Everybody wash your hands! Now, I don’t get out much these days, because I’m cooped up working at the farm, but from the reports I get from my help and extended family, the germs seem to be abundant as of late. Trying to keep the germs from finding their way to our house has been hit or miss, but overall I think we’ve been missing the worst of what’s been going around. 

Now my wife is above average when it comes to her level of health consciousness. My oldest son follows suit, often asking if the food we made for dinner is healthy or not. Sometimes this is just to get out of eating something he doesn’t like, claiming it isn’t healthy, but for the most part he actually does like healthy foods. Our babysitter also gives our boys various forms of elderberry when they develop a cough or need the extra boost in the sick seasons. And my wife has taken to stocking up on a healthier staple of the medicine cupboard: Cough drops.

Through her thorough perusing of Pinterest and Google, she eventually decided upon her own little concoction, which married a basis of simple and known flavors the boys wouldn’t oppose. 

When I’m judging the difficulty of a recipe, I often look to the number of ingredients. This isn’t a perfect method of course, but as it happens, the name of the cough drops all but covers the three ingredients needed. Honey lemon ginger cough drops. 

Do you need anything besides honey, lemon, or ginger? No. In fact, you don’t even need the whole lemon!

If you’ve ever made candy, this will be no trouble for you. If you’ve never made candy, then I doubt you’ll struggle all the same. If you want to get fancy with it, you can use an actual candy thermometer, which will tell you the stage of density your cough drops will harden to once cooled. 

Something else on the optional tools list would be a silicone baking mat. We love ours and use it for all kinds of things, from cookies to candy and even to rolling out certain doughs. It works great for cough drops, because you can pop the cooled candies off it without worrying about ripping parchment paper or whether the candy sticks too much to the surface. 

The true test of whether all this was worth it, though, has been the kids. Our oldest has come to think of these as a treat more than medicine, and since it’s made of all natural, simple ingredients, it doesn’t hurt to let him treat the cough drops that way. After all, aside from the extra natural sugar in the honey, the rest is the equivalent of tea.

If one was so inclined, one could make a million and a half variations of these cough drops using herbs and other ingredients. The idea behind all of them would be the same though: Boil the honey, infuse the ingredients and drip drops onto a mat to cool.

The way out here we might get sick, but the aid to what ails us is a treat unto itself.