High Desert Food

We've been making all sorts of salves and trying different recipes.   Here's a page with various recipes and it seems to be important to DRY the rosemary first:

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Rosemary-Oil

I wish they mentioned a temperature setting.  Recently got the Magical Butter gadget and it's so much easier than standing by the stove, having to stir and make sure it doesn't get to hot.   And of course it's much faster than having the herbs sit in a jar for weeks, although we'll do that again too once it warms up.

In some salves we added bees wax pellets (and other ingredients) so it won't be liquid in summer, but over the winter we just used coconut oil.    I recently got a 5 gallon bucket of REFINED organic coconut oil from Azure (almost half price of unrefined oil) and while I prefer UNREFINED for cooking, refined is better for oils as there's less "stuff" in it to mold and it'll last longer.

Here is Dr. Mercola's info on rosemary health benefits:

http://foodfacts.mercola.com/r.....emary.html

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Studies Done on Rosemary

Scientists tested 144 healthy volunteers (who were deceived regarding the purpose of the study) to assess the olfactory impact of the essential oils of lavender, rosemary, and no odor (control) on cognitive performance and mood.

The randomly assigned subjects were given visual analogue mood questionnaires both prior to and following exposure to the odor. Rosemary produced a significant enhancement of performance for overall quality of memory and secondary memory factors, but also produced an impairment of speed of memory compared to control.

The control and lavender groups were significantly less alert than the rosemary group, but the control group was significantly less content than the rosemary and lavender conditions. The findings indicated that the fragrance of these essential oils can produce objective effects on cognitive performance and mood.¹

A placebo-controlled, dose-increased clinical study was conducted on dried rosemary leaf powder due to its traditional reputation of reducing cognitive decline in the elderly. The lowest dose of rosemary (750 ml) had a statistically significant beneficial effect compared with placebo, whereas the highest dose (6,000 mg) had a significant impairing effect, as well as significant deleterious (less consistent) effects on other measures of cognitive performance.

Speed of memory is a potentially useful predictor of cognitive function during aging. The positive effect of the dose nearest normal culinary consumption was determined to indicate the value of further study of low dose/longer term testing of rosemary.²

As recent studies have shown rosemary to have chemopreventive and therapeutic properties, one study evaluated the anti-proliferation activity of rosemary extract against human ovarian cancer cells, and whether its three main active ingredients carnosol, carnosic acid, and rosmarinic acid can enhance the antiproliferation activity of cisplatin (which can cause serious side effects, such as hearing loss, kidney problems, and severe allergic reactions).³ The study showed that rosemary extract inhibited the proliferation of ovarian cancer cell lines.4

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"Cognitive decline" is definitely a big issue around here.  

Rosemary is also great for HAIR:

https://wellnessmama.com/5193/rosemary-leaf-herb-profile/

What a wonderful herb and it grows like a weed with no care in native soil in the high desert!