Holiday Foods, Day 1, Lettuce! From Caesar salad to the traditional tossed iceburg lettuce salad, lettuce gets used as the basis for many salad options during the holiday season. The precursor to domestic lettuce - Prickly Lettuce, can actually be used in tincture form as a painkiller and has been used to wean people off opiod dependencies although prickly lettuce itself is not addictive. The white sap that springs up when harvesting the thorny plant is a topical aenesthetic that works immediately, making the prickly harvest easier to tolerate. To use Prickly Lettuce in a wild salad, run your thumb up the center spine of each leaf to remove the tiny thorns, then wash and prep as normal. Larger leaves are more bitter than younger leaves and this is true throughout the growing season, however, bitters are known to aid in improving digestion, so we eat the leaves the entire growing season.

This is the last holiday foods post. For those that stuck with me from Day 38 to today, you now have 38 nutritional/medicinal wholefood profiles that you can use year-round. If you aren't sure how to use a given food for a pre-diagnosed condition, your local herbalist or naturopath can be of assistance. If there isn't one in your area, contact me, and after filling out my client intake packet, I can help you with recommendations around using food as medicine in your home. The wholefoods nutritional/medicinal database these profiles were pulled from is available for sale on my website. I'll also be compiling these profiles into a digital and paperback book that you can buy in the New Year. I'll be creating a calendar from these profiles as well, the goal there was to pick my top 12, but I kept annotating more than 12, so we'll see how I fit them into a 12 month calendar. I hope to have that ready for sale shortly after Christmas, before January 1st.

If you want links to any of these items, let me know. Otherwise, have a very merry CHRISTMAS! Merry in old English means "strong/strength". May you exit your holiday festivities healthier than you entered them! :-D