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If you’ve never experienced stepping out your back door, walking a few steps to your herb garden or flower bed, and snipping off just enough fresh basil and oregano leaves to flavor your homemade spaghetti sauce, you are in for a treat! Don’t use the old (maybe even several years old) herbs in that dusty spice jar tucked away in your kitchen cabinet. You can liven up your flower bed and your cooking with beautiful, lush, growing, full-of-flavor, FRESH herbs! All of the basic cooking herbs are very easy to grow… chives, rosemary, basil, parsley, thyme, oregano, sage, even cilantro and bay. Some are seasonal: basil thrives in our hot summers and makes a beautiful display of bright green, dark green, even purple colored leaves with long flower spikes on top. Parsley and cilantro grow best here in the fall, winter and early spring, and they are champions in the dead of winter when the temperature falls into the mid and even low twenties, as they remain bright green and full of flavor for your table. Chives, rosemary, thyme, bay and oregano are happy no matter what the weather. Use fresh chopped chives in potato salad, scrambled eggs, cornbread, and of course on top of baked potatoes. Fresh, flat-leaf Italian parsley is indispensable in many dishes. Basil… it just wouldn’t be summertime without several big basil plants producing like crazy. But what to do with all those beautiful green leaves? PESTO! Cut plants down to about 8 inches, fill up your kitchen sink with cold water, and wash the basil leaves, changing the water a couple of times or so, swishing the leaves and stems good to wash off any debris. Then strip the leaves off the stems. You’ll need a good amount of leaves, at least 4 cups. Put leaves in the food processor along with several cloves of garlic (garlic lovers add as much as you like!), and about ¼ cup of good olive oil to start. Whirl all this around until leaves are chopped well. Then add about ¼ cup more olive oil, about ½ cup pine nuts or walnuts, and about ½ cup good Parmesan cheese (shredded). Don’t use Parmesan cheese in a can… you will seriously insult good pesto by using canned Parmesan! Whirl all this around for a few seconds until everything is chopped good and fine. You may have to add more olive oil to make a proper consistency... like thick cake batter. Also, now is the time to add some salt, and good pesto needs a decent amount of salt. Just add to suit your taste. You should have a good amount of pesto here, and what you can do is get those little zipper snack bags (not sandwich bags, but the little ones called snack bags), put several heaping tablespoons pesto in each bag, squeeze out the air and seal. Put those little bags in a larger zipper freezer bag and freeze. Whenever you want some pesto sauce for bread, as a pasta sauce, or even as a substitute for tomato sauce on a pizza crust, just take a bag out and there you go! With just a few basil plants you can make enough delicious pesto sauce to last all winter this way. How many times have you prepared a recipe that calls for a couple tablespoons of chopped flat-leaf parsley and you have to buy a bunch at the grocery store then end up throwing most of it away? Same thing with cilantro. Just go out to your kitchen herb garden and snip off what you need! Parsley and cilantro love cold weather. Even 25 degree, wet, freezing, nasty weather. The large green leaves may droop with ice, however as soon as the temp goes back up above freezing they are as beautiful as ever! How many plants will do that? It is important to remember that when substituting fresh herbs for dried in a recipe, use 3 times more fresh herb than dried. This is because dried herbs are more concentrated as the moisture is removed and the pieces of herb are smaller. For instance, if your recipe calls for 1 teaspoon dried rosemary, use 1 tablespoon fresh rosemary. If your recipe calls for fresh herb use the amount called for. Or, toss in just a bit more fresh herb to enjoy! Start using fresh grown herbs in your cooking and you’ll find you use them more and more… and you’ll never go back to old, dried herbs again. |
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Cooking with FRESH Herbs! |
