Get your saril, ginger and limes from a small farmer, and if you want a healthy alternative sweetener try shopping for it at Organica

Almost that time of the year

The saril is flowering and soon it will be ready to harvest. In the city and at roadside stands in the Interior you will be able to buy bags of the red female flowers.

This annual harvest begins in December and is over sometime in February, with saril identified in Panamanian culture as a Christmas and New Year's drink.

What you do is strip the petals of the red flowers away from the seed pods in the middle and boil those petals into a tea. To do so traditionally, boil them with a bit of fresh ginger root, and then add lime juice and sugar to taste after you get this deep red tea, and serve the stuff chilled. ("Traditional" means Jamaican-style. This drink came into Panamanian culture by way of Jamaica.)

One Interior-style way of getting blasted as the New Year comes in is to make saril in the traditional style or just boil it up without ginger and mix it with copious amounts of seco, say while you're reveling at the bonfire on which you are burning muñecos. (This reviewer is not much of a drinker and can't tolerate seco, so has not personally tested the recipe.)

One unfortunate thing about Panamanian culture is that hardly anyone conserves food. However, if you have a food dehydrator or can improvise one, dried saril flowers will keep all year long if you dry them well and put them in a ziplock plastic bag or a jar with a tight lid. In the general culture this is a very seasonal drink, but because it's so easy to conserve it need not be if you like it very much.

Photo by Eric Jackson, of Eric Jackson's current saril crop maturing

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