Cures in the Kitchen - Ginger

You have a headache - you take a pill
You have a nasty cold - you take a pill
You have a skin rash - you take medicine
You have a hiccup - you take a pill...maybe not yet ..but I wouldnt be surprised if there is a cure available for that in the pharmacy ! The point being, I think the more advanced and technologically savvy our generation gets, the more paranoid we become.
At least, with respect to illnesses and diseases. I am not negating the effectiveness of modern medicines and the wonderful cures that are now possible due to advances in science and technology. Such medicines were not heard of 20 - 30 years ago and have made a world of difference in the quality of life of the people who have access to these medicines.
What I see as a problem is the fact that more often than not, we tend to seek out medicines to quell the symptoms rather than getting at the root of the illness and trying to find a solution for that.
We all know that the human body is a wonderful , self-correcting , self healing entity ;if only we give it a chance to do its job. I do not have a medical background and I am not an expert on any alternative healing techniques, but I know for a fact that a dose of healthy food and an active lifestyle does wonders for the human body. Most of modern day illnesses are a result of gross over-indulgence and over processing of food. Food is extremely nurturing;we only have to make it work for us.
We need not even look far, the humble kitchen pantry has a host of silent soldiers which are quite effective at combating mild discomforts and illnesses.

The Cures in The Kitchen series is my attempt at maintaining a list of common ingredients found in the kitchen that can be used as a first line of defense against illnesses.

Today's Star is Ginger - (botanical name Zingiber officinale)
Ginger is a ubiquitous ingredient in several Asian cuisines. It has a very distinct pungent flavour.
Young ginger is relatively mild. When ginger fully matures, it starts getting dry and fibrous. It is advisable to avoid dry ginger. Ginger is very widely used in the Indian sub-continent and
it shouldnt be surprising to find out that India is the largest producer of Ginger, followed by China.
Fresh ginger is usually peeled and then used to flavour vegetable, curry and even rice preparations. There are a myriad of medicinal uses of Ginger, not only as prescribed in Ayurveda, but also internationally.
Here are but a few of them :

• Ginger tea made with fresh ginger, black pepper and lemon has been long used to soothe common colds and sore throats.

• Ginger preparations are used against diarrhea.

• Ginger is also very effective in treating nausea and morning sickness. Ginger tea or crystallized ginger can be consumed to combat nausea.

• Ginger is also used in the treatment of inflammation.

• A paste of ginger, when applied to the forehead is said to relieve headaches.

• Fresh Ginger juice when mixed with honey and tulsi (holy basil) is often used for coughs and sore throats. (Since honey is not to be administered to infants, this applies to older children and adults.)
  

• Ginger has also been touted as having digestive properties. Fresh ginger included in meals aids in digestion.

• Ginger increases the warmth in the body and increases perspiration, thus helping in reducing fevers.

• Regular consumption of ginger helps is stimulating proper blood circulation and helps in flushing out the toxins from the blood stream.

Possible side-effects:
Although general and moderate use of ginger doesnt cause any side effects in healthy people,
excessive doses can cause heartburn and irritation of the mouth.
Its also recommended that people with gall stones should not consume ginger.

Availablility :
Young fresh ginger is available at local Asian stores.
Fresh mature ginger can be found at health food stores and in the produce section of grocery stores.
Dried ginger or ginger powder is available in Asian stores and at health food stores.
Ginger in capsule form is also available at local health food stores.

Storage:
Fresh ginger can be stored in the refrigerator's salad drawer.
Powdered ginger should be stored in an airtight container. The taste of powdered ginger is quite different to that of fresh ginger.
Medicinal usages almost always employ fresh ginger.

Ginger belongs to the same family as turmeric, cardomom and galangal(Used in Thai cuisines)

Personal Notes:
I have personally used ginger tea very effectively in reducing the effects of a common cold and sore throat.
I have also used it to combat nausea.
I frequently administer ginger juice and honey to my son, a preschooler , when he seems to be developing a cough.
I sometimes add the juice of tulsi leaves (holy basil plant).
I almost always add chopped fresh ginger while cooking.

Recipes :
Add a small sliver of ginger to your tea cup to awaken your sleepy senses in the morning.
Add fresh grated ginger to a cup of fresh fruits and see what a difference that makes to an ordinary fruit plate.
I will be adding more recipes that use ginger as the star ingredient.

As an end note, I would like to say that we should use our common sense while making a decision about our health and that of our family. Moderation is the key for everything !
if you or anybody in your family is really sick or if you dont know the cause of the illness, then go to a doctor with haste follow his recommendations regarding treatment of the condition,
but give the hidden medicines in your kitchen a chance first. You might just be surprised !

Do share how you use this wonder in the kitchen as a medicinal tool !

