Ginger, creepy-looking, good medicine!

Image via AS Phillips

​An ingredient commonly found in tea and soups, breads and cookies. Too, it can be dried and crystallized into a chewy, healthy snack item. In the same form it makes a wonderful and very effective (from personal experience and multiple testimonies from other users) easy-to-keep organic medicine to treat a wide array of ailments including (and especially) nausea associated with motion sickness and flu virus.  

Ginger may a hooky-spooky lookin’ root (which is the part of the plant mostly used in the above food products) but wow! It makes up for its looks with outstanding flavor and health benefits.

​I love ginger for a bunch of reasons. Near the top of the list is because it’s an easy-keeper. Just wash it, bag it (even with paper or another organic material) and put it away in the freezer and it will keep for thousands of years. Kidding, but it will keep frozen for a very, longgggg time.

You can keep in the fridge too, but it won’t stay as well-hydrated there.

Each time you need some, just chop a bit off, process it via slicing, grinding or mashing to add it to whatever dish you want, or let it cool enough to chew it up and just eat it as is. I love refrigerated, fresh ginger. It has both delicious flavor and a crisp texture that’s addictive.

Ginger is naturally low in calories. Its an organic, high-quality, broad-spectrum anti-microbial and anti-parasitic, even being lethal to cold and flu viruses. Its rich in antioxidants, anti-inflammatory agents and containing therapeutic compounds of gingerol, shogaol, paradol and zingerone.

​Another of my fav forms of ginger is the sort made by my colleague and close friend, Vicki Warner of WarnerWords. Vicki, beyond being a retired professor, multi-business owner and strong advocate and voice within the independent business community, is also a master gardener and collegiate-trained chef.

The girl can seriously cook! She also grows an impressive amount of her own organic ingredients in her beautiful back garden.

She processes some of her harvested ginger into delicate, thin slices. Then she dries it and adds a light, crystal-sugar coating. It’s the best ginger, in that form, I’ve ever had. I’m also convinced it had a great deal to do with how I managed to feel as good as I did while working with her in western Canada.

I’ve had a variety of the same sort of processing here, but none can compare to Vicki’s. Her crystallized ginger still ranks as primo.

To get there, and during my stay, we travelled quite a lot. I have a tendency for motion sickness and Vicki urged me to try an organic med, available in Canada, called Gravol. Its main component to combat motion sickness is ginger. It worked great and there were no side-effects, such as drowsiness or dry mouth. In raw or crystallized form, ginger has never produced any foul side effects at all when I’ve used, which has now spanned nearly a decade.

My sister also got me into the habit of using crystal candy ginger as a natural medicine to combat nausea and menstrual cramps. It came in very handy when we travelled home to Kentucky to visit our kin, driving along the twisty roads through the Appalachian mountains.

​Ginger is an effective remedy for tummy cramps, whether they’re from the flu, a spastic colon, irritable bowel syndrome or menses.  It also has nice warming effect that brings on a comfy-cozy feeling during cold weather, which is maybe part of the reason ginger snaps and gingere bread are so popular in cold weather and cooler seasons.

In cookie (or biscuit) form, it’s an excellent choice to partner with coffee, tea, cocoa or milk. I only use plant-based milk, but ginger cookies and breads go well with whatever type of beverage you prefer.

My family and friends also use cookies (snaps) as treats for our horses and a few other animals. It warms their bellies when it’s cold and they love the taste. Ginger snaps store well for long periods of time if sealed in a dry environment.

You can make a go-to infusion for your homeopathic medicine cabinet with ginger by adding several slices of it to a plant-based oil, such as EVOO or coconut oil. It also works in much the same way if you add it to alcohol, such as a high quality potato vodka. You can also blend it with other herbs of your choice in this fashion, like mint, clove and cinnamon, to name a few.

Ginger is a hot plant, and tastes a bit peppery, so please be mindful of the heat factor when using it. A little goes a long way and I advise big caution with it where children are concerned.

To get your own, I hope you’ll consider buying it from a local farmer’s market or even getting some starts from a friend that has heirloom plants. If not, get some from your local health food shop. You can start your own ginger plants with it, even if you want to grow them in a pot. They’re very pretty, a bit exotic looking and you can harvest them and regrow the next batch using just a few pieces of the root you harvested.

For a fun and informative read on how to easily grow your own ginger, here’s a great article compliments of Vicki Warner and WarnerWords, Ginger: A Celebration!

Thank you so much for visiting today! I hope you found the post to be both enjoyable as well as helpful! If you'd like to share your own experiences with ginger as an organic remedy or food enhancer, I encourage you to share it as a note in the comments! 

'Til next time,

​Shalom