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January 5, 2006
DIY Cough Medicine
I've spent the last couple weeks fighting and recovering from what I thought was allergies, but which my supervisor quickly diagnosed as "What's going around" (I think he's fishing for a copay). I wound up loosing my voice for about three days, and while I'm mostly recovered, there's still this ticklish cough hanging around. It's most irritating at night, it likes to kick in as soon as I lay down. So yesterday, having decided I was not going to spend another night fighting with it, I went to my friendly hometown Kroger store, and bought some fresh thyme.
Thyme is well known for it's anti-viral properties, and several years ago I learned how to make a cough syrup from thyme, which worked very well against the ticklish type of cough I've been having the last couple nights. Instead of going for the dried thyme like I normally do I decided to try using fresh thyme. (My thinking was that fresh herb might have retained more of the medicinal properties than dried herb.) After stripping the leaves from the stems I placed the leaves into a tea ball and left it in boiling water until the water had reduced significantly. I add honey for sweetening, and the end result is more like a strong tea than a syrup. I did use some of it before going in to work, but saved most of it for bedtime, and I fell asleep much sooner last night than the previous nights.
I'm brewing tonights stock while typing this, and thinking about experimenting with growing my own herbs in the window. (One side-effect of using fresh herbs is that my hands smell like thyme for awhile after stripping the leaves, and that makes me hungry for spaghetti.)
Posted by Anna at January 5, 2006 1:15 PM