What Do I Do With All These Herbs?

Herbs are one of the easiest things to grow so they're perfect for us urban, novice gardeners.  They will grow in almost any container in almost any amount of sun and most will come back year after year.  Some herbs like mint are so plentiful you will end up spending a day just trying to kill them when they're overtaking what seems like your whole yard!  (I recently managed to kill Chocolate Mint accidentally which I remain silent about right now.)

These herbs fill your garden, you're oh so happy about them and then you watch them die, wondering where all the time went and wishing you had used them in something...anything.  Yes, too often we plant these herbs just to watch them go to waste.  While I whipped up a caprese salad and used half my crop of basil, I go through my cilantro in a recipe we'll call "sexy salsa" and I manage to throw dill in a potato salad or two, I too am saddled with dying Thyme, Rosemary, Tarragon, Boxwood Basil... 

So when the NKCDC was offering a Cooking with Herbs class at the Berks Street Garden Center, I signed up to attend.  It turns out they managed to recruit Mark Tinkleman, a chef at Parc here in Rittenhouse Square, a fabulous French bistro, to teach the class.

Mark started out with a lovely secret to cutting herbs that hopefully will help you avoid cutting your fingers off, like I am wont to do.  It's call the "bear claw" and basically, you take a bunch of herbs and you get your sharp Cujo knife and you tuck in your fingers so the knife is chopping against your knuckles and not the blood squirters known as your fingers.  It's brilliant.  Plus, you'll find it easier to hold down the herbs than with your fingers.

Okay, so onto the food:  so today's menu was all French.  Courses were many; portions were small.  Yes, we got to eat.  I foolishly forgot my camera so suffice it to say, I won't torture you with photographs.  Needless to say, I will share two of the recipes that will help you sample many of the herbs in your garden and one that won't and is just darned good and simply easy for dessert for a party: A bibb salad (which simply refers to the type of lettuce), a pesto and a lavender cream perfect for topping shortbread.

Bibb Salad (Mark called Salad Verte):

This salad is a light, very herbed salad that is seriously perfect for Summer and requires no more work than your average American tomato, carrot and cucumber salad, plus it uses at least a few herbs that you likely don't ever touch.  

• Vinaigrette
• 1 C Olive Oil or Canola Oil
• 1/2 C Red Wine Vinegar
• 2 T Dijon or whole grain mustard (Nance's is my favorite)
• 1 oz. Shallots
•  Salt/Pepper to taste
• Salad
• 4 heads of Bibb Leaves (a/k/a Boston Lettuce)
• 1 bunch of Parsley, minced
• 3 Shallots, minced
• 1 bunch of chives, minced
• 1/2 bunch of Tarragon, picked
• 2 C Haricot Verte (a/k/a string beans)

To make the vinagrette:
Combine the vinegar, mustard and shallots in a blender or food processor or Magic Bullet (the blender that is my fave).  Once everything is mixed, slowly pour in oil.  Add salt/pepper to taste.

For Haricot Verts:
Fill a bowl with ice water.  Bring a large pot of water to boil.  Add salt.  Drop the beans in for 30 seconds and then strain them and drop them in the ice bath.  Cut off the ends and cut them into halves or thirds.

For the salad:
"Picked" Tarragon simply means picking the leaves off the stem.  Easy.  Use the bear claw method in mincing the other herbs.

Combine the bibb leaves, parsley, shallots, chives, tarragon, verts and vinaigrette in a big bowl right before serving. 


What's also great about this salad is that it gives, for people like me that don't often cook, a really good sense of these flavor of these lesser known herbs so in the future when I'm futzing in the kitchen, I can know what Tarragon might be good in, etc.

Pasta a la Pesto

Think you've tried pesto and found it heavy, greasy and unhealthy?  Or maybe you loved those three things that turned me off to it?  I've never made pesto and I've always found it good on a panini sandwich as a spread or something but otherwise just really heavy and not something I'd make for a light meal.  Well, this pesto is super light, definitely less oppressive feeling and makes an amazing dish.  So if you shot down pesto before, try this.

• 2 C Walnuts (that's right, pine nuts are really expensive right now--walnuts or most nuts work great with this recipe so feel free to experiment)
• 4 bunches of Basil, picked
• Juice of 4 lemons
• 1/4 C Olive Oil
• 2 boxes spaghetti pasta (I think whole wheat or spinach pasta would be great although he used white pasta)
• 5 dried tomatoes minced 
• 3 heads Broccoli, cut into bite sized pieces

This serves 5.

1. Toast the walnuts in a dry pan on the stovetop or in the oven on 250 for 10 minutes.  They'll start to brown so you'll know they're done.  Let them cool.
2. While the nuts are cooking, fill a large pot of water with salt and bring it to boil.
3. Put the basil, salt, pepper and cooled nuts into a food processor.  Add the lemon juice you can squeeze right into it and turn it on.
4. Drizzle the olive oil to the desired texture.  Season with salt/pepper to taste.
5. Put broccoli in boiling water for 30 seconds or until bright green and put it in the ice bath (this is called "blanching" in cooking.
6. Put the pasta in boiling water for the time stated on the pasta package.
7. While the pasta is cooking, heat oil in a large pan.  Add garlic.*  Wait 30 seconds and add the broccoli.  Cook over medium for 4 minutes or until broccoli is charred in a few spots**, shaking the pan back and forth (or stirring it) every minute or so.
8. When the pasta is done, drain it in a colander.  Take the pan with the broccoli and add the dried tomatoes and pesto to it.  Add the pasta and heat through. 

*The best way to use garlic in this recipe is to crush it.  Crush the entire head of garlic, which will separate the individual cloves and if you crush the top of the clove, the skin will come off much easier.
**You blanch the broccoli first not just to be annoying but to make sure the broccoli is cooked all the way through since you're going to end up with pretty al dente broccoli--you won't want a raw center.

Mark said you can make this recipe with pretty much any green herb, veggie or lettuce.  I currently have Arugula pesto in my fridge and he said he's had it with lots of herbs but that spinach was pretty flavorless.  It's amazing how great the walnuts taste.

Lavender Cream

1 C of cream cheese, softened (he didn't use light cream cheese but I see no reason why it can't be used--this is a very, very rich spread)
1 1/2 C of confectioner's sugar, sifted (sifting is necessary--it should be easy with a cheap sifter)
2 T dried lavender flowers

For this recipe, he uses dried lavender flowers which is one of the only herbs he uses dried.  He doesn't recommend using any other dried herbs because they simply don't taste good.  I agree.  Luckily we have these overabundances of herbs and things in our gardens!  But dried lavender is the only way to go here.

Beat the cream cheese and confectioner's sugar in a medium bowl with an electric mixer until light and creamy.  Stir in the lavender flowers and let sit.

Despite the fact that there's more sugar than cream cheese in the recipe, the cream cheese flavor is predominant.  The lavender flowers are hard to taste at first but the further you eat, the more you sense them.  So it's not a flowery tasting spread needless to say.  However, because of the flavor of this and the relatively thick spread it is, I'd only put this on poundcake like we had it served.  They actually purchased poundcake from A&P and honestly, it was great.  The poundcake taste basically served as a spoon for the lavender.