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Three Easy to Grow Herbs to Improve Your Cooking


Tuesday June 16, 2009

Reading Time: 6 minutes
Pineapple Sage, Sweet Bay and Winter Savory have entered my culinary arsenal and they are here to stay. What has really changed is I now have these plants growing on my patio. Fresh herbs ready to go whenever I need them.
 
For a couple years now Darin and I have had our own garden. It started very haphazardly with a plant here and a plant there. We are starting to learn what grows as well as what we regularly use. Last year I started to use a lot of our fresh basil. Fresh basil grows easily and having access to fresh basil encouraged me to integrate it into more dishes.
This year I invested more time and energy into the herb category. I claimed all the patio space for herbs. The larger garden is about 3 flights of stairs from the kitchen so I knew if I was going to incorporate fresh herbs into my cooking it better be convenient or it just wasn’t going to happen.

Pineapple Sage

My intension was to buy Sage. How happy am I that this was the only Sage option at the nursery. This herb was a great find. Pineapple Sage has a wonderful pineapple scent as well as beautiful flowers which attract hummingbirds.
 
I am looking forward to trying the herb in lemonade and more recipes.
Sweet Bay
Bay is not new to my herb collection but my Bay was always bought from the grocery store and who knows how long it sat on the shelf in the grocery store, not to mention my cupboard.
Fresh Bay leaves are actually stronger than their dried counterparts. A live Bay plant can replace the dried Bay in your cupboard. It is a beautiful easy to care for plant and can be trimmed into a topiary or bonsai if you are so inclined.
When you need to flavor a broth or soup carefully remove an older leaf. Older leaves contain more flavor. Bay leaves are very tough and sharp and should be removed before serving. I add a Bay leaf to mashed potatoes and it has made all the difference.

Winter Savory

By far the sleeper hit of our whole herb garden is Winter Savory. A delicious addition to most any meat and potato dish. I add Winter Savory to chicken by stuffing the interior cavity with the fresh herbs. I also will gently melt butter with the herb and then baste the chicken with the savory infused butter as it cooks. The smell is like none other.
 
I have not found this herb in stores. That was a huge surprise once I found what an easy and delicious contribution this herb makes. Maybe your local stores will differ, but I see no other option to enjoying Savory than to grow it myself.
 
Another very fun thing about herbs is that they all tend to come with a story. Even through I would not have discovered Savory in my local grocery store it isn’t to say that Savory hasn’t been around for a long time. The Saxon’s were great fans of Savory and it is said that “Virgil encouraged the planting of savory near one’s beehives because of the wonderful flavor it adds to the honey.” Winter Savory Recipes
I would encourage anyone with gardening and cooking aspirations to start with a simple herb garden. Start small and pick a few herbs that you can grow easily and that correspond with dishes you want to make.
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Spring in the Arizona living desert is amazing to see! Between the colorful array of Cactus flowers and the wildlife doing the sacred “dance”, there is much to marvel at. Over the past month Doves have made their nests all over the property, mostly in obvious place like underneath patio roofs and high up in trees.

However, two days ago I walked outside and stood next the cactus by my back-door. I heard a noise, which was a Dove flying out of the cactus. I thought to myself what could possibly be so important that a Dove would hang out in a plant with a thousand sharp spikes. When I looked closer at the cactus I saw something astonishing, a sight only seen in the living desert.

 

 

This Dove family had chosen to make their nest right inside a folded paddle cactus. I guess they felt like this was the safest place. A little while later mother Dove showed back up.

 

 

 

Well, it will certainly be interesting to watch the mother give flying lessons from a cactus. I will continue to watch for updates, should be interesting!

Reading Time: 6 minutes

I am sitting at my desk right now. It is Saturday 6:51AM and the view from my Tucson home office is pretty spectacular. The doves are nesting in the porch eves, the hummingbirds are fluttering around the blooming ocotillo and the prickly pear are preparing to bloom. As a write, a little bunny just walked up on to the porch enjoying the early morning weather. This week the Tucson desert around our home has been particularly beautiful and I thought I would tell you about three ways to enjoy the living desert.

I don’t want any of you to worry that my hints are going to cause you to do anything too strenuous. In fact you don’t even have to physically be in the desert to enjoy the living desert. And remember, this is Judy writing today. I gave up hiking, backpacking, camping, and bicycling a long time ago. So here we go…

1. Rent or buy a copy of Walt Disney’s The Living Desert. This film was released in November 1953! Yes, I know that is over 55 years ago, but it won the academy award in 1954 for best documentary and if you have never seen it, then you are in for a surprise. There was a time that I offered a You Tube video clip from the movie that deals with the cute ground squirrels; however, as is often the case the video has been disabled. Here you can visit a Walt Disney site and view the limited trailer. My parents took my sisters and me to see this movie in 1954 and I have never forgotten the beauty of the blooming cactus.

2. If you live in a desert environment, particularly around Tucson, AZ, then just take a walk in your neighborhood. It is spring time in the desert and for the next few months the cactus will take turns producing beautiful flowers and fruit. Just yesterday I was retrieving my neighbor’s mail and I had to stand back and wonder at the simple beauty of the living desert. And if you really think that a desert tortoise is just to be seen in the movies, here is a photo that Dan took last summer in Gates Pass a few miles from our home in Tucson..

3. For those of you who can not rent or buy the Living Desert and do not live in the desert, I invite you to watch my slide show of a RED TORCH CACTUS. This cactus is located outside my bedroom and Daniel decided to chronicle the blooming process. These photos were taken over the course of 24 hours. And you should know the flowers really are only in full bloom for one day! (I created this slide show using Googles’ Picasa Web Albums.)

So I will sign off for the day, more living desert for me to see, sans snakes!

P.S. If for some reason my slide show is really not of a Red Torch Cactus, I hope one of my readers will correct me.

Reading Time: < 1 minute

A big congratulations to Linda McClure for making the Vimeo Staff Picks.

After watching the nest for a couple weeks, hummingbird incubation ranges from 16-18 days, two tiny hummingbirds were hatched. Look carefully to find the recently evacuated egg shell in the nest.


Eggs Hatched Today – Baby Hummingbirds from Linda McClure on Vimeo.

For more perspective on the size of these very tiny birds and even tinier offspring. Here is some footage of the mother preparing her nest.


Hummingbird in a nest from Linda McClure on Vimeo.