Open up your kitchen cupboard, grab a handful of common herbs, fruits and vegetables and voila, your own unregulated pharmacy. On Friday, Tamar Lieb shared her knowledge of the medicinal uses of common plants in the workshop “Kitchen Wisdom for Common Ailments.” To use herbs as medicine, you can do everything from eating them to dissolving them in water, honey, sugar, or oil to extract beneficial properties from fresh and raw plants. I’ve included her long list of beneficial herbs and their properties here (it’s even alphabetized!)

To use waters for your herbal preparation, you can make an infusion (pouring boiling water over delicate things like flowers or leaves) a decoction (boiling harder things like bark or certain dried roots), or use steam. The smell of a plant is its volatile oils escaping, so when you’re making tea, Lieb suggested, keep it covered while it steeps. In a steam bath, made by pouring boiling water over your more delicate herbs (think the pizza spices – oregano, rosemary, basil, thyme – for a cold) and then placing your face, under a towel and over the bowl while you breath in the oily, aromatic steam.

Making herbal honeys, oils and vinegars takes somewhat longer, but its results last longer too, and make beautiful gifts, particularly if you use whole, fresh herbs in clear bottles. Try to use raw honey, which has its own beneficial properties, and apple cider vinegar, which contains probiotics. For each of these media, you’ll place the herb in the solvent and let it sit in a warm place for a couple of weeks, taking it out and shaking it around every day to ensure that more of the surface area of the herb comes into contact with the solvent. When making herbal honeys with dried herbs, Lieb suggests, use them in their powdered form, and mix them into a paste, but be sure to keep the paste slightly wetter than you think you may eventually want it. The powdered herbs will absorb liquid from the honey over the life of your spread.

In making medicines from fresh herbs, sugar is used like salt, to draw the moisture out of plants and create syrup. To make onion syrup, which is good for colds (and surprisingly delicious) layer thin slices of onion with sugar (or honey) and muddle at each layer. Over several hours, the sugar will draw the moisture out of the onion. When you have a sufficient amount of syrup for your purposes, remove the chunks of raw onion and eat your syrup or mix it with water or tea. The taste of onion is much less intense in this form.

Last but not least, the revelation greeted with the most enthusiasm by conferencegoers was Tamar’s ginger peeling method, as seen below (with the back of a spoon). Apparently it is helpful in getting around all of those little knobs.

Tamar’s List of Herbs and their Uses:

Blueberries: Rich in flavonoids and antioxidants; treats varicose veins, hemmerhoids, capillary fragility, and is a gentle remedy for children’s diarrhea.

Cardamom: Eases stomach pain and indigestion, warming stimulant, stops intestinal spasms, treats gas and bloating.

Cayenne: improves poor circulation and weak or irregular heartbeats, colds and flus, indigestion and sluggish bowels. Cayenne and ginger mixed with oil work as a massage oil for aching or painful joints. Cayenne dissolved in25ml of lemon juice and diluted with water and honey make a gargle for sore throats.

Celery: Seeds treat rheumatic conditions and gout. Support kidneys and acidify the body, treat arthritis, detoxify the body, improve circulation to muscles and joints, treats cystitis through mild diuretic and significant antiseptic action. Infuse in tea or mix celery and carrot juice once a day to cleanse.

Cinnamon: A warming stimulant for circulation and to clear congestion, 1/8 teaspoon of cinnamon can triple the body’s efficiency of insulin use. Digestive aid, powerful antiseptic, antiviral, astringent, helps stop bleedinging, good for poor digestion, colds and the flu.

Fennel: The volatile oil is antispasmodic, relieves gas and acts as an antacid, relieves bloating, settles stomach pains stimulates the appetite, is safe for children and can help with teething and stomach colic as an infusion or syrup. Nursing mothers can drink 2-4 cups of fennel tea a day to increase breast milk production, a wash of warm fennel tea can treat conjunctivitis or other eye inflammations.

Garlic: anitbiotic, expectorant, increases sweating, anticoagulant, anti-thrombotic, lowers blood pressure and cholesterol, reduces blood sugar, expels worms and parasites, antiseptic. Use it in cooking or make an infused oil for salads and topically for antiseptic or antinflammatory action. A cottonball soaked in garlic oil can treat earaches due to infection, garlic syrup can stop a cold or cough from gaining hold.

Ginger: Improves digestion and helps the body move out waste, reduces nausea, good for pregnant women suffering from motion-sickness, decreases flatulence and bloating, anti-inflammatory, soothes coughs, good for circulation, respiratory illness. Use a ginger/sage honey for flu or indigestion.

Horseradish: Sinus congestion and headcolds, rich in minerals and vitamins (including vitamin C). A warming antiseptic for asthma, congestion, lung infections. Increases gastric secretions and appetite.  Promotes sweating, helful during a fever, combine with thyme to treat headcolds.

Lavender: Mild sedative for treating headache, nervouseness and insomnia, digestive remedy, in a compress or cold tea wash it treats burns, open sores or infections. Allow to dry between applications.

Oats: Mild anti-depressant, raises energy levels, increases nursing mother’s milk, eases constipation, relieves itching associated with eczema. Fill a mesh bag with oats and toss in a bath under a hot, running tap, relax in the bath for 5-10 minutes.

Onion: diuretic, antibiotic, anti-inflammatory,  pain numbing. Beneficial to circulation, expels mucous and congestion. Helpful with colds, coughs and flus. Like garlic, onion offsets tendencies to angina, asteriosclerosis and heart attacks. Warmed juice can be placed as a muff over the painful ear to draw out the infection.

Oregano and Marjoram: Calming and soothing, can be used for nervousness and irritability and insomnia due to tension and anxiety. They are excellent in tea, alone or in combination. These herbs also have antispasmodic properties and can be used for digestive and muscular spasms.

Parsley: High in iron, beta carotene and chlorophyll. Enhances immunity and helps infections, the primary herb for bladder and kidney function and is a safe and effective diuretic, particularly its seeds. It has beentraditionally used to dry up nursing mother’s breast milk and is effective as a poultis for mastitis and swollen, enlarged breasts. Make a tea, a vinegar or simply use in cooking.

Peppermint: Stimulating to the mind, a great antispasmodic, good for cramps and spasms, good for nausea and motion or mornign sickness, stomach aches and soreness or itchiness of eczema as an infusion.

Potato or Carrot (grated): drawing agents, when used topically. Carrot treats inflammation of swollen glands, potato draws to treat chalazions or styes of the eye in conjunction with other treatment.

Pumpkin seeds: One 1/4 cup a day maintains prostate health and is a good zinc suppliment, treats prostate enlargement.

Sage: Used to dry up a nursing mother’s milk, as an antibacterial mouthwash, antiviral, antibacterial, antifungal. Taken internally, it fights infections, dries up secretions of all kinds, including persperation and saliva.

Tea Bags: Useful astringent, treats skin eruptions and allergic reactions or inflammations, treats hemorrhoids.

Thyme: Good astringent, antiseptic, treats upper respiratory infections, allays coughs and bronchitis, use as tea, facial steam or herbal vinegar.