Spice, Spice Baby

One of the darling things I loved about my 99 year old house was the herb garden the previous owners had planted underneath the windows in the kitchen. Now, to be fair, I do not have the greenest thumb out there. Whatever is in my yard is survival of the fittest. I do well with containers, but actual yard? I'm still learning. The herb garden has sage, oregano, chives, and thyme. I added a lavender plant the first year, which started blooming a couple of years ago. This makes me deliriously happy. There's also a nice corner spot where I can stick a tomato plant every year that seems to do well.

Well, it seems that my general neglect of this herb garden is exactly what it likes. The sage bush that was so sweet and tame had grown to hip height and was covering the sidewalk. The oregano is choking out almost everything else. One year, I could barely even FIND the chives. The thyme was starting to spread into the driveway. So, of course, now I'm on a harvesting kick.

Last summer, we harvested a nice sized jar of thyme and two big jars of oregano. This year, we decided to tackle the sage. It was completely out of control. Someone suggested I make smudge sticks, but then I learned that this is the WRONG type of sage for that purpose. So, I started looking up how to make my own dry rubbed sage. Seemed simple enough, so my mother and I last weekend started hacking at this plant.

When we were done, we had rediscovered the sidewalk and I had a huge basket of sage leaves to pick through and get to drying. My sister came up and brought her food dehydrator to go along with the one that I bought. We cleaned and cleaned the sage, got it really dry and added it to the racks. Two days later, we had dried sage leaves. To turn that into rubbed sage, all you really have to do is push them against a sieve. It's taken me the better part of a week to get through it all (about 13-14 total trays of the dehydrator) and get it pushed through the sieve to store. But, I ended up with a beautiful jar of fresh rubbed sage to use. Since I have a plethora of oregano and thyme, I'm thinking it might be time to play around with my own type of blend -- I think it would be great to use to season a roast chicken. Pictures to follow..