 Hi everyone, this is Chichu. Welcome to my channel. Now, as you know, we've spent some time in the kitchen in previous videos, right? We've made breakfast, talked about philosophy, politics, economics. We've made some lunch, we've made some dinner. We looked at how many different ways we can make tea and sort of mix the ingredients together, and I'm a huge tea drinker, so we spent a little bit of time doing that. In some of those videos, we had a little bit of mathematics overlaid, sort of in the background, doing a little bit of mathematics, maybe ingredients, sort of looking at the permutations, combinations of different ways we can make tea, right? And in those videos, you might have noticed some ingredients that I use a lot. And one of those ingredients is mint. And that's what I have right now in the background, drying. And, well, dried right now. Because what I do with the food that I use, with some of the things that I use, if I have access to them locally, and if I can pick them myself, I do. And mint is something that just basically grows like wheat. It grows mad, and there's a whole bunch of different types of mints you can have. And the mint that you see here is mint that I ended up picking myself. And basically what I do is basically pick a whole bunch, bring it home, wash it in salt water, let it soak a little bit in salt water, right? Because it's coming from nature, you want it to be clean and stuff. You just want to be mint that you're using, right? So I let it soak in salt water for a little bit, maybe about half an hour, anywhere between 15 minutes to half an hour. So sometimes longer if I'm busy doing other things. And then I dry it. And what I end up doing is for dispatch, because I had a fair bit, I ended up tying these things, taking the stems and tying them with a little bit of floss, right? And then hanging them and letting them hang dry. In a space that I don't, you know, I'm not very active in right now. Okay, so there isn't too much movement here. So they're just nicely sitting. I've taken about, I would say anywhere between probably about two weeks for them to dry to this state. And they were ready a little bit earlier, but I wasn't ready to make this video because what I want to do right now is jar all of this mint, right? What I end up doing usually at the beginning of spring, mint is one of the sort of weeds, I guess, one of the plants that grows fairly rapidly right at the beginning of the season. You can get some early spring mint, right? And what I have done before when spring hit, you won't get as much as, you know, towards the end of summer or mid-summer, right? But there are some nice freshman coming up in the spring. And what I ended up doing in spring is, you know, doing another cut like this. It wasn't as much as this, it was probably about this much mint that I picked or about halfway through half this mint that I picked during the spring. And we ended up jarring two jars. One of them was this size, right? And another one was this one, okay? Or it might have been three, right? And I'm down to my last half batch of mint, half jar of mint. So that's how much mint I've gone through from spring to the end of summer right now. We're into the fall, right? So what I'm going to do is I want to jar all this mint. So we're going to have mint all the way to the beginning of spring when mint comes up again. And this has sort of been a yearly ritual for me because I do use mint in... I use it again. I use it to make tea. Sometimes I just use straight up mint tea. Sometimes mix it in with rose. Sometimes it was just black tea or ginger or different ingredients that we talked about, right? But I do end up using mint as well a lot in food that I'm cooking, specifically for meats that I'm cooking as well as using mint dried like this. Sometimes I take bowl of yogurt and I take raisins and walnuts and throw it in there. And you take mint and just crumple it in there, right? And mix it all up. It's amazing. It's really good for the summer, right? So I thought what we'd do together right now, because I'm doing this, is jar this mint and I got a whole bunch of jars here laid out. We're not going to fill all of them, but most likely this is going to give us anywhere between three to five, most likely four plus or minus one, okay? And what I'm going to do is just jar these things here. That way you see what I'm doing. And what I've done is bring a bowl here, okay? And we're just going to put the jars in the bowl and take these things down nice and gentle. Okay, because sometimes when the plant is drying, the mint is drying, some of it is loose and I just pick it or it falls off. What I do is put it in a table like this or a plate like this. So from all this mint in the last two weeks, this is what's fallen from it, right? Or one of these, actually this big one I picked because I was using it or a couple of these. I was using, okay? I wanted to try it out with the fresh mint, freshly dried mint in the food just to see what it tastes like compared to the older stuff we had in the spring, right? And it's fairly recent so they tasted the same, there wasn't any difference. So what we're going to do is take the jars and I'm just going to place them here. I'm going to grab the mint from here and just crumple it in there, right? And sometimes, you know, I usually fill it in. Let's do it for these ones. I just take it in and I'll show you, right? And I don't take off the leaves. I use the stems as well a lot of times when I'm cooking or using for tea for sure, right? So I would take a stem like this and put it in a teapot and do the double, you know, simmer style that I do, right? So all I do is just usually just take this and crunch it in and it falls in there. And I push the leaves in there, right? So let's just put these in there. So these are added away. And, you know, that's basically what we're going to do for the remainder of the time. Nice and quiet, nice and gentle. And go about our business filling in these jars so we can have mint for the rest of the year and beginning of next year because we're in 2018 right now. So we can have mint. I'm going to put this little bit of bubble thing here so we don't get that sound, right? And what I do is I just push it down, right? And the way we're going to take these down, I got my scissors here. Okay. And what we're going to do, we're just going to actually before we do that, let me see if I can take this off nice and gentle without losing too many leaves from it. We lost one. You can just open it up and take it down and one we lost. I'm going to put it here and I'm going to use the scissors just to cut the floss here. And then I'm just going to separate these and push them in because when I'm taking them out, what I can do is either grab a stem and pull gently, you know, get a stem with some of the leaves falls off, or I can just reach in and just grab one leaf. The way it works is here, let me show you this as well, this as well, right? And the way it crumbles is this, take a look. I could even wait until these are dried a little bit more, but they're fairly dry. They're dry enough for what we need, right? And if I feel like right now, if these aren't as dry as I like them, because sometimes you grab and just go, it just totally falls apart. It's fantastic, right? What I do is when I jar them, I leave the lid open. I don't put the lid back on it, right? I leave the lid open and just let it dry a little bit. Maybe I put it under the sun a little bit, not for a whole day, just an hour or so or half an hour or so. And the rest of the moisture will evaporate and then I close up the lid and we're done, right? So what we're going to do is put this guy here, and I'm going to bring this guy here. That way if any of the leaves fall down, we catch them in the bowl, right? And we're just going to cut this and take the floss. What we're going to do is just push them in one at a time, and it smells amazing. Like really, it smells fantastic. When I just washed them and they were freshly hanging, amazing smell, amazing smell. Just one more note, because I'm putting the stems in here as well, because the stems take longer to dry than leaves, right? Take a look at this, you need them to be dry. So if you're doing this, you want to check the stems. When the stems are completely dry, you're ready to do this, right? These could possibly use another week of hanging, right? But it's okay, most of these are in my Linus site, and I'm just going to use them up and leave the lid open a little bit for maybe a day or so. So let's take down another one.