Name this Immune Elixir!

It kills nasty bacteria, and helps fight viruses. Inflammation in the human body, which research increasingly cites for a host of diseases and conditions, gets hobbled by it. A miracle drug? Well, it certainly is not a pharmaceutical — the health-boosting elixir is not hatched by white-jacketed chemists in suburban laboratories, sold in pharmacies and saddled with a litany of worrisome side - effects.

No, this is Fire Cider, and starting this week, we are selling our Fire Cider crafted in house, here at Fresh Thymes.

This gorgeous tonic, which has served as a potent folk medicine for generations, is a fermented beverage involving raw apple cider vinegar, turmeric, horseradish, garlic, onion, ginger, hot chilies, fresh citrus, and a dash of raw honey to lightly sweeten the pot. We embraced it some months ago, and decided upon tasting to experiment with our own creation. Our inaugural batch has been fermenting for a few weeks, and now it is ready to pour!

We are all about seasonal improvisation, and so will toy with our recipe throughout the year, adding different health promoting (of course!) vegetables and roots to each batch as they are harvested. If you swing by Fresh Thymes for the next week or so, in addition to the base (the list of ingredients that normally are used to make fire cider) the tonic will also include green onion and cilantro, in honor of the lightness and green-ness of spring. Sometimes we may remove the hot chilies, to make a nightshade-free batch. Other times, we will add adaptogenic herbs, like astragalus and ashwaganda to modulate our immune system, or supplement the fermentation with beets or kohlrabi. It all depends on what is in season, and our inspirations for new recipes.

We celebrate Fire Cider for its anti-microbial, anti-bacterial, anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties. This is strong stuff! We also trumpet its ability to aid with digestion. Flavor? We dig it, but fire cider is not something to sip and savor, like a glass of Oregon Pinot Noir or a pint of Omission IPA. The horseradish can give it a nose-scorching, wasabi-like kick, and the base of raw ingredients are weighted heavily towards the fiery — thus, the elixir’s name. We serve Fire Cider by the shot glass, and find it is both a wonderful apertif (something sipped before a meal, to help nurture appetite) and a digestif (a post-prandial treat that promotes digestion).

Never tried fire cider? Crazy for the stuff? It can be bought in bottles, here and there, but try our home-crafted version. We fuss over our big mason jars packed with fermenting goodness, tweaking recipes and toiling to hike the batches with as much health-amplification as possible. We down at least a shot of fire cider a day, and we have a feeling it might become part of your routine, too.

Food Revolution Day and the Growe Foundation

Kids, gardens and food are close to Christine’s heart. She was an early supporter of Boulder’s fantastic Growe Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes health, nutrition and education in elementary schools through the magic of gardens. Among other things, for a number of years Christine was the Growe Foundation’s roving chef, teaching cooking classes across Boulder County that incorporated produce the kids had grown themselves.

The classes weren’t just about radishes and tacos. When she taught kids how to make Indonesian lettuce wraps, for example, the kids learned about Indonesia, as well as Asian fish sauce and Thai basil.

The approach works. Get the kids in the gardens, where it begins with soil and seeds. Teach them how to nurture the plants. By the time they snip that head of lettuce or pluck the pea pod, their relationship to food has already been transformed. Cooking, which is a vital (and sadly, fading) skill, resonates much more with the kids when they watched that basil plant sprout from miniature seed to aromatic bouquet. When all of this is tied back to curriculum, like how Indonesia is an archipelago of thousands of islands, is the fourth most-populous country in the world, and has been a vital link in international trade since the 7th century, it becomes more personal.

Christine cherished this work, and now, as the Boulder County Ambassador for Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Day— which is today — Fresh Thymes is thrilled to donate 5 percent of the restaurant’s proceeds to the Growe Foundation.

We are eager to help the great Jamie Oliver spread his gospel celebrating food education and family cooking, and to join him in the fight against obesity. Throughout the year, we intend to help spread Jamie’s message throughout Boulder County in different ways.

