Category Archives: Plants and herbs

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LOOK WHAT WE FOUND!

After we moved the boxes into our new place and created a vaguely functional (dis)order inside, we started looking outside at our new garden.

Luckily, it’s been reasonably well cared for but I’m no Alan Titchmarsh and my plant identification skills won’t win me any awards. Thanks to my mum-in-law, we now know which bits of the garden to dig up and which to leave.

But most exciting of all, we found these:

house_1

STRAWBERRIES!

Well looked after strawbs, complete with anti-bird net. It’s the Elsanta variety and I’m going to be thumbing through my neglected gardening books to find out how to nuture it. But if anyone’s got any tips on growing strawberries please head to the comments and help me out. The heart is willing but the brain is sadly lacking!

And if I produce a single strawberry from this plant I PROMISE to post a picture online. Warts and all.

house_2(Not a strawberry…but pretty.)

 

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Going Herbal: Basil for summer

In a couple of days I’m posting the results of my research into sunscreens and it’s a bit of an epic [for 'epic' read: long, hopefully interesting, features heros, villains and a battle]. So today’s buzzword is brevity. I WILL be brief.

I’m into my herbs. Flowers are glorious and good for the soul but I just love plants that work as hard as herbs do. They offer rich and varied vegetation, tantalising aromas, mouthwatering flavours, plus health-promoting and medicinal properties. Some even help out in the garden – rosemary repels cabbage moths and carrot flies, while basil (today’s star) drives away flies and mosquitos.

Basil is such a wonderful herb for summer. I love the fresh, warm, spicy, grassy scent of it and combined with tomatoes it’s one of those smells that I have to stop and savour every time I encounter it. So I thought I’d start my ‘Going Herbal’ posts (I’m aiming for one every 1-2 months) by looking at some different ways to enjoy basil, above and beyond the usual ‘basil + tomatoes = winner’ equation.

Basil is rich in volatile oils, making it particularly good at relieving digestive problems like bloating or nausea, while its antibacterial properties make it an effective treatment for intestinal parasites. It’s also – so I’ve read – an effective treatment for relieving itchy skin when combined in a paste with honey. Not sure how pleasant this would be, or how inclined I am to actually try it…but if it works, it works.

It grows quickly and easily on a light windowsill or in the garden, prefering a slightly drier soil. Like all herbs, you should regularly nip out the tips to encourage a fuller, bushier shape. With basil, you should also remove the flowering tips as the white flowers that will come through aren’t worth having if you’re using the plant for culinary purposes.

If you want to bring the smell indoors, I love Jo Malone’s Lime, Basil & Mandarin Home Candle. Its “fresh limes and zesty mandarins are undercut by peppery basil” (thanks Jo Malone website; I couldn’t have said it better myself!). The smell is summery, uplifting and expansive in that way that cleans out brain cobwebs. It’s £38, which is expensive no matter how much you peek through your fingers at it but it’s a good option for the ‘when I have a birthday’ list.

If you want to slather it on yourself, Korres do a Basil Lemon body range. I haven’t tried it personally but I do rate the Korres products I’ve used in the past and their green credentials. If you have tried it, do please use the comments to let me (and others) know what you thought. The range is available from lookfantastic, priced from £7.50 for shower gel.

For a more unusual approach, you could try Basil lemonade. This recipe uses a basil-infused lemon syrup, which you can get instructions on how to make here.  I’m definitely going to give this a go on the next sunny day we get (so, 2012 then…).

You could also try basil + alcohol and use it in cocktails as an interesting alternative to mint. This gets my vote, partly because of the alcohol and partly because it involves ‘muddling’, which is the most hilarious instruction ever. It literally means ‘to gently crush into liquid’, but it’s so much more fun to imagine some comedy kitchen slapstick routine featuring a flour-dusted chef. This site features an extensive list of different cocktail options featuring basil.  

