Continuing on from Friday’s post about my five favorite immunity boosters (apparently when I write “tomorrow” regarding the next post, I mean “two days later”…lol!), I can’t talk about improving immune response without also talking about what to do when even the strongest immune system comes under attack.

For years I did what most people these days probably do: I would pop cold pills to mask my symptoms so I could “keep going.” However, the more I learn and study real food and herbalism, the more I have come to reject this approach. First of all, cold pills only mask symptoms, they don’t make your body kick the virus any faster. Symptoms are your body doing what it’s supposed to do, fight. And since it is fighting off invaders, the last thing it needs is to “keep going” with whatever your usual routine is. It needs rest so that it can kick virus butt.

When I decided to start foregoing cold pills, I needed to find other ways to naturally ease symptoms that also help my body fight invaders. Here are my five favorite ways to do that:

1. LOTS of rest. Yep, right at the top of the list. When I know I’ve caught a bug, or even when I suspect it, I start trying to rest as much as possible. I’ve had experiences where I feel something coming on in an afternoon, so I get into bed super early—even if I’m watching a movie, or reading, or knitting, or even still blog-reading—I just get myself more horizontal than not, try to relax, and go to sleep early. If I don’t feel better by the next morning, I repeat the resting the next day, and by the following morning, I feel back to normal. The key here is not just more sleep, but more rest. Sleeping more doesn’t help if, when you are awake, you’re pushing your body. To let it fight well, it needs a lot of rest.
2. Raw garlic: Garlic has antiviral and antibacterial properties (as well as antifungal), and since bacterial infections can often accompany colds/flu (which are viral infections), garlic is a great tool for helping kick all of it. But these properties are only active when garlic is raw and chopped/exposed to air; cooking destroys them and garlic pills are useless for fighting active infections. So to use garlic as a medicine, you gotta eat it raw. I’ve read that swallowing it with honey can mask the taste, but I don’t advise this since sugar suppresses the immune system. Best to cut a clove into a few chunks and swallow with water like you would a pill. I will eat one clove of raw garlic 3-4 times per day when I have an active cold. I do it on an empty stomach before breakfast, then with lunch and dinner, and then once more later on. I’ve never had any issues with smelling too garlicy, but even if I did, too bad, lol! I’m trying to get better, not appease others. However, the raw garlic is only a temporary measure. I must also mention that I have recently started hearing that there is apparently a campaign going on to discredit garlic by saying it “disrupts brain waves” or some such nonsense. Considering garlic’s long use throughout history, and my own personal successes using it, I’m not worried. Garlic is a wonderful ally.
3. Elderberry tincture: This one I learned about from Kiva Rose, my other favorite herbalist (along with Susun Weed, mentioned in the last post). To quote Kiva:
   

   “Elderberry does not simply stimulate the immune system, instead, it modulates the immune system to more appropriately respond to environs and circumstance. It also disarms the some cold and flu viruses and helps them flush through body quicker, while strengthening the mucus membranes, supporting the body’s natural fever mechanism without overheating, improves energy and stress handling AND last but certainly not least, it tastes great too.” From the post Elder Mother Immune Elixir

   If you don’t have any elderberry shrubs near you for harvesting your own berries, you can get them or a wonderful ready-made tincture from Mountain Rose Herbs. The tincture is especially nice since the one they offer is not only from organic elderberries (if ever you did not want pesticides in something, you don’t want them in your medicine), its alcohol base is made from organic grapes.  A “tincture” is an herb steeped in high-proof alcohol for many weeks; the alcohol is what pulls the good stuff out of the plant matter. You take only a few drops or dropperfuls of tincture at a time, no more, so you don’t have to worry about getting a buzz off the stuff. But regular alcohol, like the 100-proof vodka many herbalists use to make tinctures, is made from grains; if you are avoiding grains, you can use this particular tincture without concern regarding the alcohol used to make it.

4. Avoid all sugar. Depending on where you are on your real food journey, this one may or may not be difficult. But sugar is a known immune suppressor. While avoiding most sugar all the time is a goal to strive for, avoiding it when you have an active infection is important. The body can kick out a cold more quickly if blocks to healing are removed.
5. More bone broth: As I mentioned in my post about immune boosters, bone broth is a major player. When I get a cold, I eat more of it than normal, up to 2-3 times per day, either just warmed and in a mug or made into a soup for a full meal.

