Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Five Element Nutrition: Clearing Heat

Background Story: My sister is queen of the hot peppers. She loves them so much she even went to New York to do this crazy contest at an Indian food restaurant where they dare you to eat an entire serving of some insanely hot food and if you win you get your name on the wall, a certificate, and a free beer. She won – no problem, barely broke a sweat. (By the way, I adore Indian food.)

So here in Anchorage, her friends told her that one of the restaurants downtown was making chicken wings with Ghost Peppers – outrageously HOT! Of course, she had to go. So she comes home later and I ask how they were. She says they made her sweat, burned her lips, and were the hottest thing she ever ate. I remark that you can’t tell her lips are burnt through the lipstick she’s wearing. Only, she tells me, she’s not wearing any lipstick. Oh…. The dark maroon lipstick was the burn. I saw that and almost cringed at what her stomach/spleen must be doing inside to manifest this way through the lips. I had work to do.

Experiencing extreme digestive heat, she drank clay water (Sonne’s #7) for the next day. It was the only thing she could handle taking into her system. It helped enough that she could get some decent sleep through the internal volcanic activity taking place.

I made her a cooling soup to eat for the next 3 days: very light broth base (flavor and nutrition), juiced celery bunch with ½ lemon including the peel (she won’t eat celery but it’s so nice and cooling I juiced it and added that to the broth – lemon was for coolness and flavor), small amount of white rice (soothing and easy on digestion), very small amount of mung beans (cooling, detoxifies). Once this had cooked together, I removed it from the heat and added a tub of cold plain yogurt (cooling, soothing), 1 finely chopped fresh cucumber (cooling), and sprinkled some dill on top for flavor.

It was simple to make, tasted great, soothed her digestion, and cleared the heat. She started to feel much better after the first bowl.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Nothing to ease/prevent/treat the 'Ring-Of-Fire' the next day???