Finally, (who said something about keeping it brief?) a suggestion for eating basil. There’s one recipe I come back to time and again – salsa verde. I’m sure there are plenty of variations on the recipe (and most likely a definitive version that purists would never deviate from) but I like to keep things simple and customisable for taste. Use a generous handful of roughly-chopped basil, a generous handful of roughly-chopped parsley, 1tsp of Dijon mustard, 1 tsp of capers, the oil from a tin of tuna and the juice & zest of 1 lemon. Whack it all in a blender and pulse a few times until it forms a coarse paste (you want to keep some texture). It will smell amazing – like fresh air in an Italian park on a warm, sunny day. You can add anchovies but I don’t because they make The Man With The Camera screw up his face. Then just mix it through pasta with the tuna, and you’ve got a ridiculously easy dish. You can also substitute the tuna oil for olive oil and use it as a dressing for grilled salmon or tuna as well.

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Different perceptions: the dandelion

The weather continues to be beautiful and today the garden was calling. It wasn’t begging me to sit idly on the grass (sadly); it was howling for the love and attention it hasn’t had since autumn. Winter offers a respite from the heavy stuff; once everything goes to sleep, you can turn your back on it for a couple of months safe in the knowledge that all growing is on hold. But spring is definitely here and this morning my lawn was a riot of bobbing, golden dandelions.

Dandelions are all about your perspective.

I quickly decided that kneeling and digging them out of the lawn was not fun and my shoulders, neck, arms and back were all in agreement. They are evil plants for a gardener; one of nature’s great opportunists. Their blowsy, frothy seeds need only the gentlest of breezes to come loose and scatter themselves to the four corners. Their thick, waxy roots are almost impossible to pull up intact. Leave the smallest stub behind and they will be popping up again before long. 

But to dismiss the dandelion as a mere weed is to look at them from only one, rather narrow, perspective. A weed is something in the wrong place. That’s true when they’re crowding out my lawn but no longer true when they’re in my kitchen. The dandelion, or Taraxacum officinale, is prized as a medicinal herb and has many, varied applications.

Perhaps the most familiar of those is dandelion tea; an infusion of the flowers, leaves or root which targets the digestive and eliminative systems with its cleansing, purifying and detoxing effects. It has mildly diuretic properties, helping to combat poor digestion and water retention while simultaneously replacing the potassium that is often lost with synthetic diuretics. It’s also reputed to be good for skin conditions such as eczema and psoriasis, possibly as a result of its anti-inflammatory effects. You can ‘do it yourself’ by steeping 1 to 2 teaspoons of dried leaves in hot water but if you’re worried that your plant identification skills might not be up to scratch, there are plenty of stockists out there. Make sure you don’t undo the good work; opt for organic blends in unbleached bags. My favourite brews are by Clipper [http://www.clipper-teas.com/home]. As with all herbal infusions, you can bring out the flavour with a little twist of lemon juice and a drizzle of local honey.

You can also eat dandelion leaves, known as “dandelion greens”, an excellent source of calcium and iron. Fresh, young leaves and buds can be eaten raw in salads as a change from the ubiquitous iceberg. They’ve been likened to mustard greens in flavour with a slightly bitter, peppery taste. Older leaves can be cooked in boiling water for about 8-10 minutes. Much like spinach, they are particularly good when complemented with stronger flavours like onion, garlic and chilli and remember to season generously.

If you really want to go the whole hog, dandelion roots can be roasted and used as a healthier alternative to coffee while the flowers are regularly used to make dandelion wine. I can’t claim to have tried either but if you’re someone who doesn’t like to waste anything, that’s all your bases covered!

I stopped short of grinding up dried roots this evening. But in the interests of shifting my own perspective I brought some of the blooms inside. Separated from their satellites of lawn-burrowing green, they actually looked rather pretty.

Note: If you’re considering using herbs or plants for medicinal purposes, it’s a very good idea to seek advice from your GP or a registered medical herbalist, particularly if you’re pregnant or taking any medications. And remember that if you’re picking anything in the wild, get it properly identified before you eat it!