Summer’s here and I’ve been harvesting herbs from the
garden; parsley, coriander, basil, sage and fennel and now I have several fat rolls
of herbed butter in the freezer all ready for slicing up.
We’ll use the butter for whizzing into hot mashed potato, on
toast, to garnish and enrich soups, add as a garnish to pork and lamb chops, on
your favourite steak dish and so on….
Then you can use your butter on hot scones or in your scone
mixture, to add to your sauté pan with olive oil to cook an omelette or mushrooms
or anything else you fancy, come to that!
One of my favourite books has been an inspiration –
Eatability – by Jocasta Innes with Bronwen Cunningham – ISBN 0 – 356-14720-7 –
which I’ve had for years but, of course, you’ll find recipes enough on the internet
very easily. Like…
Lavender butter, or lavender butter with other herbs, with
honey – plus many ingenious uses for them.
I have to admit not having ever made lavender butter but I have popped a
sprig of lavender under a cake mixture before making and the cooked flavour has
been delicate and rather nice, especially if you then make lavender flavoured
butter cream, having previously stored a few sprigs of the plant in your box of
icing sugar, or by using lavender butter in the mixture. I imagine you could also add lavender flavoured
honey to the butter and icing sugar, plus a few chopped leaves to add colour
and interest.
I decided to
make use of a few leaves of sage too but, wary of its very strong flavour,
mixed in half a red onion and two cloves of garlic with the herb and one packet
of salted butter; I usually had two to three handfuls of herb plus a few twists of freshly milled black
pepper. Him indoors would insist on white
pepper but I can’t stand it so never use it.
The finished butter had a very nice red colour and I’m looking forward
to using it…
Here it is in the mixing stage….I machine chop my herb and
any additions then mix everything together by hand not by blender or
food processor, because this way I don’t end up wasting any!
Putting my rolls of butter into the freezer I came upon the
last three shapes of butter from last summer, which was most surprising since I
thought all of this had gone earlier in the summer when, low on olive oil, I’d
gone to my freezer for the last of last year’s butter for a sauté dish of
something or other being cooked for supper.
So all was well for supper and it’s perfectly OK to keep any herbed
butter in the freezer for up to a year before using....
So, after clearing up the kitchen I chopped up the
ingredients for a ratatouille, warmed my slow cooker, sautéed the aubergine,
peppers, onions, tomatoes, herbs, and seasoning for about ten minutes before
tipping everything into the slow-cooker and leaving the mixture to cook overnight
and well into the afternoon before tasting.
It was OK if needing a little tomato puree and salt and just another
hour to finish cooking the runner beans which I’d added as an afterthought, having
picked a good handful the day before and needing to use them.
 |
| ingredients ready ...and I'd skinned my aubergines ...I won't next time!!! |
 |
| ten minutes saute time..... |
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| and here's one I cooked and enjoyed earlier!!! |
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