Every year around March to May there is the burning season in north Thailand and lots of people get effected by the quality of the air and start to respiratory and chest problems along with a few other symptoms .
I thought I would get organized and get myself prepared to help my lungs and chest so I purchased 3 kg of raw honey from a friend in my girlfriends village .
This was from last years harvest so it had crystallized so I had to heat it up in the warm sunlight so that it could run smoother.
It was the lime season as well so I picked 3 kg from one of my trees and I dug up 1 kg of ginger from the small patch in the garden .
I was ready to rock .
First ,I cut the limes into about 1 inch slices and did the same with the ginger .
I then tum tumed the ginger with the pestle into a fine paste .
I then layered the honey lime and ginger in alternative layers till the jar was full with the honey covering all .
I added some garlic and red spice which was also tumtumed into a paste about 200g of each and then I left it for about 2 months .
This was one of the first things I did after the new year bells and was bang on the time for being ready for the smog season .
So March dutifully arrived as it always does and it was time to prepare the mix for bottling .
First had to put the mix into a bowl with a Cotten mess capturing the ingredients .
Once the bowl was half full with liquid I then hand squeezed the mess to extract as much juice as I could .
Next the mixture which had been squeezed was put through a blender so I could get the lime peel extract which actually has a higher vitamin c content than the juice part .
I don’t have a super high speed blender
So again I had to hand squeeze to extract as much juice as I could
The lemon peel is certainly much more bitter than the juice and the color is more yellow than the juice .
After about 1 hour of pouring, squeezing and blending the lemon peel .
I had extracted as much juice as I could with my hands .
I’m sure I could have got more out if I had heavy weights to,but the extract that wasn’t juiced was put on my 2 lemon plants that I had just planted a month earlier .
Lime and lemon are related so I guessed the nutritional value that was still left would be of benefit to the lemons plus they share a spiritual essence in shape ,form, aroma ,color and nutritional value so the new lemons would welcome the remains of the lime ,,along with the ginger ,honey ,garlic and red chilies .
The final part was to find a funnel and bottle the juice into the recycled whisky bottles .
I even had a special high quality scotch single malt ,( not shown in the picture ) that still had a trace of the whisky inside .
That I keep for special occasions haha.
All in all I managed to get 5 bottles from a ratio of 3 kg honey 3 kg lime 1kg ginger 200g each of garlic and red chilies .
I show some pictures of the process and you can see the sediment of the lime peel and ginger settled on the bottom of the bottles .
Always a good sign of quality haha.