Disclaimer: I am not a healthcare professional. What I have noted above is some information that I got on the internet, some information received from my mother and grandmother and some shared personal experiences about using a herb.
This post is not intended as a replacement for traditional medicines.
Proper guidance of a healthcare professional must always be sought before trying out anything new.

Winter Wonderland !

" Sleigh bells ring, are you listening,
In the lane, snow is glistening
A beautiful sight,
We're happy tonight.
Walking in a winter wonderland. "




We woke up today to a magical world outside !
Lawns, vehicles and houses were covered with a thick layer of snow, there was a considerable chill in the air
and streets had a deserted look.
Snow in Dallas is generally a-once-a-year event.
Snow several times a year with extreme cold temperatures is quite rare.

As I drove to work, I took in the sights and realized that the snow had transformed my ordinary
world into something quite mystical and pristine.
Bare trees were adorned with loads of snow and had an other wordly feeling to them.
The rooftops of houses were blanketed lightly with snow, giving them a look of cozy comfort.
People you met urged you to drive carefully and to stay warm.

As is often the case, we generally tend to focus on the negative aspects - the outcome of being able to think, I guess -
about possible accidents , about the inconvenience , about delays , about horrible traffic.
But we should try and suspend that predisposition to dwell on disaster. Its too beautiful out there to ignore !
So enjoy what nature has graciously bestowed on you ( I would probably be singing a different tune had I been
residing in any of the northern states ;-) ).
Dress warmly and go build a snowman , have snow fights with your children.
Snuggle under a blanket with a cup of hot chocolate or a delicous bowl of soup.
Listen to romantic melodies or watch a movie :)

Enjoy this day because tomorrow will bring other moments and today will be gone in the blink of an eye.

Keep warm and savour what the day brings !

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a strange play-mate.. you never know when it is going to accost you and insist on taking you down memory lane...
Most of the times you can anticipate its arrival -
* When its festival time in India (almost every month, you might say ! ) and you are at work, in a different country , in a different time zone, yearning to be with friends and family who are merrily celebrating
* When you talk to your parents on the phone
* When you get together with friends to celebrate an occasion

Sometimes, you wont see it coming, but you can sense it gently taking your hand and leading you away -
* When you see the parents of your friends ; softspoken , bespectacled , tolerant, loving and probably balding fathers and vivacious, enthusiastic , gently smiling , laughing mothers who remind you of your own much-loved and much-missed parents
* When you see another family, going cycling together or playing tag in the front yard , or taking their dog for a walk, or just having dinner together in a restaurant
* When you see a football / basketball game in progress with vehement and boisterous spectators, you remember cricket matches in the past which you ardently watched with your family and friends

And oftentimes it takes you by surprise, striking you out of the blue and yanking you into days past. It was Monday morning and I was filling up my van with gas, on my way to my son's school and then on to work. I hadnt had my morning cup of coffee yet and would have been termed almost bleary eyed if it hadnt been for the fact that I had showered and was dressed
for work. It was a new week and a new day and I was looking forward to it , but not just then.

Out of nowhere, I heard a sound that I hadnt heard in a long time ...Caw Caw ...the shrill , often racuous cawing of the common black crow ! (I dont know if there is a paucity of crows in the city where I live or it just doesnt penetrate my conscious hearing, but I didnt recall hearing
that sound in the recent past !) I turned my head and there it was - a medium sized crow , sitting on a lamp post and singing ..err..cawing away merrily ..And just like that , I was transported to the backyard of my father's ancestral house in the coastal villages of North Kanara. That was an annual pilgrimage for my family when I was a kid ...visiting my relatives for two glorious carefree months.
Having been brought up in a city, living in a sprawling house with dusty attics and dark corridors was a refreshing change. Mornings and evenings would be spent in various activities and events around the house. But afternoons were ours to spend as we chose. My brother and my cousins would be holed up on the staircases, pretending to be bus and truck drivers and I would be tucked in a chair in the front yard, under a huge mango tree, with my favourite book of the moment. The shade was a relief from the afternoon sun and the slight breeze flowing in from
the sea was almost soporific. The only ones to keep me company were cats from neighbouring houses, scrounging around for food and of course , crows sitting on the above mentioned mango trees, enthusiastically and unrelentlessly trying to sing me to sleep. These were my constant afternoon companions, familiar and irritating at the same time. The afternoons would always pass as if in a haze, I would be half reading and half asleep, but I didnt have any complaints ! Hectic school days would arrive soon and I had only so many days of satisfactory solitude :-)
Evenings would again be spent with ever arriving cousins and visitors, as is the norm in any village setting. Every household always has guests trooping in and out and the hosts are ever prepared for every visit ! But thats besides the point (maybe another post!).

