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?

My mom says that life is too short to waste on ugly cookies, but lately, especially after learning about the influences on our biochemistry of sugar, gluten and the glycemic load of some foods, I've been thinking that maybe life is too short to waste on cookies at all. I can think of at least a few things in life that I like way more than cookies.

Even so, I'm especially vulnerable to a good old fashioned cookie craving. It's familiar territory and I succumb to it more often than I'm proud to admit.

My solution? I made a cookie with nothing in it. I'll wean myself from these unhealthy habits with Nothing Cookies!

Obviously, they're not made of nothing because, there you see them right before you (Upper left, see? They're giving you a friendly wave now.). These cookies are gluten-free, sugar-free, dairy-free and vegan, which makes it sound like there must not be anything in them. But, actually there is stuff in them, and these things are pretty gosh-darn awesome, especially in regard to blood sugar regulation.

Replacing flour with steel cut oats reduces the glycemic load of the cookie, which means it won't make your poor liver and pancreas perform acrobatics around each other to manage the sweetness in your belly. Instead of sugar, banana is used, which admittedly has quite a lot of sugar itself, but at least it comes with a bunch of vitamins and minerals especially vitamin C and B6. Almond butter, here used as the oil source, endows the cookie with the protective powers of nuts, which have been shown to reduce the risk of type II diabetes when eaten regularly. Cinnamon is used by herbalists, Naturopathic doctors and in some nutriceuticals to help the body balance blood sugar. I used raisins out of convenience (which also unfortunately have a pretty high glycemic load), but a superfood cookie would instead don dried berries, like blackberries or blueberries, which are full of antioxidants and are suspected to help out with blood sugar balance.

Of course, eating these cookies as second lunch isn't going to help anyone's blood sugar. I think of it as training wheels--when I'm about to cave and reach for a sugary snack, having one of these around could save the day.

Nothing Cookies

4 super ripe bananas
1/2 cup almond butter (I suppose you could use peanut butter, which would make it a very peanutbuttery cookie.)
1/2 cup raisins or dried berries
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
2 teaspoons freshly ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 cups steel cut oats
1/2 cup coconut

Mash the bananas in a bowl until they become syrupy, add the almond butter, vanilla, cinnamon, baking soda and salt with the bananas and combine. Mix in the oats and coconut. Press this dough onto a baking sheet covered by parchment paper. Bake until the cookies are slightly golden at the edges, 15-20 minutes, at 350˚F. Freeze for emergencies.

I know since you saw my last post about these charming little nut crunchies, that you wanted a little flair. Some color. A firework to help you understand why I would devote a whole post to some chopped up nuts.

Well, here it is. Pickled beet, avocado and something-that-reminds-me-of-bacon salad. It works for winter because California avocados are actually in season around this time of year, and it's a good time to finish up any canned food on hand, before the fields and markets become populated again with fresh local produce. Also, nuts are amazing, if you hadn't heard.

Here's the recipe, but the first step is to curry enough favors from your friends until someone eventually gives you homemade pickled beets. This is when you've finally made it in this world. (Thanks for the beets, Eric!) 

Pickled Beet, Avocado and Nut Crunchy Salad

3/4 cup chopped pickled beets, gifted by a friend
1 ripe avocado
2 tablespoons nut crunchies (see recipe here)

Combine the ingredients. Do your best to share if anyone else is around.

I've been thinking about rituals lately. A very wise instructor of mine suggested that we as a population here in the US, don't have many rituals left in our daily lives anymore. She brought up ritual in the context of coffee addiction. Consider for a moment, your coffee ritual, if you are a coffee drinker. I always enjoy dressing my coffee, stirring it for a moment, smelling it and then taking that penetrating first sip. Some people conduct a more complex ritual involving grinding, boiling, percolating or pressing. Is it relaxing? Does it offer a sense of order to a busy morning? What other daily rituals do we still have?

Another enduring ritual that I can think of is reserved for smokers. There's something truly lovely about excusing oneself during a natural break in conversation to step outside into fresh air, and inhale deeply for a few minutes. It almost makes me envious of smokers.

Our instructor brought up ritual to caution us future doctors to be careful when we recommend smoking cessation or removing coffee consumption from our clients' lifestyles--we could inadvertently be removing something much more sacred to our client than just the substance. We can suggest, she pointed out, that our clients create new rituals with new, intentional meaning. Or maybe, at the right time, for the right person, tobacco leaf or coffee bean--two truly weary and abused herbs--can be replaced with another underappreciated, and eager herb or two.

Sometimes it surprises me that garlic is medicinal because it's so tasty and ubiquitous. That's the defining grace of herbal medicine, though: it works gently. Apparently, garlic has a long history as a medicine, ancient even. According to Matthew Wood and other herbalists, garlic

• supports beneficial gut flora and kills unhelpful bacteria
• supports metabolism and is also nutritive (so it helps the body replace old worn out tissues with healthy new ones),
• supports digestion for most constitutions,
• can be used reliably to alleviate hypertension, and
• dissolves and expels toxins.

And this is just a summary of its main uses as a medicine.

But it's also a food! What if all the food we ate were laden with supportive, friendly, delicious medicines like garlic? Each meal could be a boost to our bodies, like a splashy, quenching cup of sports drink to a marathon runner.

Sounds delicious.