So those are my five favorites at this point in my journey. I know that some of these are easier to do than others. The most difficult things will be rest and avoiding sugar, but I believe that both are really important for fighting colds and for general well-being. The fact that we balk at these ideas says a lot about our culture and our health. I truly believe that incorporating more rest into our lives and consuming much less sugar daily are significant first steps toward reclaiming full health.

It seems I can’t go a day without hearing about someone “catching a cold” or about someone who knows someone who has the flu (or swine flu, or H1N1, or whatever strain the media are scaring us into believing are out to get us). Sure, it’s winter, so it’s “that time of year.” But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if winter just meant cold weather, and not an inevitable cold?

This has been my goal for awhile now, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. While lots of factors play into whether or not I (or anyone) catches a cold, I realized that the most basic thing I could do to significantly lessen my chances of catching anything was to build up my immune system via nutrients & rest. So I started reading up on my options, and as of this winter, I’ve got five favorites that seem to pack the most punch: bone broth, butter, minerals, sauerkraut, and rest.

I am a firm believer that the main “medicine” we should ingest, and spend money on, is real food. So much can be healed by food that if the knowledge really spread, the pharmaceutical industry would be done for. They’ve taken certain elements of real foods, extracted them, and put them into pills (with 45 seconds of listed side effects—my favorite that most commercials mention: “risk of death.” Oh gee, now I really wanting to try that pill). And then they spend billions to convince us that we need those pills to be healthy. Well, in a sense they are right; whatever substance they’ve extracted and put into the pill probably is a substance we need…but we don’t need it from a pill. We can get it “for free” from food. Ok, yes, food isn’t free. But if we spend just a little bit more on good, real food—food that is full of so much good stuff that not only our bodies need but that our bodies can actually break down and use without side effects—we would not need to spend twice as much on pills. As we keep hearing in the health care debate, health care is a right. Indeed it is, but I think of it as a right to just say no to “health” that requires piles of money to acquire and instead a right to embrace health I create on my own with simple foods.

So in a bit more detail, my five favorite immunity boosters to help keep the pills away…

1. Eat bone broth regularly. “Good broth resurrects the dead.” –South American proverb, as quoted in Nourishing Traditions. When you hear old tales about how chicken soup helps fight colds, the “chicken soup” they mean is NOT the vapid, tasteless muck sold in cans in stores (Cambell’s chicken soup…ugh, how did I ever think that was actual chicken soup?). They’re talking about real chicken soup made from bone broth. Bone broth does require cooking, so someone could argue that it’s not a “simple” remedy. It’s not as easy as popping a cold pill, obviously. But it is simple enough that the rewards to be had from consuming bone broth on a regular basis so completely outweigh any “trouble” you go through to make it that I consider it my main line of defense against a list of ailments, colds/flu being just one. I plan to write in detail about the benefits of bone broth, but for now check out this WAPF article.
2. Eat grass-fed butter. More specifically, increase your intake of fat-soluble vitamins. Fat-soluble vitamins are vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin K, and vitamin E. But here’s the catch: you can’t just pop these as pills and get the full benefit. To be properly used by the body, they need all their cofactors, which you get when you eat them in food. Happily, getting more of these vitamins & their helpers into your diet is not only easy, but delicious. You will find the most fat-soluble vitamins in quality animal fats (fat-soluble vitamins need to be eaten in/with fat to be properly absorbed): grass-fed butter, pastured whole eggs, yogurt, raw milk cheese, raw milk, and meats from pastured animals. If you can’t do all of these, I’d suggest going with grass-fed butter. An excellent source, and one that I think is fairly widely available, is Kerrygold Irish butter; it might seem expensive compared to what you usually buy, but try buying just one a week and working it into your diet; as an example, veggies have a lot of fat-soluble vitamins in them, but they need to be eaten with fat for your body to get those vitamins…so adding butter to veggies is an easy way to up your vitamin intake. Remember, small additions are better than none, and the extra fat-soluble vitamins to be had from adding in just a small amount of grass-fed butter are worth it. As for the other sources, add them in as you can. Of course, replacing your current dairy & meat consumption with grass-fed is the ideal, but if you can’t do that yet, just buy some when you can, here and there. Think of them as vitamin shots: instead of spending money on vitamin pills, which are rarely absorbed well, can cause reactions due to their coating, and cost too much compared to the return they give, spend the money on good food. You can also budget to buy more of them in the fall and through the winter to boost your immune system when the bad bugs are more likely to be looking for hosts.
3. Ingest more minerals. If you’re eating bone broths and grass-fed butter, you’re already getting a lot more minerals. But I know I’ve been nutrient-starved for so long—and so much in modern life/diet leeches minerals from our bodies—that I’ll say again, every little bit helps. One simple thing I did is that I switched to using real sea salt (“Celtic Sea Salt” brand is my favorite) instead of refined table salt. It’s full of minerals as well as flavor. My other favorite way to get more minerals is to drink nourishing herbal infusions on a regular basis. I learned about herbal infusions a few years ago from Susun Weed, and they are a very, very simple way to boost mineral intake. Happily, Susun is now making videos, and here’s a video of her explaining infusions:
   
