green sauce recipe - using cilantro

Dear Family & Friends


The cilantro and parsley plants that have overwintered are now big massive bush. They are preparing themselves to start their seed production. As we have so many of them, I will probably just let one or two plants to go into seed, which will be enough for the seed bank. The rest I turn into green sauce. A good and easy thing to do as it does not involve any cooking at all. 


Here's how: You just need a bunch of coriander or parsley - stalk and leaves, chopped up about 3 cups, 3 cloves of garlic, 1 tsp red pepper flakes, 1/4 tsp salt, 3/4 cup of oil (olive oil or canola), 2 Tbsp of lime juice. Whizz them altogether into pulped up green sauce. Store in a jar. Refrigerate and wait for a few hours for it to work a magical flavor. Shake and stir again before serving. enjoy!







peel the coriander stem as the outer layer is fiberous but use as much of the stem for it has more flavor to it.






Set aside the leaves and chop them all into the blender together with all other ingredients. That's it!






After cleaning the coriander, I give all the scrap to the chickens or for my compost






I like to mix in some herbs too...such as mint. 





We use green sauce to eat with rice, pasta, salads, fish...anything that needs a nice sauce to go with...it is also nice as a dip just add plain yogurt and white soft cheese. I make a big batch because we eat a lot in this house and have a very good appetite for anything that says healthy.


Wishing you a good fun day in what ever you put your hands to work on:)


Yours,

Indeed.. a good morning.

Dear Family & Friends

No news is good news out there...Europe is in chaos, filled with selfish gains, without regard of other human except the SELF! I checked the weather forecast before going to bed to enable me to plan my chores for the morrow...Hmmmm...although we have been having absolutely wonderful weather the past weeks...this too is changing...forecast is starting to look grim.

We woke up and was greeted by a double rainbow.

BUT...when morning came...the weather was warm, a glimpse of sunshine is breaking out, a bit of rain drizzled, then a five minutes down pour...Hey! It's all good for the garden! Most of all, we witnessed a beautiful double rainbow:) Rainbow is a reminder of God's promise! HOPE for the week!

Another new day

 My planned chores drawn last night all changed. Even the menu of the day was slightly altered. My chicken nugget got a revamp.. it turned into a healthier version...still a nugget but with lots of herbs and chopped veggies added to it. I remembered my big girl asking each one of us before we all said goodnight to each other if anyone is the same as her...getting excited going to bed - thinking what food she would be eating the following day. To me that's a compliment:)

A healthier version of my chicken nugget

Given another warmer day, I quickly went and dug up as many chives as I could. Recently we have been snacking on Chinese savory dumpling called 'he zi /jiao zi'...there's many version for this recipe. Known also as Japanese gyoza, a Spanish empanadita, or even an English version of small pasties. The fillings can vary...we fill ours with lots of chives. It's delicious, specially as we have tons of chives in our garden to harvest.

Chives taste good..we use lots of them

Little dumplings are good alternative snack as we are getting tired of the little pancakes that the girls make now and again.

Having a break from little pancakes

The morning's double rainbow was indeed a good morning start for this week...despite chaos...we do have hope...life is simple and we have to enjoy it.

Wishing you  a good week ahead too.

Yours 

Dehydrating Onions and Herbs

Dear Family & Friends

I've been delaying my appointment with the onions...but last week, I finally managed to motivate myself to peel and dehydrate some of them at least.

Add caption

As you know, chopping onions is a tearful job...but if I leave them, I'll end up loosing most them in the end..they develop molds or start sprouting!...that's even more tearful!  So this year, I've decided to preserve them by dehydrating them. Still have a lot more to do....and it will get done:)

4-5 hours of dehydrating onions...then, it's done!

Once they are dehydrated...OH! the lovely smell of onions fill the kitchen! I love that smell:)

Harvested a big bowl of Thyme. To be preserved in the freezer.

It's also time to gather and preserve some of the Thyme in the garden for future use. I just stripe off the leaves from the stem and freeze them up. This also fills the kitchen with such wonderful smell!!

