 Our next practical is to make a hot macerated oil. So I've got all the equipment I need assembled in front of me. I've got a pan of water and I've measured the right amount of water so that when I put my beet-proof glass dish into it the base of the glass dish is just, you know, contained in the water which means that whatever's in here is going to cook at 100 degrees exactly. I've got some fresh country here that we've just gathered from the CNM Herbal Medicine Garden so it's brilliant and fresh. You can make these medicines using dried herbs but if you've got fresh herbal medicines available to use the vitality that you can get from fresh plant material is always wonderful. And then we've got, over here we've got organic extra virgin olive oil. I always like to use this type of oil. A, I've got lots of it at home anyway. It's perfect to eat therefore I'm very happy to put it on my skin and it's actually a very nice oil for external application. It's got a nice aroma, it's got slight antifungal properties so it's a good natural medicinal oil, readily available, readily available in organic form. So the process is what we're going to do first is we're going to chop up this herb which I'll show you now. I haven't washed this herb because we had a good rainstorm yesterday and I always feel the best way to wash herbs is with that distilled water that comes from the sky. And also you don't really want to be making an oily preparation using wet herbs. You don't want to be introducing any more water into the procedure than you've already got in the herb material. If you do want to wash your herbs, rinse them underwater and then pat them dry with a clean tea towel to get as much water off as possible. So now we're going to do the comminution process which basically means increasing the surface area of the plants. Obviously I've washed my hands carefully before. You don't need to do a particularly fine shop but you want to kind of reduce it so that it sits at the bottom of the pan nicely and is easy to cover with the olive oil. So that's absolutely sufficient. So this comfrey oil is going to be used for musculoskeletal injuries. As you know comfrey is the best friend for bones and the muscles. Its old name is knit bone because it used to be used by the old bone setters to knit bones together and speed the fracture healing process. It's going to be really good for sprains and sprains. It's going to be very good for arthritic joints. The thing you've always got to be aware of with oily preparations is they're not suitable for very hot inflammatory conditions. So for instance you could also make a hot macerated oil using calendula flowers. calendula is the best friend for the skin. But you'd want to be putting it on to dry skin conditions not hot red inflammatory skin conditions because oil is quite heating. We'll be using this oil later to make a cream and you'll see that you can make oils more suitable for hot skin conditions by adding other ingredients. So the process is we take our Pyrex dish. We put the herbal material into the Pyrex dish. We put it into the dish. You must never heat oils directly. This double burn is essential. It keeps it burning at a cooking at 100 degrees no more no less. And then I pour olive oil on top. You don't have to be precise about your amounts but basically you want to cover that herb material. As it starts to cook it will soften and sink down into the cooking oil. And then I'm going to turn on the heat. I'm going to bring that to the boil watching it very carefully. And as soon as it's reached the boil I'll turn it down to that minimum temperature to keep it simmering. Don't leave the house when you're doing this. You don't want the pan to run dry. You know after half an hour it might be necessary to put a little bit more water into the pan in which case you can carefully pick up the glass dish with a tea towel or oven gloves. Add a little bit more water into the pot so that the bottom of the dish is always just covered in water so it's constantly cooking. Don't let it run dry but never make a medicinal oil in anything other than a double burner. Anything above 100 degrees you'll start to burn the oil and you'll get a wasted medicine. So this is going to take about two hours so we'll return to this one later. Okay so welcome back. We have waited about two hours. This has been slowly cooking away at 100 degrees and our fresh country has been slowly yielding its constituents into the oil. I have to say the kitchen's been smelling amazing over the last couple of hours. Making medicines is like cooking. It's something that takes time. You know good things come to those who wait and it fills your kitchen with wonderful aromas and I can't express enough what fun it is for herbalists to be in the herbal kitchen and in the herbal pharmacy preparing these sorts of medicines. It's real magic at work. So what I'm going to do is pour the herbs through a sieve. I'm not going to press it hard. You don't want to squeeze out excess liquid into the oil. Lots of oils will have naturally evaporated at 100 degrees but you just want to let it drip through like that. And here we've got our macerated oil. So the colours change significantly. It's taken on the green hue of the comfrey leaves. Now if you're going to prepare a really good medicine you would actually then repeat the whole process and make a double meseration. So you'd get your double burner back on the heat. You'd put a fresh batch of comfrey leaves in there. You'd put this single macerated oil on top of that and you'd repeat the whole process again. So we're talking about a whole afternoon in the herbal kitchen and then you could double the concentration of that medicine. This is going to be good but when you're treating someone with a very acute kind of musculoskeletal injury or chronic arthritis you might want to concentrate that medicine again and then maybe even again to make a stronger medicine. It depends how much time you've got. But anyway, so this is perfectly good for our purposes and also critically this is a really good base ingredient for making other medicines. We're going to come back to this later on and make something else with it but I'm just going to put some of this away for use just as an oil. It's always good to have some of this in the herbal dispensary to give to patients who need something to rub into their joints. Just remember not onto very inflammatory hot conditions but whether skin is dry or circulation is poor it's a wonderful preparation to put on the skin. I'm not going to put the lid on yet. I'm going to let it cool down to room temperature. Then I'm going to put the stopper in and then I'm going to store it in the fridge. It should last a couple of years, kept in the fridge. We all know when oil has gone off, it starts to smell a bit rancid and we know the oil is finished but this should last two years and I have to say it smells absolutely beautiful. So this is a single macerated, comfrey oil.