   Growing your own herbs is best, but if you can’t, or if you’re like me, you just don’t have them growing yet (I’ve got my seeds–can’t wait for a huge nettle patch!), you can buy all the herbs you need, affordably, at Mountain Rose Herbs (1 pound of dried organic nettle is only $8.50; I use 1 oz of dry herb per quart of infusion weekly (drink it over 2-3 days), so 1 lb of herb lasts me 4 months!).
4. Eat homemade sauerkraut daily. Did you know that sauerkraut is one of the best sources of vitamin C? Sauerkraut contains something like 10-20 times more vitamin C than cabbage, thanks to fermentation. But here’s the catch: you’ve got to make your own, because pretty much every brand of sauerkraut on the market is pasteurized, even the organics, and heat kills not only the good enzymes of sauerkraut but also destroys the vitamin C created during the fermentation. Lucky for us, it’s easy & cheap to make, since you need only three ingredients: cabbage, salt, jar. A head of organic cabbage doesn’t cost much, maybe $1-2, and will yield about a pint of sauerkraut (give or take). Of course, if you love kraut, you’ll want to keep more on hand. Happily, it gets better with age, so if you plan to buy a few heads of cabbage and have a marathon kraut-making session, you’ll be in kraut for months. The best book on the subject is Wild Fermentation, and its author has generously provided the how-to for sauerkraut on this page (I’ll post soon on how I’ve been experimenting with making it in small batches).
5. Sleep, sleep, rest, sleep. And more rest. Nothing attracts sickness like unending stress and being on-the-go (which I learned the hard way, especially when I was teaching). No matter what, every single person needs downtime, rest, relaxation, and enough sleep. Everyone. No excuses.

So there they are, my five favorite things to do to help keep my immune system humming along. I hope the information helps someone out there! Tomorrow I’ll post about five simple things I do to fight an active cold/infection if I get one, things I’ve tried and that have worked for me.

This post is part of Fight Back Friday for February 26, 2010.

Let me say right now that I think bone broth is the easiest, most delicious, and most cost-effective way of improving and maintaining health; it is true kitchen alchemy, the power of the hearth at work. I’m going to write soon about that power in more detail, but for today I’ll just focus on another method of creating the liquid gold (ways to use the stock, other than making soup, will be coming soon).

In “Chapter 1,” I made stock in a pot on my stove, cooking the chicken with the stock for the entire time. Awesome stock, bland chicken, lol. This time I roasted the chicken first, harvested the meat, and then made the stock from the carcass, all done in a crock pot. I’ve read that this method is supposed to be “easier” than stovetop stock, but to me it was pretty much the same, although I realized I was a bit less concerned about leaving the crock on all night as opposed to a simmering pot on the stove. However, this new method did raise new questions.

