A thoughtful friend who knew of my fondness for cooking brought me several containers of dried herbs from the US, all well within their best-by dates. Reconstituted or not, most of them smelt of tea. It was only the oregano, I think, which retained some semblance of the original smell. I had them for years, finally gave up on them and threw them away. When I recently went to Thailand, I trawled the Net for good spice stores, went to one and brought back some kaffir lime, some lemongrass, galangal and some basil. Happily, everything except the basil performed well right from the beginning - a soup I made smelt gloriously of lemongrass and galangal, a paneer recipe to which I added kaffir lime took on its aroma and the basil smelt like tea. I haven't thrown it away, though - I'm a hopeful soul.
It's not often that I see exotic-to-India herbs such as thyme, rosemary and even parsley at my neighbourhood store, so when I saw parsley this week, I thought of the baby potatoes at home and picked up a packet. I sprinkled a bit of it over my breakfast of scrambled eggs, but they didn't seem to go well together - I hadn't chopped up the parsley well enough, but still ...
Then a couple of days later, I washed about 20 baby potatoes, boiled them with their skins on, let them cool, peeled them, rinsed them once and tossed them in a pan over fire with 2 tsp of extra-virgin olive oil to which 6 cloves of minced garlic had been added. After making sure the garlic got distributed evenly among the potatoes (during which process I added some salt), I added about a fistful of finely chopped parsley and sauted the potatoes some more - maybe for a couple of minutes. Then I took them off the fire and tried not to wolf them down.
Don't forget to send in your entries for My Legume Love Affair - Fourth Helping, which I'm hosting this month. The details are in the sidebar.
Herbs Dried Herbs Garlic Potatoes Parsley
