Culinary herbs - such as basil, parsley, thyme and sage - feature in an enormous number of traditional Italian dishes. Of course, it’s best if these herbs are fresh - and in summer it’s easy to grow some of your own, even if you’ve only got a sunny windowsill. But you don’t have to resort to shop-bought dried herbs in the winter.
Preserving Italian Culinary Herbs
You can preserve them by making your own herbal salt, like Elisa who grows a wonderful variety of herbs in her organic garden at Villa Corte Armonica (Via Bosconi 22, Fiesole T 00 39 055 59334) a lovely B&B on the outskirts of the Tuscan town of Fiesole. This culinary herb salt makes a lovely seasoning that you can use in a wide variety of Italian dishes.
Making Herbal Salt
Elisa suggests that you make this herbal salt by collecting fresh, fine culinary herbs such as sage, rosemary, thyme and laurel – trying to ensure that you have the same quantity of each one. You should then put them in a sieve and leave them to dry in a greenhouse, directly in the sun, for a week to ten days. Use a flat basket if you don’t have a sieve (and a window sill if you don’t have a greenhouse).
Once the herbs are dry, remove the hard branches and collect the leaves, which will crush easily. You then mix the dried herbs with salt (the proportions are, one or two tablespoons of herbs to five tablespoons of sea salt). Put them into a food processor (or you could use a pestle and mortar). Mix until they combine to form a powder, then add one juniper berry for every tablespoon of herbs. Store the herbal salt in a glass jar and make sure that it’s tightly closed.
Pumpkin with herbal salt - recipe
Elisa often cooks a pumpkin seasoned with her herbal salt: “Yellow long pumpkins are better,” she says, “but an orange round one will also do.”
Ingredients
- One pumpkin
- Herbal salt
- Extra virgin olive oil
Method
- Peel the pumpkin and remove the seeds, then cut the flesh in thin slices. Lay them in a large, low baking tin and sprinkle them with the herbal salt.
- Follow with a second layer of pumpkin, again sprinkling with the herbal salt. You can add a third layer if you wish, trying to fill all the holes by criss-crossing the slices of pumpkin.
- Pour 6-8 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil onto the pumpkin slices and cook uncovered in a moderate oven (150-200 C) for 30-45 minutes.
- When the moisture has evaporated, the pumpkin slices will be crisp and tasty, like roasted potatoes. “Children love them,” says Elisa.
Read about Culinary Herbs of Ancient Rome
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