Recipe Box: Damiana Love Cordial

This one went to someone who already sees unicorns,
so they should be fine.

I've spoken about cordial-making before, and wanted to share with you a few of my most recent batches, and their basic recipes.

Damiana is a flowering herb that I am quite fond of in both flavor and effect.  I've already rhapsodized about her beauty on this blog.

Damiana Love Cordial - a Basic Recipe

• Play some sexy music and set the mood. (optional, but encouraged) 


• Fill your jar of choice half-full with damiana. Add any other herbs that make you feel tingly, happy, and naughty.  Some suggestions are rose petals, vanilla bean, honeysuckle flowers, horny goat weed, muira pauma...


• Add booze!  In this case, I used a good quality, clean-flavored vodka.  Fill the jar up to the top!


• Close jar, swish to mix it all together, and put into a dark cabinet.  Shake it occasionally.


• Six weeks later, strain the mixture, and squeeze the liquid out of the herbs.  Add the herbs to your compost.


• Make a sugar syrup, or honey syrup to sweeten.  The cordial in the picture above was done with honey, hence the near opaque quality of the delicious nectar!

The Sweetened Essence of Earl Grey is subtitled with
"A Drink for Gentlemen, A Drink for Rogues"

These two bottles are at Dragon*Con at this very moment, in the hands of a puppeteer, warming the tips of earlobes and tingling toes and tongues and other giggly extremities of beautiful geeks.  Travel safe, and bring delight!

Some folks to follow...

You can make this, too! 

KaraPaints has a great tutorial on how to make a chalkboard quote-board, and use it to set goals and reminders for her two kids as they go to school every day. 

She also shares watercolor lessons for beginners, photo fridays, and the occasional recipe!

Adonis DNA chain by DoktorNix

Doktor Nix's Mercantile is a great shop on Etsy.  If you are into lovely chainmail accessories, handcrafted corsets and vests, and the occasional slave collar *ahem* - check out the lovely work offered by Nix and Terana. 

Lynette McDonough has just made her amazing crafts available via her new venture, Littlest Pumpkin Studio.

Her paintings are fabulous, her creepy baby dolls are mind-blowing and spine chilling, but where she really packs a punch is in making lightweight, flexible masks.  They are quite simply awesome, and sold in Asheville at The Costume Shoppe.

The same skill sets go into crafting some amazing corsets and costumery, just trust me and go see!

Putting away 2012 - Tomatoes and Cherries

A Busy Kitchen, by Amber Shehan
Candle-making, honey jars, tincture jars,
tomatoes, drying herbs, and more!

Phew...it is hard to find time to write when I'm so busy chopping, boiling, cooking, and eating really yummy food.

To start with, I found cherries at a really good price at the grocery store, and I got about 3 pounds.  So far, I now have:

• Cherry Jam: For this, I used the recipe in the pectin box.  Next time, I'm going to try Pomona pectin, or some other method with less sugar.  I ended up with four 8oz jars, and six 4oz jars of nice, firm jam!  
•  Dried Cherries: Dried in my dehydrator. Yum!
• Brandied cherries:   Rough chopped, pitted cherries submerged in brandy, and stored in a crock in the fridge.
• Cherry Cordial:  Cherries and their pits put in a jar, covered with vodka, to be strained in a few weeks and sweetened as needed.
• Cherry Stone Cordial: Cherry pits covered in vodka, to be strained in a few weeks and sweetened as needed.

Also working in their jars are new batches of tinctures and cordials, which will be strained and ready in a few weeks:

• Mint tincture
• Earl Grey cordial
• Damiana cordial

Tomatoes! Yay!  - by Amber Shehan

My heirloom tomatoes this year are taking their sweet time to change from green to red.  I knew that I wouldn't likely have enough to can from my few vines, so went looking for fresh 'maters in my town.

It turns out that there is a farm stand down the street from my house who has boxes of big, fat, firm tomatoes ready for canning.  I got somewhere between 12-18 lbs of tomatoes for a mere $5!

After a day or two of work, I ended up with:

• 2 quarts of cooked, herby tomato sauce
• 5 quarts and 2 pints of diced tomatoes
• A fresh spaghetti sauce for dinner, made with pork sausage and garlic and red wine, which left a few spare pint jars to go into the freezer!
• A really spicy barbeque sauce that I can't puree until I get a new blender, put in the freezer until later...

I've got more irons in the fire, too...what are you all preserving, making fresh, or enjoying from your yard, garden, or farm market?

August Update

Howdy there, folks! 

I'm working out a bit of revamping with this blog and with my honey shop at PixiesPocket.com.  Between that, and canning up the garden as it's coming in, I've not had time to write. 

Bear with me, and until I'm back to creating content, I'm happy to share some awesomeness from other sources that you might not have seen!

Some Great Recipes

Cooking Comically:  These are excellent!  Tyler Capps creates simple but really good recipes drawn in comic form.  It's a great for getting the no-frills person in the kitchen to try their hand at making things, and he'll have a published book coming out soon.

Quinoa and Potato Curry: This is from the blog KaraPaints.  True, she does normally keep her posts to art-related topics, including a series teaching you (Yes, YOU!) how to paint with watercolors.  But even artists have to eat...so Kara made a nummy meal the other day and shared her recipe.

No More Herbalists on Etsy?

So, there are a lot of herbalists who are annoyed with Etsy due to new labeling requirements that are more stringent than the FDA requires, and are moving their wares to new venues.  If you are on that boat and want a new place to sell your products, or if you are an herbal shopper who is wondering where all the good stuff has gone, visit PoppySwap!

To that end, you will see me listing more bulk herbs and honeys on PoppySwap, and using Etsy for jewelry and divination listings.