Well, we're midway into the third year of our dual-degree program, and my cohort and I have just started to get underway with our studies of classical Chinese medicine. I'd say there's a smattering of excitement and a generous amount of awe of the medicine. As a group, my classmates and I are adorably awkward and humble as we try to practice some of the wildly un-Western concepts. So far, one thing is for sure: it's a ridiculously beautiful medicine. Let's indulge in a little of it's beauty, shall we?

For a recent assignment, I was asked to prepare a classical Chinese medicinal formula. You know, a recipe from a 1800 year old book. No big.

I got to choose the formula that I would prepare, but given how little I know about classical formulas, selecting my recipe was a lot like throwing darts, especially with my aim. I ended up working with a charming interplay of herbs found to "govern" in cases of, as my instructor put it, "stomach qi rebellion", a charming way of implying conditions where stuff moves upward from the stomach, as far as I can tell, like hiccups, belching and (what are the kids saying these days?) Ralphing?

Despite its ancientness, my recipe included some familiar herbs: tangerine peel, licorice, ginger and a few others, including bamboo! Bamboo, the familiar, yet super hip, boringly zen member of the grass family. Famous in certain thai curries, as an eco-friendly building material, and sometimes, as a most stubborn and aggressive garden weed. How fun to get to know it as a medicine too.

Our instructions for the assignment were to make the medicine exactly according to the original recipe. This one is a decoction, meaning the herbs are boiled for a particular amount of time. Here it is boiling away. Forty-five minutes of this, yielded a dark, slightly sweet, slightly smoky, very concentrated ...elixir, shall we say?

Behold, friends, an entire post dedicated to the magic that is cinnamon. See, me and cinnamon went way, way back. I thought I knew knew the herb--good ol' cinnamon, you know: tasty with apples, fun in a smoothie, a secret ingredient in a handful of savory dishes, even.

Then came the day I threw a few cinnamon sticks (also called quills) in my herb grinder. That's when we really met, and I learned that cinnamon is less like a flavor of boxed cereal and much more like a small fire that burns sweet, a gentle sun ray spiked with electricity, or a languid kitten that dreamily pricks you with its tiny claws. Oh, cinnamon.

This transformation of the herb from familiar to delightfully powerful and somewhat exotic, is the effect of experiencing the plant in a more complete way. Grinding the herb right before using it eliminates the time that the ground herb sits around, all the while dissipating it's precious constituents directly into the air, or allowing light to break down the herb's natural chemicals. So, maybe cinnamon can serve as an example of how alive these fresh ground spices can be.

A couple years ago, I bit the bullet and bought myself a coffee grinder and dedicated it solely to herbs and spices (no coffee allowed!). The payoff has been all these super sexy new relationships with herbs I used to think were mundane. Mustard seed! Cumin! Black pepper, for crying out loud! Who knew black pepper had floral notes??

Grinding herbs at home isn't too complicated as long as you have a spice grinder (or coffee grinder, same thing) that you're willing to keep free of coffee beans. Just throw in your spice and press the only button on the machine!

In the case of cinnamon, it's helpful to break up the quills into pieces. Sometimes wedging a table knife into the slits of the quills is the easiest way to break up a tough one.

If I'm being meticulous, I'll wash the grinder between each spice (to avoid contamination of herbs with each other). I've also heard of grinding rice between herbs as a way of "cleaning" the grinder. Do you have any good spice grinder tips?