not profitable so pharmaceutical companies are not willing to invest in the research and development of antibiotics.  They prefer instead to invest in drugs that patients have to take every day of their lives.  They prefer customers to cures. 

This leaves us in the clutches of a predatory-pharmaceutical industry that seeks only profit, not good patient outcomes.  I began dabbling with herbal gardening and medicines, some years ago, because I thought it was quaint and a bit witchy.  I soon changed my mind as I found the medicines I was able to make were very effective and I have been able to help many people when the pharmaceutical-medical industrial complex failed them.  

Herb gardens can also be very beautiful and intriguing.  The herb-gardening year just started with the arrival of Richters Herb and Vegetable catalogue in my post box.  Just looking at this catalogue excites me and I have to start with a firm limit on how many seeds I will buy.  I already have lots of plants and a favourite is elecampane.  A packet of elecampane seeds from Richters will set you back only $3.75 and you will have this tall stately plant at the back of your flower beds for the rest of your life.

A friend was suffering from a lung problem.  She had a strange film forming over her lungs causing shortness of breath to a very marked degree.  She went to a physician who diagnosed the problem and said, “There is nothing we can do for you but don’t worry; this is a minor problem.”

As a lifelong asthmatic, I can tell you that not being able to breathe is a bitch.  My friend could hardly walk for lack of breath when she came to see me.  I thought she was dying.  I had just harvested some elecampane roots which are huge like parsnips, and I gave her a root to slice up and make a strong tea with.  She tried it and her lung problem cleared up!  Surprised?  Yes, I was.  

Besides being able to treat lung problems, elecampane stimulates digestion and its flowers make a good yellow and orange dye.  All that for $3.75!  Actually, the seeds will be free if I can only find my stash.  The plants grow six feet or more tall with lovely huge leaves and a cluster of small yellow flowers at the top.  The plants produce many seeds in their first year.  You should wait two or three years to harvest the excellent roots.  

Another herb I really love is the elder bush.  These things can turn into bloody great trees if you do not prune them in January.  I prune mine down to one foot and the tallest was a European Elderberry that was twelve-feet tall.  Richters catalogue states that, “studies show that elder extracts provide powerful relief from the symptoms of colds and flu.  Indeed, the elderberry has been shown to deactivate the flu virus.”  

Richters will sell you an elderberry plant for about eleven dollars.  Once established, elders are easy to propagate by cuttings.  I have heaps of cuttings and if you want any to start , call me at 355-1088.   Just shove the cuttings into some nice soil in your garden, it really is that easy.  

Every garden can benefit from having at least one elder bush.  The flowers are white and tiny but grouped in large flat clusters and they smell so sweet.  Traditionally, they are harvested and left in a basin of water overnight so people can bathe their hands, faces and babies in the deliciously-scented water.  The flowers can also be simmered into a strong tea which is strained and an equal amount of sugar or honey is added to make a flavoured syrup for desserts and drinks.  The British use the flowers to make a sparkling wine.  The pollinating insects love them.

Druids like to do things in threes so my last herb is Saint John’s Wort.  Wort is an old Saxon word for plant.  Do not be without this amazing, multi-talented herb in your garden.

I was planning to write about herb gardens and why my readers might want to plan one or expand the one they already have.  That will have to wait as it seems there is a bit of a cold going around.  I learned about this soup more than twenty five years ago and it has been our standby cold and flu treatment ever since.  

Soup is not our only line of attack.  We drink copious quantities of ginger tea which is very anti-inflammatory  as well as being tasty and comforting.  We take elderberry syrup made from our own frozen elderberries and it is both highly effective at banishing colds and flu while being so very tasty.  We also do the old-fashioned head steaming over a basin of hot water with oil of oregano in it (3 to 5 drops only) and a towel over the head.  This last is very good to treat or, better still, to prevent chest infections.  

To make a great Nuclear Noodle Soup, I start out with chicken stock which naturally contains an enzyme that helps to keep the lungs clear of congestion.  I make this stock from the oldest hens possible as they are tough and can take the long simmering to get all the nutrients and flavour out.  I only use my own birds as I am very fussy about their nutrition and they get a lot of greens to eat which makes their eggs and flesh very healthful.

I usually make a huge cauldron of stock and then pressure can it.  When I started pressure canning, one of my walking buddies asked why it was that I wanted to be a nineteenth century housewife?  This would be because I know for a fact that it is not possible to buy a nutritious and tasty stock of any kind.  My sister in the city was using some store-bought stock and I tasted it.  The flavour reminded me of nothing so much as dirty dishwater.  My brother in law, who is quite the foodie, says that my stock is the best he has ever had.  

If you don’t have stock already made, it is easy to make stock so grab a chicken carcass and find a recipe you like.  Once you have mastered the art of making a good stock, your cooking will improve by a whole letter grade.  

I chopped two of my beautiful red onions and began to fry them in some golden rendered-chicken fat.  The fat on a chicken should be deepest yellow to orange.  If it is white, the bird never got any greens and the flesh is not nutritious.  The eggs we produce here have yolks that are orange and friends from rural China say the eggs on their farm had yolks that were nearly red.  They kept the hens free range and that is the best way.  Here, we feel we have to lock our hens up as there are so many predators, such as mink and eagles, that we feel it is not kind to expose them to so much danger.  

After the onions, I would normally add garlic, home-grown of course, but not today.  I chopped up a heap of fresh garlic and ginger, which I keep frozen in chunks, and I added them at the end of the cooking process as they have more medicinal value when eaten raw.  I did add a bunch of chopped leeks, carrots, peas, sweet red peppers and a quart of canned tomatoes, all from our garden.  The soup looked very pretty and that is important to tempt the appetite of a sick person.  I also threw in about a tablespoon of chili flakes. 

That might sound like a lot of chili but we ended up with six quarts of soup in the end.  I seasoned it with salt and pepper and then chopped up a generous bunch of cilantro and added that right before serving.  

Now, it is called Nuclear Noodle Soup so where do the noodles come in?  I like to cook with rice noodles, especially the broad kind.  I cook them separately, cool them under cold running water and place some noodles in the bottom of the soup bowl.  Any extra noodles should be placed in a covered dish in the fridge.  The soup should be served with chili sauce on the side.  

The soup is tasty, pretty and comforting.  It is easy to put the leftover soup in quart jars while it is very hot and put the lids on.  As they cool, a seal develops which enhances the keeping quality of the soup.  This is not canning, just a little hack for keeping the soup fresher longer.  It still needs to go into the fridge.  I hope you will try making this soup as I am sure it will do you good.