A food as your medicine

There is a saying, if you don't consider food as your medicine, then medicine will be your food some day. Nature is amazing to have remedy of all the health problems and it knows when to give what. Neem flowers are a special springtime gift of Nature having a lovely jasmine-like scent and we have quite a few Neem plants in the front, so the entire area is full of fragrance during this time. However, apart from the fragrance they have a nice use - you can eat them as food and offer numerous health benefits. The difficult part is in procuring them, but slowly people have realized the potential of this nature's gift and taking of that advantage, many street side vendors now sell them at heft price.

And if you want them at the convenience from your home, you can buy online as well, but look at the price - 20gm costs ₹53.42 - ₹2.67 per gram is way above the price of any other normal vegetable, but then this indicates the demand of it.

I have got these special big tools ( bamboo sticks) for the purpose of getting flowers, so I decided to procure some fresh neem flowers from our garden - all free.

It took a couple of hours, to get a full of bag of clusters of flowers, discarding the leaves, but it was worth it.

Then at home, the lady took care of extracting only the leaves from these clusters, not a very difficult job.

We put them under the sun to dry it so that it can be kept for long time and consumed, however, I was surprised to see the kids loving to consume them, once they understood the benefit of it. There are a varieties of dishes that can be prepared using it - they certainly taste a bit bitter, but then that's the law of nature, right - The bitter the taste, the better it is for our health. On the first occasion, the lady made pakodas using these and they finished fast. You can just simply fry it with onion and mustard oil, it tastes amazing. When we were kids, we were being told that, if we eat this seven times in a year during this season, we will be free of all diseases for the entire year and that is how we loved it. Now we can't do the same - we have to convince the kids with all the knowledge and only after that they accept. But I am glad, they are learning these valuable lessons of life that is not taught in text books. Tell a teen that consuming neem flowers will improve their hair quality and cleanse all pimples (they will find the evidence from google instantly) and you will see what happens next.

However, there is a caution - it is very important to consume them in moderation and not a lot daily - specially for pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers - they may have adverse effects.

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