 Good morning holistic head to towers we are live in the holistic head to kitchen. I am your host Jennifer McLean and today I'm gonna help you guys to learn how to beat this cold and flu season. Sorry we have a little background noise this morning this is live. We got a little a little dog so hopefully that doesn't come through too bad. But anyhow so beat the cold and flu season. School has started for those that have kids it's back to school time already. All the germs are coming in full force. I've got a little tonic that I want to show you how to make this morning that actually during the summertime I use it as we use it as a drink around our house. But during the cold and flu season I'm going to make it into a little more of a tonic so that I only have the drink little bits every day and keep healthy. So what this tonic is called is it's called there's two names that I've heard going around it's Haymakers Punch or Switch All. Crazy right? I bet nobody's heard of it. So one of the main ingredients for this drink is super healthy apple cider vinegar. I want to tell you a little bit about the benefits of apple cider vinegar. It lowers blend sugar. It helps with detoxification. It's a great digestive aid I know a lot of us especially as we age have digestive challenges. This is a really good helpful tool to have in your cupboard. It also alkalines your body. So a lot of us in America especially we deal with inflammation and it can come out in all kinds of different ways. It can manifest in different things. For example my dear husband who's our videographer today he has a condition that has manifested from his inflammation called Gau and we actually treat it a hundred percent natural through food and yes it is possible. He does not take prescription medicine but this is one of his tools as well because it alkalines your body and you want it to be alkaline and not acidic. When your body is higher in acidity your inflammation is going to just explode. The key oh two other things too. This also promotes healthy cholesterol. Cholesterol actually is also a byproduct of inflammation. So it's all kind of related. You want to drop that in from inflammation and keep your body alkaline. It contains a ton of antioxidants. Again that's going to help you know we're bombarded with free radicals chemicals all kinds of stuff. This is going to help with that. The key to getting the right or really the best apple cider vinegar is that you want yes so it says here raw and unfiltered. That's really important because if it's not a raw apple cider vinegar it's going to be a pasteurized product and it's going to have it's going to be heated at the high temperature and it's going to kill all the live benefits. So what raw means essentially is you get the live benefits. So you want raw and unfiltered. Organic is important too because it's not going to have those chemicals. Our bodies are already bombarded with a lot of chemicals and just are everyday life so the more that we can keep out the better it's going to be. I'm going to plug a Costco again. I did get this apple cider vinegar at Costco. It comes in a two pack and it's in nice glass containers so that you're it's not in plastic because plastic can reach chemicals as well. So ideally if you can find it in glass that's the way to go. Love this stuff. And funny enough the recipe for this is actually on the back of this brand of switch-all. So this is really the starting point for the recipe. For me. Alright next key ingredient is going to be our raw and unfiltered honey. So just like the apple cider vinegar you want to find a raw and unfiltered honey. I get this at our local health food store. We have vitamin cutage here. It's definitely going to be available at Sprouts. If not this brand you know a similar version. I think there's also raw honey at King's Supers. Try do have you seen that there before? Awesome. So you can get it at your regular grocery store too. The benefits of raw honey. Raw honey is an antibacterial so that's huge. You can actually put this thing on wounds. A few other benefits it also helps with digestive issues. So this tonic not only is amazing to beat the cold and flu season but it's a tremendous digestive aid. Last honey also contains a whole slew of antioxidants. So again this is only going to be helpful to your bodies. Now certainly there's some people that have to watch their sugar intake so you have to kind of decide you know honey is the right thing for you. Hopefully it is because it does have a lot of health benefits and this is going to be a great drink and tonic. Alright the next ingredient here you have two options. We can do organic lemon juice or I really like to use lime juice in this tonic. This is probably my favorite. The recipe on the bottle I actually call for lemon juice but I prefer to use the lime so I'm going to do that today. But I do have to give a shout out once again to my dear mother. You guys I just have to give a shout out for these amazing bottle stoppers. These are silicone bottle stoppers. We use these all the time in our house. You know when you get these kind of jars and they're really hard to open. Those nasty metal twist tops like they kill my hands. Silicone bottle stopper pops right in. It's great too for sparkling water because it keeps all the bubbles in. Thanks mom you're the best. Alright and then the last ingredient is going to be ginger. So the recipe on the back of the jar called for fresh ginger. I use a combination of both fresh and I forget where I put my peel piece but both fresh and powdered. Powdered ginger is going to give it a little more depth in flavor along with the zest of the fresh ginger. Fresh ginger has a ton of health benefits as well. Ginger is a medicinal herb. It is great for digestion. Boom you got three things already that are helping the your gut be healthy. It's an anti-inflammatory so again it's going to help lower you know keep that inflammation low and it also helps to lower blood sugar and keeps your cholesterol lower. So a great herb to use anytime you're cooking you can get more ginger and fresh is certainly going to be best because it's going to have those live enzymes but in this drink I combine the two so you get the best of both worlds. Any questions so far I think we have some live viewers on. Alright okay so I'm going to jump right in we're going to start. This is super simple guys literally I think it takes probably four minutes or less and so what we're going to do it calls for one quarter cup of apple cider vinegar. One thing I forgot to mention though was what kind of container I use. So this is a glass ball jar. Love these things. This is a... I forgot what it is. Four cups. Four cups. I have a cheat sheet. Okay four cups is a court. So this is a court size ball jar. The recipe that I'm going to show you is perfect for this size because we're a family of four I actually size it up and we do a double batch so I always put it in here. But for cold and flu season if you're using it as a tonic this is a great size. You can get these ball jars as somewhere as close as Walmart so or online at Amazon it's a great place to get them. Alright so we're going to start out here and we're going to get down to the nitty-gritty. We're going to put a quarter cup of the apple cider vinegar. You guys seriously this is medicine