Contents:
Taking Care of Ourselves - Malva
A Practical Tip/Solution - Warm Teas
I Recommend - Paleo Transition Cookbook
Contact & Policies

Taking Care of Ourselves - Malva
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I've discovered Malva - a lovely plant with pretty mauve flowers and lovely leaves. I bought a packet of malva seeds as flowers for my garden two years ago and sown them by the fence. They didn't really begin to flower until the fall. Then they didn't want to die when the rest of the garden quit and browned off for the winter.

Last year these malva plants showed up as volunteer plants ranging further away from the fence. Somewhere I spied some mention of this plant as an herb. So this year, when it began to pop up all over my garden I was okay with it. In the last few weeks as I was cleaning up my garden for the winter, I saw that these malva plants were thriving and looking so healthy and beautiful - I just hesitated to pull them up.

Suddenly I decided that I should go back inside and check online to see what malva plants are good for as herbs. It hadn't really occurred to me to do that before. In no time at all I came out excited again, with an ice cream pail and began to harvest the leaves off the plants. I've already dried two batches on my dining table, and want to gather another batch.

Why? Well, those leaves and flowers are terrific as a tea, or a compress, or even in a salad. They are soothing in skin care products, and can draw toxins out of pimples and abscesses, and relieve superficial burns. The ingredients in malva are mucilage, tannins, and malvin, which is a red pigment. It also has a precursor to vitamin A.

The proper Latin name of malva is Althea sylvestris. It is found all over the world, and in most parts it is known as mallow. In the USA 'malva' is used more often to help it stand apart from the marshmallow plant. Malva comes from the Greek "malakos" meaning soothing.

Uses and Benefits:

a tea or gargle to reduce inflammation in the throat
it can also bring out phlegm and suppress coughs
as a tea to sooth the stomach and intestines, and bronchitis
steam aching ear over a bowl of malva leaves boiled in water
as a warm compress to draw toxins out of pimples and abscesses
as a cool compress to sooth superficial burns
try it on rashy, itchy skin too.

Make Malva Tea - by pouring boiling water over a teaspoon or two full of dried malva leaves and flowers. Cover the cup or teapot to steep for a while. Drink up to three cups a day.

Make a Malva Compress - by using twice as much dried malva leaves and flowers (2-4 teaspoons), and steeping as for tea, then dip clean cloths in the boiled liquid and lay on the skin. A warm compress will be soothing to sore breasts. This Basic Malva Compress liquid could be used as vaginal douche, as long as you don't have yeast or an infection, or are pregnant.

You can improve the anti-inflammatory action by adding 5 drops of echinacea and 5 drops of arnica tincture to the compress mixture. But notice; this is only for external use. (Like, don't go crazy).

Make a Malva Wine - by soaking 1 ounce of malva flowers in a pint of white wine for ten days. Strain, and drink in small sips for serious digestive/intestinal problems.

Make a Malva Expectorant - mix 1/2 oz. of dried malva, 1 oz of dried marshmallow herb and 1 oz of fennel seeds. Put 1 to 2 teaspoons of that herbal mix in a cup of hot water and allow to steep. Together these herbs are slippery and loosen up phlegm to help you expel it. (If that phlegm goes down into your lungs you have pneumonia!). Personally, I don't care for the strong barnyard smell of marshmallow, so you might want to add a bit of honey to the steeping mixture. Strain out the herbs before you sip at the syrup.

Malva Remedy for Colds and Hoarse Throat - mix 2 oz. dried malva and 1/2 oz. of mullein flowers. Put 1 to 2 teaspoons of this herbal mix in a cup of boiling water. Steep ten minutes and strain before drinking until your symptoms ease away.

I confess I'm just learning about this herb, but having harvested some this fall, I hope to experiment with the teas, compresses - and - I want to see how malva works in my ointment recipe!

A Practical Tip/Solution - Warm Teas
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A friend was over to visit the other Sunday and mentioned that she finds winter depressing because of the less hours of light here in Canada. But that she drinks more of the 'warm teas' and that helps. I had not heard of warm teas before, so I went to research this a bit. Sure enough, the Chinese people have long known that dark teas will warm you up from the inside, and the light-coloured teas will cool you down.

For the teas you find in stores this means the black teas and the darker oolong teas.

If you drink herbal teas, you can count the following as warm teas: fennel, rosemary, star anise (licorice flavour), ginger, ginsing, jasmine, and spearmint (not peppermint). Another idea is to drop your dried Mandarin orange peels into the teapot while it is steeping. Not only is that more warming a tea, but it is beneficial to women - at that time of month.

In the last issue of the AVTS, I gave out a bad link for my Facebook page. It turns out there should not be a period before the com at the end. Here's the correct FB page link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/aloe-vera-and-handy-herbscom - Thanks to those who let me know.

I Recommend - Paleo Transition Cookbook
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Dr. Arland Hill has written the Paleo Transition Cookbook for the people like his patients, who had trouble switching over to this kind of eating as a new lifestyle. He has been recommending paleo to them for some years already. But it bothered him that people were not following through. So he set about to create new and very easy recipes to help with this transition.

His Paleo Transition Cookbook has 220 pages, and I'm discovering that I already have been eating more raw vegetables and fruits, and less meats So that part is easy for me. It doesn't sound nearly so scary to go Paleo. But he does have some clever recipes. For instance, paleo eating tries to do away with using flour or grains of most kinds; so how do you make pancakes, waffles, and things that normally call for flour? Answer: you look for substitutes like almond flour. I don't think I would have thought of that. At least not right away.

You can make a breakfast muffin by frying bacon strips (but not to brittle stage), and lining the sides of a muffin tin. lay in a tomato slice for the bottom, then put in a mix of onion, garlic, etc. and top with a raw egg. Bake, and voila, you have a fine breakfast muffin and never touched flour.

What? No bread? You ask - as I did. Oh yes, there's bread, but it is made with other ingredients which might include roasted, then ground up pumpkin seeds and pumpkin puree, plus some other ingredients, and it is then baked like quick bread. You can even slice this and use it to make French Toast. That, as you may know, is simply frying bread that has been soaked in a scrambled egg mixture.

If you go buy this book to download now, at Paleo Transition Cookbook you will get with it a smaller ebook that is a 14 day Quick Start Accelerator. In other words, you see how to lay out all your meals for 14 days. This helps you to integrate this kind of eating into your life, and you see that it isn't as hard as you thought.

I'm not about to go buy ALL those new ingredients at once, but the recipes I've read so far make me eager to try out some of these, and as they become favourites - I believe I will shift into more paleo eating.

Blessings & Thanks!

Ruth Marlene Friesen

Contact & Policies - Constant
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CONTACT INFO: Ruth Marlene Friesen (306)856-7785
903 23rd Street West, Saskatoon, SK. S7L 0A5 Canada.
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