Herbes de Provence: by Tina Clinefelter

During my long, unwilling and quite undistinguished career as a cook, I have managed to learn a few things that help to make food more palatable namely the addition of various herbs and spices. My mother, bless her heart, used salt and pepper – the sum total of the contents of her flavoring cupboard and my father, sometimes enlivened things with a liberal splash of malt vinegar especially mint sauce for the lamb roast, but during the last forty-something years I have boldly experimented with a wide range of herbs and was delighted to find that I use most of the herbs found in the famous ‘Herbes de Provence’.
Here’s a basic recipe to make your own concoction beginning with the most-often used herbs:
Combine 2 tablespoons of each of the following dried herbs – summer savory, rosemary, thyme, oregano, basil, marjoram and fennel seed. Mash them up a bit with a pestle, mix them well and store in a tightly-lidded jar in a cool, dark place. They will be fine for about 4 months and when they get stale just add them to the compost pile!
If there is something in the above list that is not to your taste, remove the offending herb and substitute any of the following: mint, dill, tarragon, chopped bay leaf, sage and culinary-grade lavender! Bet you never saw that coming – the lavender, I mean, but it adds a little ‘je ne sais quoi’ to the mix, and tourists visiting Provence (in France) see fields of lavender growing alongside all the other herbs and assume it can be used in a similar fashion.
‘Herbes de Provence’ can be used to season meat, chicken, fish, and vegetables. Most commonly, they are used as a dry rub, or mixed with olive oil and used as a marinade, or added to soups and stews, or added to the coals on the grill. Tres versatile! I use a version of this to season my dumplings…
Now for the good part…most of these herbs are very beneficial to your health-for instance, sage helps to cope with the symptoms of PMS and menopause (fat lot of good that knowledge will do me now); bay leaves ease pain (even the Romans knew that!); oregano is a major antibacterial powerhouse (move over penicillin) and dill is a gas-buster (no myth here)!
Another interesting factoid is that a combination of some of these herbs intensifies their beneficial effect – an actual example of ‘if one herb is good – two are better’! Now, how many herbs are there in pizza? Does this qualify pizza as a health food? I may have to do an ‘in depth’ study into the benefits of pepperoni before I can answer that question…
At the beginning of this article I referred to myself as a reluctant cook – well – my late husband, Jere, always maintained that the difference between a cook and a chef was that a cook always cleaned up her own dishes and that HE was a chef!
I love my dishwasher!