Recipes for Writers: Homemade Ginger Tea

What qualifies a good Writer's Recipe? 

First, it must acknowledge the facts of a writer's life:

1: We have no time.

2: We are stressed.

3: We will eat whatever leftovers or snack is most easily reached by our keyboard-numbed fingers, be it healthy or terrible for us, in order to finish a makeshift meal within five minutes and get back to writing a scene. 

4: We tend to be overcaffeinated, dehydrated, and probably malnourished. 

Therefore!  An ideal writer's recipe is quick to prepare, low-stress and uncomplicated, lasts for several days of leftovers (therefore saving future food preparation time), and... is good for us. 

Enter, the ultimate writer's drink: homemade ginger tea.  This is the perfect hot drink to stave off writing doldrums and winter blues.  Also, ginger is supposed to make you smarter, or some such thing.  So next time you're stuck on a plot line, boil up some ginger root for super-tea.    Caffeine free and delicious.  Boil a gigantic pot and reheat the ginger water for days to come.

Go ahead.  You deserve it. 

Ingredients: hunk of ginger root, 1 lemon, honey

(optional: dash of red pepper powder and himalayan sea salt, if you're going for the five chinese flavors of salty, spicy, pungent, sweet, and sour in one mug of sheer perfection.*)

Full disclosure: I did not invent this recipe.  I worked a summer at a backcountry chalet in Glacier National Park, spending 10 weeks 7 miles away from any roads or civilization or wifi, and our wonderful manager would make a batch of this whenever one of our crewmembers seemed to be coming down with a cold, or worse.  (The last thing we wanted was a flurry of flu in the backcountry, with no hospitals and no replacement staff if we keeled over.)  It worked, every time.  

Use real lemons instead of extract if you can afford it (but don't feel bad if you can't.)  There's always more vitamins in the real thing.  And if you slice up a whole ginger root, and boil your biggest pot, you can have ginger water to reheat for a week.  Many, many mugs of tea.  

Step 1: Peel ginger root and slice into flakes.

Step 2: Boil ginger root for 30 minutes to several hours.  30 minutes if you don't want a strong ginger flavor...  3 hours if you go out to feed the horses or go for a long walk on a back road and forget about your tea.  Not to worry, it'll still taste fine.  (Boiling on a wood cookstove not required.) 

Step 3: Scoop hot ginger water into a mug, stir in a tablespoon of honey, and squeeze in the juice of half a lemon.  Stir until all the honey's dissolved, and...

Enjoy the perfect concentration-boosting mug of ginger tea.  Boiling fresh ginger packs more punch than any tea bag. 

* Now, the reason I also add a dash of red pepper and sea salt to my mugs of tea...

My lesson on electrolyte depletion and dehydration. 

Last winter, I went to see an acupuncturist during the computer screen headache fiasco.  This was my first time trying acupuncture - it was AWESOME, and I came out feeling lightweight and airy.  But the most lasting thing I learned from that session was to hydrate with more than simple water.  This acupuncturist was incredible, and so kind.  She talked about how common caffeine addiction is these days (cough, cough) and, as a result, widespread dehydration.  We all know to drink lots of water.  But water alone is not quite enough, and gatorade and so-called electrolyte sports drinks tend to be mostly high fructose corn syrup (yuck, yuck.  Avoid at all costs).  Caffeine and diuretics force fluids through our body faster, and as a result you're losing more trace minerals too, in your urine every time you pee.  Sometimes you get so dehydrated you can drink water and more water but still just feel... empty.  Your body can't process fluids, without also receiving salts and electrolytes to add to your cells.  So, this acupuncturist shared a lesson from her own days as a recovering coffee addict: an older mentor gave her the advice to follow the system of 5 Chinese flavors, and replenish her body's vital nutrients as well as water in every cup of tea she drank. 

Add lemon, and ginger, and honey, and salt, and hot pepper.   You can add these to your mugs of actual green tea, too.  Cayenne pepper for Spicy/Acrid; lemon juice for Sour; honey for Sweet; sea salt for Salty; ginger for Bitter/Pungent. 

There is some ancient wisdom to be had here (more than can be learned in one lifetime).  If you haven't yet looked into the five flavors and corresponding effects on organs and healing in traditional Eastern medicine, I'd strongly suggest you keep investigating.  And if you want an incredibly enlightening and also lightheardedly-written guide to QiGong and energy healing- complete with scientific evidence and explanations- I'd strongly, strongly, strongly recommend 'The Way of Qigong' by Kenneth S Cohen.  (Given to me by a friend; I read it three times in one winter.) 

I had further proof of just how many trace minerals and essential salts we lose every time we sweat and urinate this summer, in Glacier Nat'l Park.  The mountain goats (which are usually somewhat rare, and fairly shy) positively congregated around the backcountry chalet where I worked, their bulging black eyes fixed hopefully on every passing human.  They wanted... salt.  If hikers left socks drying on railings, the socks soon disappeared; mountain goats stole and chewed on multiple sweaty articles of clothing.  If hikers walked off trail to relieve themselves in the trees, mountain goats recognized the distinctive tinkling sound and came running, in a sometimes-frightening horde.  And every morning, without fail, a handful of mountain goats would be feverishly licking the rocks in front of the chalet, where male guests sometimes failed to make the walk to the outhouse the night before, and simply relieved themselves over the railing (despite frequent reminders by chalet staff to not do precisely this.  So much for keeping the wildlife wild). 

An unexpectedly... intimate relationship with the local residents. 

We want your pee.

Anyway.  Enjoy your ginger tea and replenish your body's salt!

Happy writing, fellow scribblers.  Whatever your current project, may it go well, and even if it doesn't, carry on.  We want to read the worlds you write. 

-mlj

Recipes for Writers: cheapest homemade jerky? Beef heart!

