A Kenyan chef’s cure for flu that is not to be sneezed at...
“What’s new,” I responded irritably, blowing my nose.
I’d been trying to explain to her about the grandiosity of a Champagne sink and she was going on about how I could cure my flu with that African health remedy I’d told her about.
“You have the flu. Make the health drink,” she persisted.
She just wasn’t getting it.
How, I observed sourly, can one soar like an eagle when one is surrounded by turkeys?
I’d been reading an article in the property pages about a house that had gone up for sale. It boasted a thing called a Champagne sink that everyone seemed to be extremely excited about.
This house also had a cinema and a home-gym and a fabulous kitchen and other features to recommend it, but it was the Champagne sink, I snuffled, that had got to me.
For not only had I never seen one; I didn’t even know what a Champagne sink was.
“‘Tis far from a Champagne sink you were reared,” my friend retorted.
Googling had unearthed Champagne buckets, Champagne-coloured sinks, and what was described as a Champagne wash-hand basin with matching pedestal.
Finally, I found the Champagne sink which, it turned out, is something which can apparently be installed in a kitchen to display and chill bottles of Champagne.
Only it was described as a Champagne trough, I sniggered.
“A trough!”
“That’s a bit mean-spirited,” my friend said.
But isn’t the concept of a Champagne trough a bitter thing while the number of homeless people in our land increases every day; all those tents on all those streets, all those flimsy structures barely sheltering the shameful and ever-growing numbers of people now living rough.
This is one reason, no matter what Simon Harris says, why the tricolours have been going up all over the place.
Ordinary, very decent people who have worked hard and contributed to the Exchequer all their lives, feel let-down and beleaguered.
They watch in anger, resentment and sorrow as their expensively educated, highly qualified sons and daughters stream out of the country because they cannot find an affordable place to rent or buy.
And – rightly or wrongly – there is a growing fear of too many people jostling for everything from housing to health and even GP care, as the State struggles to house, feed and finance those living here along with those coming to live here.
Hence the tricolours. Not, I sense, to intimidate anyone but, simply, to remind the Irish State of its responsibility to its citizens.
The average cost of a house in Cork city is now between €375,000 and €390,000.
Americans reportedly account for up to 60% of house sales in some West Cork towns and villages - presumably because no-one else can afford them.
When you think about all of this, I said, coughing, it’s kinda hard to get excited about someone installing a Champagne trough to chill all the bottles of Bollinger they’re buying for these fab parties they’re having.
“You,” my friend said disapprovingly, “are just in unusually bad and begrudging form because you have the flu.”
Yes, I had the flu. Yes, I was feeling rotten. The worst of the symptoms had passed but the virus left me weak as a cracked egg and mean as a snake.
“What about the health drink your dad gave you the recipe for?” my friend repeated.
And faux-innocently: “Haven’t you been drinking it yourself, lately, to, em, ward off the flu?”
“Oh, just bugger off,” I said, and I went and made it again, using the recipe that my father got from a chef years ago in Kenya.
Three lemons, washed and sliced. Three limes washed and sliced (although I used oranges this time). Five cloves. One good generous tablespoon of turmeric – more if you could - a great big thumb of fresh ginger, grated. Six peppercorns, three cardamoms, two tablespoons of honey.
I have another, somewhat similar, anti-flu recipe that doesn’t use the cloves but it does recommend the use of a good dash of cayenne pepper.
Into a big saucepan with the lot of it, including the cloves or the cayenne or both, whichever you prefer, and cover it all with cold water.
Next, bring it to a slow, rolling boil. Simmer very gently for up to an hour. Leave the mixture overnight to allow the flavours to coalesce. Lift out and dispose of the fruit slices, then store your health drink in the fridge in flasks.
Warm up a cup of it every day and drink.
Then keep making it and keep drinking it.
If I hadn’t given up drinking it last spring, chances are I wouldn’t have caught this killer whack of autumn flu.
Now don’t even start on me getting the flu vaccine. Not a notion of it, ladies.
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