The Sanostol bottles which Vihra fills with special condiments – basil-flavoured, rosemary-flavoured or dill-flavoured olive oil.

The Sanostol bottles Iva uses to mix olive and marigold oil.

This morning my daughter’s throat was a little sore… so we took out the vitamins, made herbal tea and that reminded me of my two favourite blogs – “Razvihreno” and “The Land Beyond the Rainbow” ….and the two magicians Vihra and Iva.

Vihra’s great idea to use empty bottles that used to contain Sanostol multivitamin syrup (read more at “Razvihreno”):

I, for example, often buy the vitamin syrup Sanostol for my son. I remember its wonderful fresh taste from my childhood years and I’m not surprised that my child likes it. too. When I grew up, however, I discovered another good things about those vitamins. The beautiful dark-brown bottles they come in. 

I’ve been collecting them in a cupboard for some time – it takes just a little bit of work to turn them into bottles for different condiments -basil-flavoured, rosemary-flavoured or dill-flavoured olive oil. I close them with wine corks. You can’t see the sprigs through the dark glass, but the aroma remains. And I put labels on them so I’ll know which is which. Unfortunately, lately I don’t have the time to change the labels which often get greasy as I use those condiments a lot. That’s why I came up with something else –  I make the labels from thick brown paper, I decorate them with a paper (or real) lace, I perforate them and I tie them to the bottle’s neck with a piece of thin gold twine. That way I can make a batch of new labels very quickly – while I’m warming the food in the oven – so that the table will be perfectly set… ( read the whole article)

…..wonderfully complemented by Iva from  “The Land Beyond the Rainbow”:

Our garden is so full of dew in the morning… The girls often go out in rubber boots, because summers here are wet and rainy. We can easily believe the illusion that we’re living in the English countryside… but instead of rose beds we have marigolds. To make them bloom all through the summer, however, I must not let them wilt completely. When they are fully open, when they have absorbed a lot of sunshine, I pick up the larges flowers and leave them in a warm and airy place to dry. In a couple of weeks I have a few handfuls of dry marigold. I use it to make marigold oil. I put them in a large jar and fill it with olive oil. I leave the jar at our South-West window where the sun shines warmly all afternoon. It stays there for the next four or five weeks. The longer the marigold soaks in the olive oil, the darker the oil becomes. It’s very warming. When little Dara was born, I rubbed it in her feet, and now that the girls are bigger, I give them a little sunshine on cold winter nights, when they’ve just had their baths… (read the whole article)

We don’t have a garden full of marigolds but we do have a wonderful friend who brings us homemade olive oil from Greece. I think I’ll try Iva’s homemade marigold oil recipe…