Here’s the basic outline of what I did:

1. Rinse chicken, pat dry, plop into crock (I put it breast-down to help “juice-en up” the white meat).
2. Added some halved garlic cloves.
3. Put on lid, turn crock on low, cook for 8ish hours.
4. When done, take off/out all meat, leave bones in crock along with juices (I didn’t remove the carcass, just picked it over while still in the crock).
5. Add water to bones & juices.
6. Add couple of tablespoons of raw vinegar (the vinegar helps get all the minerals out of the bones), re-cover, then let sit for an hour.
7. Turn crock to high.
8. After rolling “boil”/cook is going, turn to low.
9. Simmer for 24 hours.
10. About 6ish hours from done, I added carrots & onions (only veggies I had on hand to add).
11. When done, I strained everything from the stock, and let the stock cool.
12. Once cooled, I put it in the fridge to cool more overnight and to let the fat rise.
13. The next day, skim off the solidified fat and transfer the stock to jars for freezing.

Ok, so that was the basic process. Here are the questions I came up against:

• When doing stock in a stovetop pot, with a whole chicken, you add enough water to cover the chicken. I have not yet measured exactly how much that is. When I did the crock pot stock, by the time I added water to it the carcass was a pile of unconnected bones sitting in juices—I had *no* idea how much water to add, so I winged it. Silly me didn’t measure this time, either, but by the end I definitely had less stock than when I made it on the stovetop. I think this means the stock I have is more “concentrated” than before?
• The bones/juices were warm (obviously) when I added the vinegar to them, and they sat warm(ish) yet cooling for the hour while the vinegar did its thing. Does it matter that it was warm?
• The stock never boiled enough to create “scum” on top to skim off; does this matter?

Yep, I’m probably the most analytical cook in the history of hearth-tenders. I think it’s fallout from all the “food safety” claptrap that corporate powers-that-be try to pummel into our psyche; not that food safety is bad, but fear of food is, which is what their “food safety” is all about: fear. They want us afraid so that we buy their processed/drugged/cloned/irradiated “food.” I refuse to buy it, so that means learning all the ins and outs of cooking my own food…but I find that their planted fears linger, urging me to worry over this little detail or that little detail, concerned that I might overlook one little thing that could sicken me. I know I’m working to regain my natural instincts about food and nourishment, and that regaining those instincts will take time. Each success makes me feel one step closer, and even though I end up with a passel of questions with each success, I try to remember that it’s a part of the process. The fears will pass, and my long-unused kitchen instincts will grow.

As for the chicken this time around, cooking it first was a nice step in that it made it ready to eat much more quickly, but I still cooked it a bit too long and it was a tad drier than I want. It wasn’t nearly as dry as it was the other time I made stock, but it was still not perfectly juicy (although it did fall right off the bone again). I suspect this is because I’m using a pretty small bird yet using larger-bird cooking times. Next time I do this, I’ll roast the bird for less time.

So as of now, despite feeling that leaving a crock pot on is relatively safer than a simmering stovetop pot, my preference is for the stovetop method of making stock, if only because I feel like I get “more” stock and also get to skim off crud. Of course, neither of these might matter all that much. But there’s something about a big pot slowly bubbling on the stove that speaks to me much more distinctly than a plugged-in device taking up counter space.

I’d love to hear from you about your experiences with crock pot stock.

This post originally appeared on my other blog, Avidly Dreaming.

Ok. So. I finally got my hands on a copy of Nourishing Traditions. I have this post by Katie at Kitchen Stewardship bookmarked & referenced. I’ve been really looking forward to making my own bone broth/stock the real way, full of all the goodies that can only be gotten from the chicken’s bones through long, slow cooking. Making bone broth is simple and yields so many rewards! Then again, anything “simple” I always overthink, and my first true bone broth was no different. I also had to deal with a few things I’d not considered.

Confession #1: I’ve never cooked with an entire chicken before. Ever. Why? Well, I’ve never had to. My mom used to, but when I went out on my own I always cooked boneless chicken breasts, because they were simple to use…and I didn’t have to contend with an entire skeleton.

