Stupid Weather

Honey-Lemon-Ginger Tea Time!

We seem to have sped past fall again and jumped into winter with its blustery, cold, icky weather; and though the rain is very much needed, going directly from muddy and gross into frozen is not going to be fun. Leeloo still doesn’t have her full winter coat yet either, so she has been extra grumpy to everybody. To make up for this I fed them some hay in their shelters which they proceeded to make a giant mess of. This is why the hay needs to go in hay boxes! (Still working on the last six – and still trying to figure out a hay-net-lid solution.)

I have been making up for the cold weather chores for myself by making honey–lemon–ginger tea since those ingredients can supposedly help with all sorts of health things – and it tastes good and warms me up after being wet and cold. Here is my very inexact “recipe”:

• Fill a mug with water and then put that water in a small saucepan (What size mug you ask? Whatever you have on hand – I did warn you this was an inexact recipe)
• Add the juice of half a lemon (don’t worry about the seeds you can fish them out or just ignore them)
• Grate in some ginger using a microplane (I keep my ginger in the freezer and just grate off however much I want and I don’t bother peeling it). How much? However much you feel like, if you put in too much you can always add more honey, if you don’t put in enough you can always grate in some more as you drink it, if you use the microplane you don’t need to cook it to get the flavor
• Simmer for 5-10 minutes
• Let sit in the saucepan to cool down to somewhere around 105-100 degrees (and if you wander away and forget for an hour or two you can always reheat it and let it cool down again, not that I do that of course)
• Pour it all back into the mug and add local raw honey to taste (some of the good things in raw honey can be killed by temperatures much higher than 105 degrees which is why you want to let it cool down first)

When I am actually sick and my throat hurts I really up the honey, when I’m feeling fine I use a lot less honey and up the ginger.

We haven’t gotten much done this week because I have been focused on getting my presentations done for the AMATYC Conference in Toronto next week. I did manage to get them done with four days to spare! That means this weekend can be dedicated to projects (just like every other weekend – someday we’ll be caught up)