Hey I'm Kami McBride, and I'm here at Mountain Rose Herbs, and I'm working out
of my book "The Herbal Kitchen." And I have an entire chapter on cordials, and today,
I want to make a cordial for you. It's called three-seed cordials (and
again, I have an entire chapter on cordials). Cordials are such an incredible
thing to have in your life. They support, they can support you in so many
different ways, and especially with digestion. And this cordial is one of
those incredible digestive supporting cordials that you can just drink a
little bit, this isn't something like you sit around and drink like wine, right?
This is like you, you take like half an ounce after your
meal, and that's how cordials are traditionally taken: half an hour, like a
half an ounce, before your meal or after your meal. Okay, so this this cordial has
fennel seed, coriander, and celery seed in it, and we're going to be using brandy to
extract, to infuse, the constituents of the herbs into. We're going to be using
one cup of brandy, three tablespoons of fennel seed, two tablespoons of coriander,
and one teaspoon of celery seed. And then we're going to put it all together,
we're gonna strain it out, and then we're gonna add honey to add a little bit of
sweetness so, as you like it. The sweet and the honey, I'm gonna add half a
cup of honey, but you can just add the honey that works for you as far as
sweetness, okay? Some people don't put honey in at all, I like it a little bit
sweet. So let's get started. Okay, so we've got our fennel seed, and what we're gonna do is,
we're gonna just kind of grind things up a little bit in the mortar
pestle first. So we're doing, again, this is three tablespoons of fennel, and fennel
is so supportive for normal digestion. It really helps with gas, bloating, helps you
to digest fat, and so we're gonna get the fennel seed ground up, and we'll get it
into our jar here. Okay, then we're gonna put in two teaspoons of coriander,
coriander again, is just another one of these
amazing digestive supporting herbs. This is really good for potlucks or feasts,
you know, when you've just eaten too much food, or you've eaten too many different
kinds of food, you want to get a little help with your digestion and coriander
is great for that. It helps you to digest your food, it helps to, you know
how sometimes you eat something and you're just like, "Hmm, I don't think those
beans were quite cooked enough," or it doesn't feel quite right? Coriander,
coriander will help settle that. Okay, so we've got our --that smells so good, I
LOVE that smell! The interesting thing about coriander is that it's
one of those spices that it can go sweet or savory. You know how some spices are,
like rosemary is for savory, right? Coriander, you can use with savory foods
or sweet foods, so that's one of the reasons why I love it. It's one of the
most used spices in my kitchen, actually. And then a teaspoon of celery seed.
Celery seed is slightly cooling, helps to cool down a hot digestion, you know,
if you're really, you know, sometimes after you eat too much,
you get like kind of bloated maybe, or certain foods will have your
pulse just pounding, you can feel the heat of your digestion working,
celery seed helps calm that. So there we've got our celery seed, and again, I smell everything,
all the time. Our body is always learning ,even though you think oh yeah,
I've smelled celery seed a thousand times, smell it again! Every time you
smell that, those oils get into your bloodstream, and they change who you are,
and they affect your chemistry, and so smelling the medicine that you work with
is part of the herbalism. Then we're gonna take, for the cordial, we're going to be extracting, or infusing, we're going to take a cup
of brandy, and this is a pint, so it's two cups. And so a lot of times, I don't
measure things in measuring cups if I can use the jar, you know, because
every time you measure, you lose a little bit. So I'm gonna, this is
about a cup, so I've got our brandy, and we can put our lid on. And so what we're
doing is, we're infusing these spices into the brandy, and we're gonna shake it,
and then we're gonna store it in a cabinet or a pantry, someplace, a cool, dark place,
and we're gonna shake it every couple days, and we let it sit for
a month. I want to actually just show you how to decant it right now, so that you
know how to do that. Okay, so let's just imagine that it's sat for a month,
and then what you would do is, you'd get your jar and get your funnel, and you've
got some cotton muslin here....so cotton, I love straining things out with
cotton muslin much more than, like cheesecloth. Cotton muslin, it's a tight
weave, and it's thin--there's lots of tightly woven fabric that's thick that
will just soak up your cordial--THIS is tightly woven and thin, and it's one of
the best decanting fabrics that I know of. So, ready? So what you do is, you just
pour it through the muslin. Okay, that was pretty simple, right? It just came right
through, and then what you're gonna do is, you're just gonna squeeze it, right, and
get all those, get everything out, okay?
Good, there you go, just set this aside, and what you want to do is get a pretty
jar to dispense it in. And this cordial is really nice to drink after after
dinner, after a heavy meal, after a celebration potluck, and you put it in a
pretty jar, and people are like "Mmm, that's, what's that?!". Okay, then we're
gonna add our honey, and honey is one of those things that I don't measure in
anything, because it's like gold to me, and I don't want to lose a single drop.
So I'm just eyeballing...
and the honey is totally to taste, you know, you can add a little bit, and then
taste it, and see if you like it, or add a little bit more. But you do want to shake
it so that you get the honey mixed in there. And then you get your, these are a
little bit bigger than cordial glasses, and again, cordial is traditionally about
a half an ounce after a meal, and it just helps you with your digestion, whatever
you've eaten, and you know, we know that in every every medicine system that I
know of, from Chinese Medicine, traditional Ayurveda, Western
clinical medicine and even Western medicine, they talk about, when you're not
feeling well, like, when you're catching a cold or a flu, or you just kind of don't
feel that well, to eat lightly, to eat soup, right? Why do, why do they tell
us that, why do they tell us to eat soup? Because soup is easy to digest, and when
you eat something that's easy to digest, and easy to eliminate, it frees up all
the energy that normally goes toward digestion--digestion takes a lot of work--
and so when you free up that energy, then your body can focus on what,
you know, whatever's happening, if you're starting to catch a cold.
So if we know that supporting our digestion helps us when we don't feel
well, why not get help supporting digestion with every meal? And that's the
gift of the herbs, these carminative, that's their gift, that's why I wrote The
Herbal Kitchen, is to help people realize that at every single meal, you can layer
in herbs to help give you more energy by supporting your digestion. And so that's
what this cordial does, it gives you just that. So I'm not saying drink
cordial at every meal, but let the herbs gift that to you,
that digestive support, and this is just one way to do that. So here you have
your three-seed cordial, and enjoy!