Michael & Liz are Bloggable

A crazy thing happened in the garden over the winter. At the end of the summer growing season last year, I pulled out the plants that were slowly dying or had no chance of producing anymore fruit. It didn’t take very long for the garden to be emptied of the dead plants – except for one. For some reason, parsley just didn’t die. So I left it alone and figured it would die over the winter and I’d pull it out when I was ready to clean up the soil for this year. Apparently parsley is a super herb because it absolutely flourished over the winter. To the point of having a huge amount of it:

At first, I thought this was awesome! Except then I realized I never really used it that much in the first place. And I really don’t need so much just to garnish a dish. And, I decided I didn’t want any herbs in the garden at all this year because they took up too much veggie real estate! I want them here:

Yep, more room for just herbs right off the deck. This way, I won’t have to put on my shoes and go for a walk to the back fence just to get a few herbs when cooking dinner this summer.

So now the question was…what to do with all that parsley?? After a little searching, I found this recipe for parsley pesto. It looked promising, even though I’ve never made pesto, and I’ve never eaten a parsley version.

I followed the directions almost exactly, with the exception of adding a bit more oil and salt to the final product. It turned out pretty good! After thinning it out a bit, I put it over a tortellini sausage dinner. I even froze most of it in ice cube trays to prevent having to eat a ton of pesto in the next week.

Stay tuned for more garden updates. I plan on putting a lot of new herbs in the planters on the deck. When at our local greenhouse the other week, we saw chocolate mint. I don't know what I'll use it for, but I'm getting it anyway!