the Friday Feeding; VOL. 39

The store is the place to be right now. Air conditioning, good food, a great art show a n d puzzles. Thank you for coming in all week.

What’s happening in the store right now…

Click here for next weeks food specials…

Herbs

Your gardens may be lush with herbs ‘bout now, but do you really do anything with them?  

You know how that early January lust for all things green leads to purchasing those herb seeds just KNOWING we will have the best garden e v e r.  And in early spring, like a kid in a candy store, we stuff our senses and shopping cart with all the herb plants hauling them home to sit for a while, and a while, eventually making it into the ground.  AND NOW…we have so much lushness so that unless we plan a week-end of industrious kitchening, they may go by the way side.

Since I have always had 3 or 4 projects going at once I have taught myself some herb preserving speed tricks that might help you too.

Drying herbs for later use:

Herbs taste best picked first thing in the morning before the sun hits them.  They are fully hydrated so their flavor chemicals are more evenly distributed in the leaves making their flavor more delicate.

I cut them by the stem-full, run them under cool water to rinse off any dirt or bugs and immediately put them to dry.  Don’t wait long because once they are wet they start deteriorating.

NO.I have found that my dehydrator is a pain in the butt, takes too long, uses electricity, requires watching over and I hate the constant background sound of the whirling fan.

NO. I have found that oven drying, like all the above reasons, is also a pain in the butt.  And, because the oven temperature doesn’t get low enough, the herbs have a slightly cooked flavor to them.

YES.  Drying in your attic! I got this idea from the Shakers who did this.  I have a clothes line strung up with clothes pins and hang my stemmed branches of herbs over the line and pin them in place.  Drape some cheese cloth over them if you are worried about flies landing on them.  They will be crispy dry in a few days up to a week. Come back with a basket and gather them. 

YES.  Drying in your car!  Our cars get so hot this time of year you can place your herbs onto a towel or garden center flat tray to dry them on.  The flavor will be better if they are not in the direct sun.  Keep them in place until they are crispy dry.

YES. At the end of the season when your house is not air conditioned you can hang your last-of-the-season herbs in the warmest room of the house to dry.  This is the old fashioned way to dry them over a cooking stove, near the fireplace or above your wood stove.  I dry my sage at the end of the season hanging branches in the kitchen then pick from them for our Thanksgiving stuffing.

The herbs crumble easily off the stems once dried, then store in a zip lock bag or jar.

Preserving herbs in the freezer for later use.

Yes, you can knit-pickily pull every tiny bloomin’ leaf off the stem and freeze them as-is, but who has the time for that?!  Preserved herbs end up in a sauce or stew as a flavoring anyway—unlike summer fresh herbs that we eat like lettuce—so preserving them in oil as a pesto works beautifully.

Cut branches of what ever herbs you prefer or use a mix of them.  I rinse them as above then shake off that water like crazy or roll in a towel momentarily or hit them with a blow dryer.  Immediately pick the leaves off.  Mix in the following proportions in a food processor or Nutri-Bullet or blender and whirl until smooth.  Freeze in ice cube trays then pop them out once frozen to a zip lock bag for storage.  1 cube = 2T of flavor to any soup, stew, dip, spread or sandwich.

1 cup packed herb leaves to 1/4 cup good oil like olive or sunflower

Since we have them now…

Fresh herb cheese spread.  

Take a good cheese and make it even better…this is so simple and so very good.

Soften to room temperature [not hard to do these summer days]:

• one 4oz wedge of Jasper Hill Farm’s Moses Sleeper cheese. We have it. Mash it up rind and all.

Mix in:

• 1T heavy cream

Add:

• 1T sliced very thin (chiffonade) basil leaves.  I used purple basil for the color.
• 1/4 cup diced (little 1/4” cubes) summer sweet cherries

Mix together.  Eat as-is or deposit into a pool of aged balsamic vinegar.  Serve with crackers.

No Friday night pizza until fall. Instead go to our Farmers Market 4pm – 6:30pm where Dave is doing pizza live made to order. We suggest calling ahead to reserve a pizza…we have had a line and could not take any further orders past 6:00. We have plenty of room for the 4:00 to 5:00 time range. Fresh squeezed lemonade too!

Calling all quilters in Canterbury…

Our next show in the Feed Loft is a Community Share Project. We invite anyone who quilts to show their handiwork. Click here and scroll down to read more about it and to download and entry form.

We hope you have a great week-end,

Jane and Dave!