We love to cook with fresh herbs. It just gives almost any dish a fresh and delicious taste. Of course the most perfect solution for getting fresh herbs would be to grow them in your garden or on your window sill, but that’s not always possible or practical. The next best option is to get them at the store or market and then store them properly to keep them fresh and usable for as long as possible.

To keep herbs fresh longer, loosely wrap them in a damp paper towel, place in a plastic bag and store in the refrigerator until ready to use. If you can’t use all of them up within a few days, you may want to consider freezing them. We use two different ways depending on what we will use the herbs in later. For herbs to use in soups, stews and sauces, just  chop the herbs and add them along with a little water to ice cube trays and freeze. When you’re ready to season your dish with the fresh herb, just plop  the herb ice cube in the cooking liquid.

The second option is to clean the herbs, put them in small freezer bags and then throw them in the freezer. We like to use enough herbs for one recipe or dish per bag. That way you can take one out and use it today and another one a few weeks from now.

Both of these freezing techniques work  great whenever you buy or grow more herbs than you can use right away and it ensures that you have fresh seasonings all year long.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Cooking Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.