Herbs for the Winter

In addition to the basil that I cut and dried back in October, I also brought in some other herbs to dry before the first expected freeze. Those are now completely dried, and today I put them in mason jars to store them:

From left to right are sage, tarragon, and marjoram. At the time, it felt like I brought in armloads of herbs, but when they dry, they really shrink down. In the middle of the summer it seems like there's no way you could ever use all the herbs you plant, but drying them for storage is a whole other matter. Now I don't think there is such a thing as planting too much!

I also cut several bunches of the cilantro that is still growing in one of our greenhouse tunnels. We managed to time this perfectly, because the colder weather has kept it from going to seed — something that I've never been able to keep on top of in the summer. Anyway, I only brought in a fraction of what is out there: 

So I was thinking that this was a gigantic bunch of cilantro. Instead of drying it (have you ever heard of dried cilantro? I figure there's a reason that's not a thing), I decided to try a cilantro pesto. I picked the leaves off the stems (well, small stems are ok because they get chopped up and are soft and tasty, but the big stalks aren't cool) and put them in the food processor. Once they were chopped up nice and small, I added a small clove of garlic and some olive oil (about a tablespoon per cup of leaves, I think), and blended that all together in the food processor. Then I spooned it into ice cube trays, just like we did with regular basil pesto:

This is all I got from all that cilantro — four cubes! Cilantro leaves are pretty small, and this preparation seemed to shrink it all down a LOT. Again, the lesson here is that what looks like a ton of fresh herbs in the summer won't look like much dried or frozen in the fall.

This is an experiment anyway, though, so it's ok that there's not much there. I figured these would be good for cooking: you could melt a frozen one into ground beef for tacos or into chili, or mix it into carrot-cilantro soup. Or it would probably be good stirred into a boring store-bought salsa to freshen it up. None of those things would suffer from the addition of the garlic or olive oil, but I guess you could skip the garlic if you have other uses in mind.