#134 Conquer half of Europe?
You need more rosemary in your life
These days, there’s a new productivity supplement every week. Just recently I came across this new cognitive product on X that claimed to enhance your productivity. Check the ingredients list and it’s just a concoction of pharmaceuticals that you used to need a prescription for.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with innovation, and I'm sure there's a market for it, but what are we even doing? Do we need such insane concoctions just to sit down and get some work done?
If you ask me, the root problem is the mass degradation of attention spans around the world but hey that’s a conversation for another day.
We’ve forgotten the medicine nature provides. How lucky are we to live in a world where so many things just grow out of the ground that’s incredible for us? I find it miraculous.
Yet you don’t see these benefits lauded in the mainstream. Well that’s because you can’t patent rosemary like you can that new productivity drink and build an 8 figure brand. And that’s why we’ll keep spreading real propaganda for as long as time continues.
If you told me I could only choose ONE herb for the rest of my life, the answer would be rosemary. Napoleon was so obsessed he used 162 bottles of rosemary water as perfume in the first three months of 1806. Aristotle believed rosemary improved memory, so his students wore rosemary garlands. And we’ve only confirmed this ancient wisdom with modern science.
Rosemary has incredible cognitive benefits. It doesn’t only decrease your odds of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s in the future but studies have shown that it makes you sharper. 750mg dried rosemary powder was found to significantly improve memory speed in elderly adults. Even the aroma of rosemary increased cognitive performance and alertness in multiple studies.
There’s increasing evidence showing rosemary’s effectiveness against cancer, particularly in reducing tumor size.
Rosemary supports hair growth. Rosemary extract was found to be as effective as 2% minoxidil! Both treatments showed significant hair count increases at 6 months, but rosemary oil caused significantly less scalp irritation.
Rosemary helps diabetics. Rosemary tea significantly decreased HbA1c, insulin resistance, and glucose levels in type 2 diabetics, increasing glucose uptake to 186% of control (comparable to insulin and metformin effects).
Here’s how you incorporate more rosemary into your life:
Baste your steaks with fresh rosemary and even chew on the sprigs after you’re done if you’re about that life
Mince rosemary finely and make a rosemary omelette
Make rosemary garlic compound butter
Add rosemary leaves to your basil pesto
Sip on rosemary tea before bed
Throw rosemary sprigs into bone broth
Use rosemary oil on your hair
Dry rosemary and use as seasoning
Grow rosemary in your garden
Remember, rosemary is a herb, and with herbs and any natural supplement, it takes time to see results. You don’t just chew on a rosemary sprig one day and conquer half of Europe! You need to take rosemary consistently and over a few weeks you’ll notice the difference.
Fertility bingo
Gifts of nourishment
Normalize gifts of nourishment
Eat green
You need to be eating more green
The era of minimalism is over
The more detail, the more soul
❋ PAN-SEARED WILD DUCK BREAST WITH PORT WINE REDUCTION
Seared Duck Breast with Port Wine Reduction — it’s a dish fit for a bistro menu. Truly, the sauce tastes as if it took hours to prepare, as if pans loaded with veal bones had to be roasted, as if those bones then had to simmer into a rich stock, and as if that stock had to reduce to a syrup.
It’s the sort of sauce that elicits comments such as, “I could bathe in this.” I promise you, anyone could make this sauce. It’s foolproof.
The sauce, incredibly, has only three ingredients — port wine, shallots and chicken stock. Admittedly, a 750-ml bottle of port — cheap port but port nonetheless — gets reduced by more than half. And making it does require a bit of love, by which I mean time, about an hour total.
❋ HOW TO MAKE POLLEN PATTIES FOR BEES
Knowing how to make pollen patties for your bee colonies is a valuable skill. While bees collect their own pollen-sometimes they need more protein than they can collect. A large part of keeping bees healthy and productive involves learning when to help your bees and providing extra protein at the right time can be very beneficial.
In a perfect world, our bees get everything they need from the environment. That is what every beekeeper wants to happen. But, in the same way that we may find ourselves feeding bees sugar water sometimes – making pollen patties can provide a needed boost.
As a child one of my favorite dishes was a simple broth with noodles. Already very early on I was able to cook it all by myself, standing on a little chair I mixed stock powder with hot water, boiled some noodles in it and after a few minutes I was in a salty broth heaven.
Nowadays I don’t like stock powders that much anymore, but I still love a good broth and have tried a lot of recipes, which promised to turn a pot of hot water into broth heaven. But as I like my broth clear or only with little add ons I find ordinary vegetable broths often a bit boring and they also take ages to cook (and having some bones or a soup chicken at home takes quite some planning).
A while ago I read a book by David Tanis and he mentions a provencal garlic soup which only needs 20 cloves of garlic and hardly anything else. After trying it out I knew I had found the holy grail of vegetable broths. The garlic loses its penetrant smell while cooking and turns he water into a savory broth which is comparable to a long boiled chicken broth. And it only takes 20 minutes with ingredients I always have at home!
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