Herb Garden Gal

One of my favorite meals in the spring is a salad made with really young spring herbs from the garden.

After a long winter, spring salads using fresh herbs from the herb garden taste so lively.  The flavors are fresh and vibrant.  I feel good whenever I eat this salad — it’s super flavorful and feels like I’m feeding my body with healthful ingredients.

Economical and delicious, spring herb garden salads are so simple to make.  A little bit of this, a little bit of that, and soon the salad bowl is full of herbal goodness.  Every time you make this salad, you’ll be rewarded with a different flavor profile.

Ingredients for Spring Herb Salad

Perennial herbs, and annual herbs whose seeds have self-sown are the base for these herb salads.  Pick small perennial herbs sparingly.  Annual herbs that have self-sown over-abundantly, or in areas you don’t want them, are little treasures to add to your herb garden salads, as you weed them out.

In my latest herb salad concoction, I started with some romaine lettuce left over from the previous night’s dinner.  I went foraging in my herb garden for the remaining salad ingredients.  I picked bloody dock, chives, garlic chives, bronze fennel, oregano, tarragon and mint.

Dressing Your Herb Garden Salad

The spring herb salad is best dressed with a simple vinaigrette.  The stronger flavors in an herb salad also work with a mild creamy dressing.

My favorite salad dressing for herb salads is a balsamic vinaigrette made with extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, a bit of maple syrup and salt.

To make a complete meal, I add feta cheese and cooked chicken to the salad (omit salt in the salad dressing if adding feta cheese or olives to your salad).

The young spring herbs are mild, sweet and tender, making them a perfect addition to salads.

As the herb plants mature in the summer heat, the leaves become tougher and the herbal flavor becomes stronger.  Some herbs also develop bitterness as they mature.  The flavor profile often becomes too strong to use as a salad green.

So take advantage of the spring offerings in your herb garden, and build your own unique spring herb garden salads!

Happy growing,
Herb Garden Gal

Copyright © 2011 www.HerbGardenGal.com.  All rights reserved.

Chive Volunteer Plants

Spring has been slow to warm up this year.  But that hasn’t stopped the chives from dutifully popping up.

My chives are the first garden herbs I look for each spring.  And I can’t wait until they’re grown to pick them.

At one inch tall, I carefully pinch off a few new chive leaves to add to my omelet.  Luckily, the chive plants don’t seem to mind, and I have an abundant crop of chives in my garden within a couple of weeks.

Spring Chive Plant Volunteers:

If you left the seed heads on your chive plants over the winter as I often do, you may have small patches of chives popping out in other areas of your herb garden near the mother plant.  This is the easiest way I know of to increase my supply of chives — let mother nature do the work!

Leave the young volunteer chive plants where they have self-sown in the garden, or carefully transplant them to another location.  If you don’t want the new chive plants, cut them down and eat them.  Or share the young chive plants with a friend or two.

Culinary Versatility of Chives:

In the spring, the chive leaves are tender with a mild onion-like  flavor.  Because of their mild onion flavor, chives can be added to almost any dish in the final stages of cooking, or sprinkled on top just before serving.

Favorite culinary uses for chives :

• Add finely chopped chives to salad dressings
• Toss snipped chives in with salad greens
• Stir chopped chives into soups and stews just before serving.  The chives brighten up these hearty dishes
• Add chives to omelets, quiches, deviled eggs.  Chives pair very well with egg dishes.
• Mix in chopped chives with tuna salad/filling for a hint of spring in tuna sandwiches
• Add chives to steamed vegetables
• Add chopped chives to stir-fries or fried rice.  This is a great way to use chives later in the summer, when the leaves are tougher.

And my all-time favorite way to enjoy the first chives of spring:

• Boil Yukon Gold potatoes until tender.  Drain.  Add in butter, very finely chopped young chives, and a bit of salt.  Toss gently until the butter is melted.  Just that touch of heat from the potatoes releases more flavor from the chives.  The chives also gently infuse the butter with a hint of chive flavor.

Ahh, spring on a plate.

What is your all-time favorite way to enjoy chives?

Happy growing,
Herb Garden Gal

Copyright © 2011 www.HerbGardenGal.com.  All rights reserved.