This past week a tickle in my throat turned into a full blown cold, culminating in a weekend of sneezing, coughing, snotty misery.

Ugh. This is the second time I’ve been sick this month. Very strange for me – I haven’t had so much as a sniffle in over a year! My best guess is that my body is forcing me to rest after my headlong sprint to complete my degree last year. I didn’t exactly take time to rest and relax and apparently by body is revolting.

Besides rest (yes, body, I get the message, rest more) I’ve been guzzling tea. Tea is such a cure all. It adds warmth, comfort and is uplifting when you are feeling miserable. One of my families favorites is lemon-ginger tea. But we recently came up with a new way to add a kick of spicy, warming ginger to our tea – juicing it. I almost always add a piece of fresh ginger to our fresh-pressed juice in morning, so it wasn’t a far cry to just juice a pile of ginger and bottle it up. We use tincture bottles to make dispensing the ginger juice an easy task.

To make a warming cup of tea (and I use the term tea here loosely) add 3-5 squirts of ginger juice (depending on how my you love ginger), a teaspoon of fresh lemon juice and a tablespoon of honey to a warm mug. Pour in fresh boiling water, give it a swirl and drink up! The honey helps coat and sooth a sore throat and cough, ginger aids digestion and is warming and lemon is a tried and true antibacterial thanks to its powerful citrus flavonoids (1).

Besides it’s cold-busting properties, if you love ginger, this drink tastes amazing too.

So if you have a cold too, drink up and feel better!

1) M. Dhanavade, et al. Study Antimicrobial Activity of Lemon (Citrus lemon L.) Peel Extract. British Journal of Pharmacology and Toxicology 2(3): 119-122, 2011. Available: http://maxwellsci.com/print/bjpt/v2-119-122.pdf