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| Lime Basil ready to dry |
As I
posted earlier this year, I planted my first herb garden
this spring. We planted basil, parsley,
oregano, lavender, sage, cilantro, garlic chives, and lime basil (which I hadn’t
heard of before this year). The lavender
didn’t make it, and the cilantro didn’t thrive.
Most things did fairly well. The basil
and lime basil flourished and thrived.
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| Lime Basil just out of the oven |
I came to love the lime basil during the summer. I love how it smells, and it adds such a nice
flavor to stir fry, salad, fruit dishes, and lots of other things. However, the temperature here has been
dropping steadily over the past couple of weeks, so it seems that my supply of
lime basil will soon come to an end. We
actually had our first frost warning last night. Fortunately it didn’t freeze though! I decided it was time to look into drying the
lime basil for fear we won’t escape the next frost warning so easily.
I found a few articles on
drying herbs on Google. The general consensus seems to be that
hanging herbs tied in bundles up to dry is the best way to dry them; it’s
natural, not too much work, and doesn’t require any sort of power source, so is
very economical and earth friendly. For
us, with
a cat who eats string, and
a cat who gets into everything, this seemed
more like a recipe for disaster than an intelligent, economical plan to enjoy
home grown herbs through the winter.
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| The finished product! |
We decided to go with the oven drying method. This involves placing the washed and dry
herbs on a baking sheet at 180 degrees.
The times mentioned in the articles varied from two to four hours. Ours were dry in about an hour, though this
may be because the lime basil leaves are fairly small. I suspect the traditional basil will take a
little longer.
It was fairly time consuming to pat all of the leaves dry
and lay them out on the baking sheets, but I think the results are definitely worth
the time. And the house smelled amazing
while they were baking! I’m pretty
excited about drying the rest of our herbs.
We’re having something of a warm smell over the weekend, so now I have a
little more time to pick and dry the rest of the herbs.
Today is also Day Four of the 30-Day Photo Challenge I’m
participating in, which is “Leaves”. It’s
a little early for the great fall colors here, so I’m sharing pictures of my
lime basil instead. I think the little
leaves are very cute.
