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Dilly Beans and Pickled or Dilly Carrots
If you haven’t tried Dilly Beans you are missing a treat. Crisp-tender green beans, they are pickled in a simple vinegar, salt, and water solution and seasoned with garlic and dill. Hot peppers or pepper flakes can be added if you like them with more of a bite. Preparation is fairly simple. They can be canned by hot water processing, or if not processed they must be kept refrigerated. I also pickle carrots the same way. Just peel, cut into 4” lengths, and quarter them on the length, and then process like the green beans. Don’t bother using multi colored carrots to make them look nicer, though. I tried that and found that the vinegar bleached all the color out of them during pickling anyway.
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Sage and Proscuitto Wrapped Chicken
I don’t use a lot of fresh sage from the herb garden, but when I do, this recipe based on one from Martha Stewart is a favorite. It tastes as good as it looks and is pretty easy to prepare.
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From My Herb Garden
Fresh herbs, snipped this morning at the peak of their flavor, washed and laid out on towels to air dry. Top left is parsley, lower left if French tarragon, center chives. These will be chopped and blended together, put into a zip lock freezer bag, and stored in the freezer for use throughout the year to flavor scrambled eggs … a combination that elevates eggs from ordinary to sublime. On the far right is rosemary, just waiting to be finely chopped and added to Orange-Rosemary Biscotti (recipe to follow). Yesterday I harvested a big bunch of chives. Washed, air dried, and finely chopped while still garden fresh, they keep like new when placed in zip lock freezer bags and frozen. They remain as green and supple as when they were harvested, ready to use in soups, stews, mashed potatoes or…
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My Herb Garden
On a blisteringly hot day almost 30-years ago I headed out the door with only one thought in mind, planting an herb garden. The fact that the forecast warned of temperatures well into the 90’s didn’t matter. I had one day off that week and my wagon was loaded with an expensive assortment of 3” pots of tender herbs. Aborting the mission was not an option, and so shovel in hand, I began. By the time I had completed the job I thought I was going to die…right there in my pretty little garden. The chosen site was on the front lawn, right under my kitchen window. It received full sun for most of the day, would be easily accessible anytime I needed fresh herbs for the cookpot, and it could be seen and admired any time I happened to…
