Slippery Ginger Echinacea Cough Drops

Hey Everyone! Sorry for the long absence! 
Our family room flooded in August and since my last post we have been doing lots of renovation to the house, and then with the holidays directly following, we are just now slowing down into normal life! Hopefully I'll be able to post more often than I have been! 

 One of my promised posts was a report on concoctions and experimentation of herbally things, but I decided just to start posting on each of the different things I've tried that have succeeded, and perhaps a footnote on one of the post of things that didn't  go so well or I didn't end up using much. 

A few days after christmas I had a tickly throat but found myself out of my store-bought cough drops (herbal honey-lemon drops of Swiss manufacture). It was a cold blustery, day and I didn't have any demands on my time so  I decided I should try my hand at making my own cough drops. I turned to my trusty pinterest board and discovered I had pinned a recipe some time ago for honey-ginger throat drops.


I followed the tutorial pretty much exactly, only I added echinacea and slippery elm to the ginger tea as it steeped.
I had never made "candy" before so I had the heat *WAY* higher than it was supposed to be and had to end up stirring it once even though the instructions said to leave it be, but I didn't want to be cleaning cough drop mess off the stove so I stirred it  and turned it down when it almost overflowed (she's not kidding when she says make sure you have a much larger pot than  you think you'll need!)
So although they were delicious and really interesting to make they were just a bit stickier than they should have been and not quite to hard "candy". The fact that they stuck in your teeth impossibly did help me not to try and crunch them up instead of suck though, so I didn't really have a big issue with them, and they got used within two weeks.

 They were super spicy because of the ginger, but I really liked them that way, and I really liked the addition of slippery elm bark - the "slippery" aspect is very soothing to a sore throat and cough!

 











If you like cough drops, or feel like a sore throat or cough is coming on,  you should definitely try these!
They are only good for like maybe 2-3 weeks though so don't make them unless you know you'll eat them!

On other things I've made recently, I'll just post at the bottom here - since my last post I've only made a few things like Echinacea Tincture, which was absolutely disgusting, but on the flip side really helped ward away (for dad) and (for me) lessen the severity of  an awful bout of sickness we caught while traveling.
In early January I made a new batch of Elderberry Syrup, with echinacea, clove and a cinnamon stick added. I really liked this batch, though even with just under 1/2 a cup of honey it was super sweet .

During the cold/flu season from November to January we caught a few colds,and I made many many batches of my ginger lemonade and I've tweaked it considerably since my original post, so expect an update recipe for that quite soon, as well as a post about the yogurt I am in the process of making today!

I hope you enjoyed this installment of things I've made over the past few months
Hopefully I'll be back soon with more posts,

~Elissa