Traditional Chinese medicine

For around the past two years, my wife has been boiling a herbal remedy that our son drinks that is meant to improve his overall health and particularly his eczema symptoms.  The drink is produced by reducing (boiling off ) a specific amount of water until only several ounces remains.  In order to overcome the bitter taste that these herbs naturally create, she adds dried dates to the mixture.

By spotreporting

I am thankful that we switched to boiling with a stainless steel pot rather than a ceramic pot.  Sometimes one of us would forget that the mixture was reducing and the pot would boil dry.  For the stainless steel pot, the burned blackness can be scoured off but for the ceramic pots, they crack and we went through at least four of them this way.

I am thankful that my son drinks this remedy less often now so that we don't have to be boiling these herbs every day (down to once every three days or so).

Before buying pit-less dates, my wife used to take out the pits of the dates herself.  For her, it would take approximately a minute to remove the pit of each dried date, for about 8-12 dates. During this pit removal session, she'd be oblivious to everything else.  I am thankful that she finally verified with the herbalist and was told that:  There is no need to remove the pits of the dates.