Tea Toddler (a recipe)

A recipe for overcoming your seasonal affective disorderly phlegmatism with winter warmth, far more efficacious than the poisonous blear of Nyquil et al:

Boil water. If it works for childbirth, it damn well ought to work for the common cold. Drop in a clutch of teabags and let it steep while you assemble the active ingredients.

Into a stouthearted mug (because motivation is everything), squeeze the juice of half a lemon (bits of pulp optional).  Limes work nearly as well, medically speaking*, but this is one of the few places in culinaria where lemons taste better.

Add a healthy splorf of honey, somewhere between 2t and 2T.

Put in your tot** of bottom-shelf whisky (not whiskey with an “e,” which is arguably not whisky at all, and certainly not bourbon unless you’re making this for the kid you’re babysitting, not that we recommend that even if it’s occasionally a capital idea).

You don’t need the good stuff. You just need the stuff.

Top up with boiling hot tea. Stir with cinnamon stick, then drink that sucker right down, letting your honey squeeze your lemon til the juice runs down your chin.

Then go to bed early. You’re gonna be there for a while.

*DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor, and neither are you. This is self-recreation, not self-medication. People run over by rhinovirus-osceruses deserve a little recreation.

**Somewhere between wee dram and a manly double jigger, adjusted according to symptomatology and whining level.