Confession #2: I have a problem contending with an entire skeleton. I guess I can blame it on too many horror novels & movies growing up; for some reason, when I see too many bones together in one place that look too much like an actual creature, I get “the willies.” A few bones from a wing or thigh are ok (or I’m just used to them), since they are separated from the entirety. But a whole carcass? *shudder*. I remember ages ago, when my mom would cook roast whole chickens or turkeys, and I’d just look away and let her deal with it, and let someone else carve it, etc. Pretty sad and laughable, right? For all my growing up around animals and gardens and nature, I am very “citified” in my relation to meat. But here I am now, determined to learn how to cook a whole bird (although I’ll never, ever be able to see/be near actual slaughter; that’s an entirely different issue I won’t go into now). I sometimes think I hear chuckling nearby, and it must be my mom, vastly amused in the afterlife. I also wonder if she’s not whispering in my ear, “Stop being a ninny and cook a chicken.”

Confession #3: When I purchased the whole, pastured chicken, I was feeling proud of myself. It’s the small steps that matter!

So a couple of days ago, I put the chicken (it came without innards—I’ll tackle those eventually) in a stock pot with some water & splash of vinegar to soak, an hour later added some veggies:

Brought it to a boil, skimmed as needed, and started simmering it for 24 hours.

And then the overthinking kicked in:

Can I really leave the stove on all night? For 24 hours? Will my roommate kill me for jacking up the electric bill? Will this jack up the electric bill? How much of a fire hazard is this? Will I be able to sleep with the stove on all night? What if all the liquid evaporates? (I didn’t say my worries were sensible.)

My roommate was a little dubious of it, too, and suggested I get up in the middle of the night to check on it, just to be safe (I didn’t—slept like a rock). Before going to bed, I’d also worried that the stock was too hot or wait is it not simmering enough? Oh look the chicken floated to the top and so a portion of it was above the water line and was that ok or not?

When I got up the next morning, some of the veggies had cooked too much and looked “burned:”

I was not at all sure that was ok or not, but decided to just keep on. At this point, I realized that sure, the entire thing might not turn out, but I’d learn a lot in the process.

Near the end of 24 hours, I tossed in parsley for the last 10 minutes of cooking, and then it was done:

I proceeded to (clumsily) remove the chicken to a plate for picking,

and then strain out the stock,

The sodden remains of the veggies went into the compost.

And then it was time to pick the chicken. This was a surprisingly relaxing thing to do, lol. I filled a big bowl with chicken, which I’ll be eating for days:

The chicken on its own was a bit dry (roommate: “of course it is, you cooked the crap out of it!”), but still good. However, during the picking I had a flare-up of ohgodsthisisaskeleton: it was picking around the spine and ribs that did it. I had to stop a few times, tell myself I can do this. Yeah yeah yeah, I sound like a complete wimp, making a fuss out of something so trivial. But as a very visual person, these things really work on me. I just kept reminding myself that eating a chicken this way, as opposed to just boneless breasts, is vastly healthier and very cost-saving. I got through the picking and again felt like I’d accomplished something.

Instead of discarding all this, maybe I should start making my own horror movies…*insert cheesy, creepy, 80s-horror-movie music here*

The stock went into the fridge to cool so that the fat would rise, and I gotta say, not much fat rose. I was afraid I’d done something wrong, but my roommate assures me that the amount of fat that rose is normal. So I’m going to just plow ahead, even though I worry that uh oh what if the overcooked, dark-browned veggies somehow messed up the stock, or contaminated it somehow, I don’t want to make myself sick, what if I didn’t keep it hot enough all night and bacteria got in? I won’t know until I get sick. What if…?

Again, I know I sound a bit nuts (a friend of mine has nicknamed me “Nutsy,” and although he did it due to my peanut allergy, it might be even more fitting than he realized), but I want to be honest about all my fears as I learn this stuff. I do wish I’d learned this from my mom, but back when I could have, I wasn’t interested. So all I can do is just plow ahead now, learning as I go.

The next time I make bone broth I’m going to try making it in a slow cooker, since for some reason leaving that on all night doesn’t seem as worrisome. I might even roast the chicken first for dinner, then make stock from the carcass. Not sure yet, but that’ll be chapter 2 of my bone broth adventures.

Now to find (real food) recipes for shredded chicken…