Hints and tips and lovage soup.

Hints and tips, and a lovage soup.

I lecture quite a lot. Every now and then somebody tells me something interesting; their gems used to be collected on notes, to be forgotten ever after, but not this lot, cos I found a pile of them. Enjoy:

• Use roasted coffee beans for nausea. Just chew'em up.
• A tea of rowanberry leaf (Sorbus aucuparia), nettle leaf (Urtica dioica) and great willowherb leaf (Epilobium angustifolium) made a cough disappear. Don't ask me why, none of them is a cough herb.
• Nettle leaf is nice in fish soup.
• A salve with goosefoot (Chenopodium album) helps itchy skin.
• Smelly buckets: fill'em with water, leave overnight. Note, this will not help against the infamous nettle fertilizer stink.
• Use tea of maral root leaf (Stemmacantha carthamoides) as a hair conditioner.
• Smelly jar lids: dig them into your garden, leave them for a few days, and dig them up again. This really works; I'm told soil bacteria will eat anything that smells in those lids, leaving them neutral and useful for content other than fish, or onions, or pickles.

And here's a recipe for Leila's Lovage Soup:
6 onions
1.5 dl (150 ml, ⅓ pint) chopped-up lovage leaf (Levisticum officinale)
1 tsp sugar
2 tblsp flour
dash of butter
2 dl (200 ml, ½ pint) cream
1.5 l (1500 ml, 3 pints) (or less) water

Put a dash of butter into a pan, add onions, lovage and sugar. Leave on low heat until onions are soft. Then add flour, water and half the cream. Bring to a boil and let boil for a while. Add remaining cream just before serving.

Serve with toasted bread.