After all that...it's time to treat myself :) with yummy apple cake.

All these wonderful kitchen smell makes one feel hungry...so off for a little break...some more of those apple cakes... nice:)

I'm having a good time...hope you have as much!

Yours

Melons in Season

Dear Family & Friends

Summer is time for melon or melon like fruits such as cucumber, courgette/zuchinni...all ideal to cool us down and give comfort on hot days.

Cantalope melons from next door neighbour get passed through our dividing garden walls

By mid summer, watermelon can be bought for just under 10 pence/kilo...so cheap! This year, our next door neighbour grew honeydew and cantalopes in his garden, so we received some of his overflowing harvest:) I never tried growing melons because I think they like a lot of watering...but maybe I should try next year. 

Watermelon rinds can be pickled or stir fried...and they taste good!

Our meal menu these days seem to be full of cucumbers, courgette and even melons...fresh or cooked! Did you know that you can cook watermelon rind as stir fries? so with cucumber too! They taste great! 

Basil grows fast and are in abundance these days

As always, we make use of herbs with the seasonal fruits and veggies to alter and put more interest to meals. Basil comes handy these days. I'm not sure of the above basil variety which was a cutting we got from a friend. It's a varigated green and purple leaf basil...and it also got a taste of liquorice!

Life comes with seasonal fruits and veggies...isn't that wonderful? I'm grateful and we don't complain eating them again till the season is over.

Here's wishing you a day full of good fruits and abundance of life:)

Yours 

Crispy Sage Leaves Snack Recipe

Dear Family & Friends

The sage plant in the herb garden have been giving us lots of leaves.We use it to flavour cooked meals and make herbal tea drinks too. Then, I searched for more ways that we can use them and found this recipe.

Crispy Sage Snack

Ingredients: (adapted from www.cookingwithpatty.com)

1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup + 1 Tbsp. cold water
10-12 big sage leaves or about 30 small ones
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil for frying
sea salt

Instructions:

1. Wash the leaves and dry them on a kitchen towel.
2. Whisk the water into sifted flour and mix until the batter becomes smooth.
3. Warm up the oil in a nonstick skillet. Dip the leaves in the batter and let the extra batter drip off.
4. Fry the sage leaves on one side until crispy and light golden and then fry them on the other side.
5. Place them on a paper towel and sprinkle them with a little bit of salt. Serve warm. 

These are good...but I find it a bit fiddly...time consuming thing to do. I'm not very keen on deep frying food either, but it's worth a try!

Sage leaves got strong flavour to it.

Yes, the sage tempura didn't last long on the plate. After all, who wouldn't love a crispy tasty snack?

Hope you have a lovely day.

Yours

A Tea Cup For Loose Herbal Tea

Dear Family & Friends

We had a lot of rain drizzles...typical spring time! There's not much I could do in a wet garden. Cooler days like these mean.. time for a nice warm herbal tea. This particular tea cup does it's service well.

With the lid on, it can brew and keep your tea warm. It also got a removable porcelain strainer.

We have been growing our own herbs in the garden for this purpose. Homemade herbal tea means you have a way of knowing exactly what was mixed in your tea drink. With loose herbs, you would need a strainer so you won't be drinking bits with your tea.

Various herbs blend makes a very interesting tea flavour. Today, my cup of tea was with Chrysanthemum flower, berries, orange peels, and rock sugar. It taste wonderful:) I simple lift the porcelain strainer within, sit it on top of the upside down lid, and I have my delicious tea drink!

This is definitely a very handy type of tea cup for homemade loose herbal tea. Do you have any favourite tea cups? or tea mix?

I hope you had a wonderful Easter celebration. We enjoyed ours with some friends over at our place. They also brought me a big tray of various herbs seedlings from their garden...Oh...I'm so happy and grateful! So, there will be lots of herbal tea ingredients to look forward to:)

Yours

Our wet market

Dear Family & Friends

Today I'm taking you on a shopping trip. You've heard about retail shopping theraphy..I don't know how it is for you...but it doesn't work for us, in fact we find shopping stressful. But we do have the need to do food shopping to stock and replenish kitchen cupboards...it's once every three weeks exercise for us.