Ingredients for this simple and easy homemade jerky are: heart meat, Bragg's Liquid Aminos (a soy sauce alternative - you can use soy sauce instead), powdered ginger, coarse black pepper, brown sugar, salt, and a dehydrator to dry it on.  Also, a really sharp knife.

In keeping with the writing lifestyle, an ideal writer's recipe must be:

Cheap (because we are usually poor.)  Low-stress (so as not to stress us out more than we already are),  Healthy (to fuel our writing brains).  And, preferably, something we can prepare once and eat for days or weeks after (to save on cooking time).  Ladies and gentlemen, you can make jerky once and eat it for months.

If you eat meat you probably love beef jerky.  But, store-bought jerky is expensive, and usually packed with preservatives.  Making jerky from scratch is simple, but buying all that meat can be expensive, too. 

Enter: beef hearts. 

This may be the cheapest- and quite possibly the healthiest- meat to use for homemade jerky. 

Now, if you think that looks disgusting, think again.  Once you cut off that thin casing of fat the meat inside is rich and red and perfectly fat-free; if you buy it in a grocery store instead of a butcher's shop, the heart may already be sliced into more appealing chunks.  (If this is the case, lament, because you'll miss the grisly fascination of slicing out heartstrings from inside the ventricles.)  I discovered heart meat in college, when I browsed the meat sections and realized it was cheaper than the cheapest of the reduced-price beef cuts.  Heart is delicious, highly nutritious, and (here in Montana, at least) a third of the price of steak.  But, don't let the low price fool you: for nutritional value alone, heart meat is a steal.  It's packed with iron and other nutrients, and is as low in fat as white-meat chicken.   If you've never tried heart, there's no strong organ flavor (like liver) or greasy texture (like tongue) or stored toxins (liver again.)  Just delicious red meat.

No wonder wolves go for the heart first. 

So, learn from the wolves and indulge your inner carnivore.  If you're feeling anemic, or just want some good on-hand ready-to-eat protein to fuel long nights of writing (for months to come) make a batch of beef heart jerky. 

Note: the slicing of the hearts is time-consuming.  I listen to audiobooks on headphones while cutting.  Slicing meat for hours on end is the perfect brainless listening-task. 

Second note: you'll need a dehydrator.  If you've never dehydrated before, prowl craigslist.  Used dehydrators come cheap. 

Step 0: Dig out your dehydrator.  (Make sure the racks are clean, and that it works when you plug it in.)

Step 1: Find heart meat.  (At grocery stores with a good meat section, or any butcher's or meat shop.)  I do jerky in big batches, and have the dehydrator running for a week at a time.  For this, I get a box of 8 or 9 hearts - about 20 pounds of meat. 

Step 2: Prepare marinade.  For approximately 5 lbs of meat, mix 1 32-oz bottle of Bragg Liquid Aminos soy sauce alternative (or about 4 cups of soy sauce) with 2 1/2 cups brown sugar, 4 Tb powdered ginger, 4 Tb coarse-ground black pepper, and 1 tsp salt.  Bragg Liquid Aminos are packed with soybeans' amino acids and super good for you; they're a healthier version of soy sauce, and I think they taste better.  (I use liquid aminos as a healthy dressing on salads, too).  Some grocery stores stock it, and all health food stores.  The bottle looks like this:

image source huffingtonpost.com

Marinade can be reused to soak a second round of meat, the following day. 

Step 3: Cut.  Slice meat as thin as you can while still making jerky-sized pieces.  I use a big finely-serrated knife.  Aim for the thickness of a ruler, or of a house key, but don't stress the slicing thinness.  Thicker pieces and chunks will all dry fine, they just take longer.  If you're slicing from whole hearts, remove all the white fat casing from the outside, and all the heart strings from inside the ventricles.  (Until this, I'd only ever heard of dragon heartstring as the core of Harry Potter's wand -  I never knew hearts had actual heartstrings.  They're incredibly strong, like super-thin nylon cord fused to the inside of the ventricle.  Bodies are amazing.) 

Heart strings

More heart strings, cut loose.

Heart strings are these tiny, slippery white strands that... keep the flaps closed in our heart.  They're called 'chordae tendonae', the tendons connecting the valves to the heart muscle, and they're about 80% collagen, 20% elastin.  These keep blood where it's supposed to be when our hearts are pumping, to maintain blood pressure, so our hearts can pump it out through our arteries.  Every single time our heart beats, these little strings are working.  For our whole lives.  Isn't that crazy? 

Anyway.  Back to jerky. 

Step 4: Soak sliced meat in marinade for 12-24 hours.  (Longer won't hurt, if you've marinated more meat than can fit on the dehydrator in one batch.  Marinating longer just makes it saltier.)

Step 5: Dehydrate.  Lay meat flat on dehydrator racks and dry for 8-12 hours, depending on thickness.  Dry until meat is no longer sticky, but preferably not so long that jerky strips shatter when you try to pry them off the racks (although there's nothing wrong with jerky being that dry, it's just incredibly annoying to pry it off the racks with a fork.)

All racks of the dehydrator filled with jerky, now ready to be lidded and plugged in to dry...

Step 6: Devour.  Save for your own late nights or long trips, or give to fellow carnivorous friends. 

As a note on preservation: I'm not sure how Bragg's Liquid Aminos compares to soy sauce for salt content.  Both salt and dryness preserve the meat.  You can easily carry this jerky around for a week in your backpack without it going bad, probably a lot longer.  I've never had jerky spoil, and I've kept it in a car while camping for two weeks.  But, best not to take chances.  Always freeze all homemade jerky in ziploc bags, until you're ready to pull out a bag and eat it in the next week or two.  Just in case. 

Happy eating (and writing.)

-mlj