So there I was, remembering crows and lazy afternoons and mango trees. The thud of the gas nozzle thrust me back into the present. My toddler was squirming in his car seat and the gas pump was spitting out the receipt, thus ending my sojourn into the past. Getting into the driver's seat, I turned my head to look at the bird that had started this pleasant interlude, but it was nowhere to be seen.
....Perhaps it was sitting on some other lamp post - crying out its high pitched , ear piercing tune , leading some other hapless individual down memory lane.

What triggers your nostalgia ?

BBC Book Tag - How many have you read ?

Chanced upon this tag at the Punarjanman blog (Thanks!).
For all fellow book lovers out there, consider yourselves tagged.
This is supposed to be a BBC generated list. There are quite a few books in there which have interested me in the past and I have been meaning to read them !
Now that I have seen this list, I shall have to make sure and get them from the library (if only to have more x's on my list!! )

Instructions: Copy this into your blog. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. Tag other book nerds.
The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible in parts
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens x

Total: 5

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy x
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

Total: 3

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell x
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

Total: 2

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens x
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis x
34 Emma – Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen x
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne x

Total: 6

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy x
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

Total: 3

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens x
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Total: 2

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas x
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding x
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

Total: 2

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens x
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett x
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt

Total: 2

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom x
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

Total: 3

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas x
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

total: 2

Grand total = 30

Nourishing minds !

Education is not the answer to the question. Education is the means to the answer to all questions."
-- William Allin

"An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life."
-- Source Unknown


Recently, while randomly browsing through Barnes and Noble, I chanced upon a book with a very interesting title.
It was called 'The Well trained mind'. The few pages that I rifled through intrigued me and I couldnt wait until I got my hands on the book.
Its another matter that I did have to wait quite a bit before I could access the book (but since thats a testament to my laziness more than
anything else, I will not elaborate on that.! ) The book is written by two women, a mother and a daughter team. It is a kind of a reference book for parents who want to take a more active and involved approach to their childrens' education. A comprehensive guide to the list of topics that should be introduced to children at each development level, this book covers grades K-12.
Wait, you might say, shouldnt books of this kind be read by teachers and educators ? After all, kids go to school for that very reason.
We as parents expend some effort in finding the best schools for our children and we would be within our rights to expect that the teachers at these schools be on top of everything under the sky and be the best resources themselves when it comes to the education of their students.

While all that is valid, I strongly feel that we shouldnt forget that education always begins and continues at home. We as parents should always know what our children are learning at school. That is especially true for parents who havent attended schools in the US and have absolutely no idea about the curriculum followed here. All my dicussions with other parents in the know has made me realize that the
education system here is completely different than the one that I grew up with.
In such a situation, wouldnt it be advisable to be aware of as much as possible ? To be able to help them in their school work ?
Wouldnt it be gratifying to know whether your child's capacity is more than what they are learning in schools and then be able do introduce them to more interesting topics ?
Wouldnt your heart soar when you see your children make the best of their abilities and be able to use their intelligence to the maximum ?
Wouldnt you want them to explore not only academic interests but also fuel their imagination and curiosity ?

On the other hand, it is a rather large investment of your time and energy. Not everybody might be able to sit down with their children everyday to make them study. The kids might not have the inclination to do so either.. But then the challenge is about incorporating education in day to day activities where you do spend time with your kids in any case.

For toddlers, parents could teach shapes and colours and numbers and alphabets very easily in the course of a car ride, or while setting the table for dinner or while watering your plants. You could let the kids have a small container with a few flowers and let them water it and see the plant flourish. The point of this interaction would be more practical rather than academic.

For older children, you could invest in a good telescope and learn about the planetary system together. Enterprising parents could attempt to build a rudimentary solar system with lightweight balls and then cover it with paper. Let the kids paint it, either from a picture or from imagination and then hang it up from the ceiling in their rooms !

For kids in the 7th - 10th grades , a magnifying glass could open up loads of possibilities..Take every opportunity to use a dictionary with your children if they are of reading age.
Thats an amazing way to increase your vocabulary.


These are just possibilities ...I am a newbie at this myself, so its exciting to think about opportunities to learn with your kid,
because you will be learning quite a lot with your child and about your child too !

I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, revising spellings and doing homework. Thinking back, I am touched that she took enough interest in my education, even though she herself wasnt able to complete higher education. With the vast resources available to us now, we do not have any excuses for not becoming co-educators for our children.

There are a few online links that are pretty interesting :
http://www.jstart.org
www.mathcantakeyouplaces.org

A search on homeschooling will also provide lots of links that we can explore.

What strategies do you employ to make the environment around your family funfilled and enriching at the same time ?
I would love to know about your techniques !