Above here you see a picture of tea and ginger root. As a Filipino, I am very used to seeing and working with ginger so it was a shock to me that very few people knew what ginger actually looked like. It's actually a very good spice to any stir fry or certain soups. I think it is extremele delicious but it also has very good healing properties. One thing it is excellent for is nausea. As someone who frequently becomes nauseous I have found that there is no better and faster working cure than a slice of ginger root. I normally just cut the skin off of it and suck/chew on it as is but it is also good to put in hot tea. Just slice it in to a few small pieces and use it as you would tea leaves. Adding honey and lemon to it make it super delicious. Another good thing ginger tea is good for is fighting colds. I've never tried this myself, but I've heard that if you drink 2-3 cups of ginger tea daily right when your cold starts up that it will last for a much shorter period of time and be less severe.
Bitter melon is also very useful. However, as the name suggest, it is also very bitter. My mom is a diabetic and often eats bitter melon because it helps control her diabetes. When cooking it, I suggest soaking it in salt water for at least half an hour to try and combat the taste. A simple recipe for this would be to just soak it in the salt water and then add it in with your scrambled eggs. It actually goes very well with scrambled eggs. As an Asian, we eat everything with rice, so we generally scramble this with eggs and then eat with rice (brown rice for diabetics). However, having it with a side of wheat toast is just as good. It's an aquired taste so if you don't like it the first time you try it, just keep trying it. Eventually you'll learn to like it or you'll just learn to deal with it. If you're going through a rough time with your diabetes, this is the stuff to eat. Oh, and as a side note, you'll probably only be able to find this in Asian grocery stores. They're fun to shop at anyway so stop by one and broaden your culinary horizon.
Lastly I would like to talk about one of the best things to spice up a dish, garlic! I absolutely love garlic. Thankfully, my boyfriend does too so we're able to use loads of garlic in all our dishes. A French teacher once told me that if you cook with a lot of spices then you're in love so she must be right because spices and garlic are the way to go. Garlic actually helps with high blood pressure and it's very easy to incorporate in to almost any dish. If you're lazy like me and buy the pasta sauce that comes in the jar, even if it's garlic flavored, just add some extra fresh cloves of garlic to it. You'll be amazed at how much it can liven that sauce up. There honestly isn't a dish out there that I probably wouldn't put garlic in unless it were a dessert. You can always mix garlic in with your vegetables and meat. It's delicious and nutritous so go out and try it. And that's it for my natural cures of today. Follow me for more helpful post :)
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