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A Home for Herbs© Leda Meredith I like to imagine that in a different century I lived in a cottage just outside a small village. Ducking to pass through my front door, your nose would have been met with the clean fragrance of herbs hanging from the rafters. Your eyes would have been intrigued by the jars of oils, tinctures and vinegars lining the shelves. And the delicious smells coming from the kitchen would have made you forget everything else.
As it is, I live in the early 21st century in a one bedroom apartment with a garden in Brooklyn, NY. But there are indeed herbs drying in bundles everywhere (hung from nails on shelf edges), bottles of intriguing herbal infusions, and several dozen fragrant, flavorful delights to perk up my cooking. You can use home-dried herbs in cooking, tea blends, to make cordials, herbal vinegars, baths, etc. Your recipes will turn out much more fragrant and flavorful if you use herbs that you dried at home rather than herbs that sat on a store shelf for months. The scents wafting through our one bedroom apartment tonight are wild with the fragrance of many different drying herbs. It's Mess Night - tomorrow is the one day of the week when I have time to contribute to housecleaning, so tonight is the night I crumble herbs into jars, dropping a few leaves on the floor, trash the stove with an overflowing mash of dandelion beer, strain herbal oils ignoring the small spills, and forgive all of it with the disclaimer, "tomorrow is cleaning day". Herbs picked or purchased fresh and dried at home are very different from the commercially grown and dried herbs that have sat on a store shelf for months. Store bought dried herbs tend to have lost so much of their aroma and taste that they all share an indistinguishable dull green color and generic "herb" scent. Contrast that with the bright greens and unmistakeable aromas of herbs dried at home! No recipe made with store bought dried herbs can compare with the same recipe made with herbs that have been home-dried with care. If you wish to learn more, Pier Jones has written an excellent article on harvesting herbs. A note on buying fresh herbs: most produce sections of supermarkets and specialty stores now sell bunches of fresh herbs. Inevitably, these bunches are more than you will need for any single recipe. Simply tie the leftover stalks of the herbs together and hang to dry away from direct light. Proceed as described below. Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article A Home for Herbs in Urban Homestead is owned by Jill Florio. Permission to republish A Home for Herbs in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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