Saturday, May 4, 2013

Parsley



 My parsley was all threatening to go to seed.  Four bushy plants had started to produce tall leggy flower stalks:


So, I figured I should harvest and use as much as possible.  It occurred to me that if I cut it way down, it might get another wave of growth before it tried to go to seed again.  If not, well, it wasn't going to be edible much longer anyway. 

So I gave all four plants a brutal haircut:
Which produced massive quantities of fresh parsley:
The problem with parsley is that it always seems like such a pain to clean and prep fresh parsley for eating.  Usually I carefully snip off each leaf from the stem.  This time, with so much to prep, I decided I really need to be far less prissy about removing every bit of stem.  So I filled the sink with water to wash off the grit and bugs, then snipped off just the main thick center stems and left the rest of them on. 

I started out chopping it in my usual style, efficient for small batches:  Dump the parsley in a bowl and then snip madly in the middle of the parsley mass with a decent pair of kitchen scissors:
But then it occurred to me that I'm a typical spoiled American with more kitchen gadgets than I could possibly need, so I pulled out a food processor.  So that gave me several quarts of chopped parsley in minutes.

So then it was time for tabouleh!  Or ersatz tabouleh since I didn't have cracked wheat on hand.  So I subbed in barley.  Sorry, no pictures - recipe was roughly as follows:
Cook up two cups of barley and let cool.
Toss with all the parsley
Add a finely chopped cucumber and about 4 finely chopped tomatoes.
Normally I'd add some finely chopped onion; didn't have any this time.
Juice a bunch of the meyer lemons left on my tree from last season to make two full cups of lemon juice.
in blender, mix the lemon juice with a half-cup of olive oil, a healthy slug of garlic powder, and a tablespoon or so of salt.  Pour that over the salad.

Yum.


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