For starters, kids in schools across Boulder County grow vegetables in hoop houses sponsored by the Growe Foundation, and we are buying all of the lettuce — so far, that is 80 pounds of it — from four of the schools and serving it in different Fresh Thymes dishes, including a Growe Foundation salad, dressed with a recipe that the school kids created. All of the money we spend on the lettuce goes straight back to the garden-to-table programs in the schools.

Happy Food Revolution Day, comrades! Gardeners and cooks of the world unite!

Why Sea Vegetable?

We love our vegetables, here at Fresh Thymes Eatery. We dig grating the brussels sprouts for our slaw. We geek-out over the pleasures of fermentation — we nearly dance when it’s time to make kimchi again. The aroma of just-made pesto makes us swoon.

But it’s not just earth-rooted treasures that thrill us. We adore sea vegetables, too. Kelp noodles, in fact, have recently become regulars on the menu, in our pho-in-a-jar dish, which you can find in the refrigerated case, and in our increasingly popular pad thai.

 Why sea vegetables?

The kaleidoscope of water-borne vegetables — including both marine salt water and those from freshwater lakes — offer quite a bit, including different flavor profiles. Vegetarians who desire the atmospheric and evocative flavors of seafood, for example, embrace seaweeds, which can impart the flavor of fish without involving the harvesting of a single anchovy. The textures delight as well. Kelp noodles can simultaneously deliver slight crunch, like al dente wheat noodles, with an almost satiny mouthfeel. And classic sea vegetables like hijiki, arame and wakame introduce something gorgeously ethereal to soups, and something delightfully chewy to salads.

The flavors and textures are special, but it is in the realm of nutrition where sea vegetables really shine.

Sea vegetables, which need sunlight to grow and survive, are neither plants nor animals — they are algae, and are commonly grown on coral reefs or rock landscapes. They contain virtually every mineral (about 100 minerals and trace elements) found in the sea, the same minerals found in our blood. Sea vegetables contain between 20 and 50 times the amount of minerals found in land plants.

It’s not just the things with roots that get overshadowed by sea vegetables’ mineral content. Sea lettuce contains 25 times the iron of beef, while the iron content in wakame and kelp quadruples that found in beef. Milk gets touted for its calcium content, but hijiki, arame and wakame, those sea vegetables commonly found in Japanese seaweed salads, contain 10 times more calcium than the liquid we pump out of cows.

Sea vegetables are high in iodine, and thus help boost thyroid hormones, and come packed with vitamin K and iron, both of which are vital for blood. Bones get a boost from folate and calcium.

More? Indeed.

Sea vegetables possess an abundance of lignans, which are phytonutrients that inhibit blood cell growth that are responsible for nourishing cancer cells and for sending cancer cells into the bloodstream. They contain mucilagenous gels, such as algin, carrageenan and agar, which specifically rejuvenate the lungs and the gastrointestinal tract. The mucilagenous quality to sea vegetables helps with digestion, too; digestive tissues, essentially, turn more slippery, and food moves with greater ease through the digestive system.

Earth plants, of course, contain powerful punches of chlorophyll, a potent alkaline substance that is considered “the blood of plants.” Consuming chlorophyll is extremely healthy. Guess what? The highest concentrations of chlorophyll are found in sea vegetables.

Shall we continue? Yes!

The minerals in sea vegetables are in colloid form, meaning that all minerals and elements are fully integrated into the living plant tissue. Among other things, this means the minerals get used by the body, rather than just eliminated as waste.

Due to this overall high concentration of minerals, sea vegetables are extremely dynamic anti-oxidants, and the wallop of nutrients makes sea vegetables vigorous energy boosters.

Finally, sea vegetables are classic detoxifiers.

All of this is foundational for human life. We all begin our development in a saline solution in the womb and are nourished and cleansed by blood that has the same mineral composition as sea water.

They are gifts to humanity. Miracles. And we honor them with great love at Fresh Thymes.