and a jar. Quarter cup goes in. Super simple. The next part this is kind of the fun part is the honey because honey always seems to drip all over and make a mess. I'm sure if my mom was on she'd give me a nice tip of how to do this better. I'm literally just going to pour the quarter cup of honey. It's going to ooze out. I'm probably going to get a little more and pour that raw goodness right inside. I do use a nice silicone spatula to kind of scrape out the excess otherwise it gets stuck. Right try I've taught you lot about silicone spatulas. This is the tool that every person in the kitchen needs to know how to use. Alright so you've got your honey you've got your apple cider vinegar. The next piece to put in is our acidic so either the lemon or the lime. Again I said I like to use the lime juice so that's a simple it's just one teaspoon. So one teaspoon of your lime or lemon juice done. And then we're going to put a teaspoon of the ginger. So what I do with ginger actually my friend my dear friend Danielle Kelly showed me how to do this is just to use a peeler. I never used a peeler. I actually used the back of a spoon but I love doing it this way. It's much much easier. I actually had a peel piece and I've no idea where I put it. So I'm going to peel it really quick here. But you can use a back of a spoon for the ginger and I'll show you with my measuring spoon how to do this. There's stuff. Alright so we got a piece here. But you can use the back of a spoon for example and you can really just kind of scrape the ginger like that as well. So if you're up in the mountains and you want to make a switch all you don't have a peeler you just use a spoon. The next tool the kitchen tool that I'm going to use is this handy dandy zester or greater. I forget what it's actually called a zester. I love this one. This one I think is also from my dear mom. Thank you mom you're the best. Hashtag only child. Love my mom. She got me this kitchen tool as well but it has two different size graters on it. So one kind of make big chunks and this one's going to make your real fine zesting. I've used both in this switch all. It really doesn't matter. It kind of just has to do a texture. You are going to get a little bit of that ginger in your glass. If you don't like you know chewy bits of things in your drinks or your tonic you can just filter it out when you pour it. So you can just take a little small hand filter while you pour your drink out into the cup just filter out that bits. All right so now we're going to zest. I'm going to use the small side today and just kind of scrape it along and so this is one teaspoon. So the ingredients so far were a quarter cup of apple cider vinegar, quarter cup of honey, one teaspoon of your either lime or lemon juice, and then one teaspoon of the fresh grated ginger. And super easy to tap it in your jar. As far as the dry ginger again I kind of adapt to the recipe to what so I think I read something else online that also called for the the powdered ginger, your herb and your pantry. And I kind of do it by taste or I I it but I would say start out with maybe an eighth of a teaspoon. If you do a double batch start start out with a quarter teaspoon and just kind of you know do it to taste. Again it just brings a little bit of depth. I love ginger because I kind of love that spicy zing so the beauty of these recipes is truly do you know what works for you. Once you have these four simple ingredients in all I'm going to do next is add some filtered water and you just add filtered water to fill up this one quart container. So here you go you can see it all mixing. I'm going to take my handy dnd spatula and I'm going to stir this around and just kind of get everything mixed in. Stir it all around. All right then my next favorite part you guys is instead of having those metal tops that your ball jars come with. Also they sell these at Wal-Mart or online are just the plastic wide mouth ball jar lids. I like to use these because they don't have that separate piece and when I'm making things like my sourcrout or this switchle I call it switchle or haymakers punch you just have one cap and then I'm just going to shake this and you can kind of see the honey is going to settle. I told it upside down, give a couple shakes, hit it to the kids, tell them to shake it for you. Another really fun useful tool guys when you use these lids they're made out of plastic. I just take a dry erase marker that already has the lid off and I write on the top what this is so I'm going to write switchle it's great if you want to write the date down. Don't ask me how long this lasts because it never lasts long enough in our family to even I mean make a dent so I have to make it you know pretty frequently unless I do make it in the large size jars. So I just use my dry erase marker I write what it is on top and then if you use this lid for something else you simply wipe it off and you're good to go. So that's my switch o tonic and this is truly a health and a jar. I love this stuff. Again we use it to also help lower our inflammation, lowers the blood sugar, it's going to help my husband with gout, it's going to help me with some autoimmune conditions that I'm battling that I don't quite have a name for but we're actually getting those soon and it's super simple I would actually to drink this tonic in this kind of I feel that this is kind of a concentrated version. I would just use a little almost like a shot glass and just take a shot glassful every morning for the kids maybe give them a table spoon because it has apple cider vinegar it is going to be you know it's going to have a little of that vinaigree taste and kids at first maybe like what my kids love it but we also eat all real food. We don't drink sodas things like that so their taste buds are kind of used to things like this you know maybe start small even a teaspoon size but if you can get this apple cider vinegar that raw honey the fresh ginger inside your kids and inside you you're going to hopefully stay healthy for the entire cold and flu season. All right that's it this is how to make switch all our hay makers punch. Troy you had a question you mentioned earlier yes can you do this in any other flavors. So that's a great question can we do this in any other flavors? That's the beauty of this this is kind of a base product. One thing I've thought and I haven't tried yet but is to add you don't want to add any more sugar because this does have honey in it but you can find on your health food store shell for the health food section of your regular grocery store. Some juices that are called like just cranberry or just cherry where they have no added sugar. It literally is just the cherry liquid. That would be a great addition to this to kind of give it a more flavor. Again do what you think would be fun. Have make it you know have a little variety with it and enjoy for this fall season. We have a request to post the recipe with that proportions listed. Oh great who's that from? Joe. Joe thank you for joining. I will absolutely post the recipe because you can you think it's really easy to size it up or size it down. So thank you for the question. I'm so glad that you joined live and happy healthy healing. Thanks you guys for joining in the holistic head to toe kitchen and we will see you next week.