Erica De Mane

“A Cook and Her Herbs” will be a new regular feature on my blog. Once a month I’ll post about my love of herbs. I’ll offer recipes, personal stories, historical notes on herbs’ uses in Mediterranean cooking, health facts and myths, all sorts of cooking wisdom, and, as always, beautiful artwork and food photos. I decided to write my first herb post in the dead of winter mainly because I find the season challenging for the herb-obsessed like me, and I figured you could use all the help you could get.

I hope you enjoy it. Please send along any thoughts you have about my postings and any ideas you’d like to see covered here.  Happy winter cooking to you. It’s been a long one. And don’t forget to look at my YouTube videos. I’m posting “A Cook and Her Herbs” videos monthly, too. And they’re often on different topics from my monthly text posts.

Recipe below: Pistachio Mint Pesto

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve grabbed a package of sage or oregano or rosemary at a supermarket and thrown it in my cart only to get home and find almost the entire contents browned and rotten. I’m talking about the herbs you find in the little hard plastic packages lined up in rows in the produce department. Winter is when I’m forced to buy that stuff, since there’s no other option, and the letdown for me can be profound. As you know, I love my herbs. When I see them mistreated, I take it personally. The supermarket stuff often looks fine from the front of the package, but had I bothered to flip it over, I would have seen how desiccated it was. Of course, sometimes it looks really bad from the front. And occasionally, and here’s the most annoying thing, it looks good from the front and the back, but the middle is screwed-up moldy. Now I always open the herb packs to see if there’s anything funky going on inside. Many herbs that aren’t big sellers, marjoram among them, sit on the shelf too long, and nobody pays attention.

When they’re not all moldy or dried out, or moldy and dried out, the herbs I buy at the supermarket usually taste okay, but being mass-produced they’re often on the mild side, compared with ones you grow yourself or buy at farm stands. That doesn’t make them bad. You just have to be sure to always taste a leaf to determine how much you’ll need. You might want to add a bit more to get the effect you want.

Oregano is pretty easy to find in supermarkets year-round now, easier than marjoram, but it’s hard to know if you’ll find Greek or Italian oregano in those little packages. My local West Side Market usually stocks Italian oregano, but when go to Citarella, it’s always the stronger, less flowery Greek. Greek oregano has bigger leaves and is slightly darker in color. I now open the packages and give them a good look and smell to make sure I’m getting what I want. I often prefer Italian oregano, but it depends on what I’m cooking. For instance, I want Greek oregano in a spinach and feta pie. It’s only right.

Parsley and mint are fairly dependable winter supermarket finds, and usually in pretty good shape. Basil, on the other hand, is almost never good in the winter. I’m not sure why that is. You’d think anything grown in a greenhouse would at least be serviceable. In Liguria they grow basil in huge greenhouses all year round, and it’s excellent, but the stuff I get is cat-pissy and mostly blackened at the tips, and also strangely sandy. So the hell with that.

I use both parsley and mint in this pistachio pesto, which to my way of thinking is a good winter substitute for the more summery Genoa pesto. I make that only when I can get the best basil. Regardless of the trials of winter, I try to keep working fresh herbs year-round, not only to brighten up my cooking but also for their strong antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.  Every little bit helps.

I tossed this rich, mellow pesto with a pound of busiate, a long, twisted traditional Sicilian pasta. Seemed like a really good match, considering that it involves most of the ingredients for a classic Trapanese pesto, excepting the tomatoes. You can use it as a condiment for seafood or vegetables (it’s excellent on roasted eggplant). And if you’re tossing it with pasta, remember to save a cup of the pasta cooking water to loosen it up and make it creamy.

A note on pistachios: Although wildly expensive, the Sicilian pistachios from the town of Bronte are exceptional. Turkish pistachios are also excellent, and I often buy them. I saw both at Kalustyan’s the other day, but considering that I was also purchasing a not so mini tin of Spanish saffron, the potential bill scared me, so I went for California-grown. They were better than I expected, rich and sweet and flecked with green, which is nice when  making pesto. There’s nothing more depressing than gray pesto. Oh, and one other thing: I’ve tried toasting boring nuts such as almonds, pistachios, pine nuts, and walnuts to make them more flavorful for pesto, but it doesn’t work. I think pesto needs the taste of virgin nuts. I find that a strong toasted-nut taste overpowers the fresh herbs and throws the delicate medley off balance. That’s just me. I know people who do it, but I don’t think my people should.