This is our wet market...no frills...it's just fruits and veggie stalls...some locally grown while others are imported such as the exotic bananas, pineapples and mangoes.

This stall sells all sorts of dried herbs and seeds that's used for food or cooking purpose. Most of them are locally grown and fresher in comparison. To prove to you, I sometimes buy some of their seed food packets and I use them to plant out in our garden and the seeds grow!

Vegetables sold in wet market are fresher than those sold in big supermarket chain stores...but of course, it's better if you grow your own in your garden...although I love seeing all the produce sold here, we don't normally buy any because we grow them ourselves in our garden.

Locally grown produce taste so much nicier. As you can see, these cucumbers still got the yellow flowers attached to it...proving to you it left the growers garden not too long ago. 

See why we call this a wet market...the place is not air conditioned nor does it have any refrigeration facilities to keep veggies cool before consumers buy them...so vendors have the need to sprinkle water onto these produce to help keep the veggies fresh.

I love visiting wet markets now and again, just to see the various produce that's available. If you don't grow and can't grow veggies in your garden, wet market is worth supporting.

Yours

My Circle Herb Garden

Dear Family & Friends

Early this year, a brilliant idea of using up the big stone boulders that was littered around the premises lit up!We have leftover old stones which were used to form as base of the mud walls during construction...we just have to use and recycle them!

The circle herb garden

There were enough to form a big circle to hold up the soil bed..I thought of it as a way of making the garden have a more interesting design too.

This is how it got started

A circle herb garden! In it, I've planted some thyme, chives, rosemary, sage, basil, coriander, and savoury. In the middle of it, is another encircled area...this is where the torny gooseberry brush settled...I think, that's the best place for it...unreacheable enough to prick me, except when it's fruit harvest time.

We love having lots and lots of herbs in our meal dish...it's a natural way of perking up flavours and adding lovely smells to food:) A herb garden is also a nice feature for a garden.

Do you have a herb garden? What's growing in your herb garden?

Yours

Harvesting Herbs

Dear Family & Friends

As summer is coming to a close...I know that the fresh herbs available from the garden to snip now and again as I need it, won't be there when cold months arrive.

So, before its too late, I try and save some for winter's stew meal...I started snipping extras, to store in the freezer.

I just clean the thyme, place them in a freezer bag and freeze them for future use.

We could also collect and make use some of the herb seeds from the garden for meal flavouring. 

These are coriander seeds

I must admit I'm not really good in making spectacular dishes. Every recipe I come up with is usually done with just plain imagination..no measurements to go by either!!  I think using lots of herbs, fresh garden produce contributes to delicious meals! It's proven because we never have leftovers and my family eats everything with joy.... :P

Yours

Edible Plant as Food

Dear Family & Friends

I'm not sure if you are familiar with this type of edible plant....it's called wild garlic! The leaves have a very strong garlic odour that can be used to flavour meals, but it does not form any bulbs like the garlic. This plant normally grow wild in woodlands.

This is a dock leaves. We used to know this plant as weeds...but in Bulgaria, it's sold in the market as food! It's actually delicious...Our neighbour cooked a risotto sort of rice dish and used this dock leaves to wrap the rice and steam/baked afterwards.... I'm all for this dish! I'm now letting this weed grow in my garden too...normally you can find them in woodland/forest area...but I think it is better when you collect it from your own garden...so do let some weeds the chance to grow in your garden too:)

At this time, my coriander leaves from last year's sowing is still going strong...soon it will start bolting to seeds...so I must make the most of the leaves while it is in abundance...

As I was collecting herbs for kitchen use...I just realized that this other plant although very similar to coriander in looks, the Parsley actually got completely different taste and smell. The leaves texture is coarser too! Hmmm...I prefer the stronger smell of the parsley!

Slowly, I'm getting more acquainted with various herbs and even wild edible food...it's something to be enjoyed!

Yours,