Rosemary harvest ideas

What to do with all this rosemary? Ideas to date:

Rosemary and tomato salt, includes dehydrated tomato skins to give pretty red flecks in the final mix

Rosemary oil from cold marinaded olive oil to be gifted in pretty bottles for foodie friends to enjoy

Still marinading three weeks on, the hopefully flavoured oil is nearly ready for straining and bottling

Rosemary facial toner from simmering sprigs in water and then diluting the strained result in apple cider vinegar

Flavoured salts

Flavoured salts lift simple recipes, they avoid waste by preserving herbs and fruit, they look great and are easy to make. Why not? Here are two ‘no weigh, use what you have’ versions.

For the rosemary and orange version the rosemary leaves were stripped from 5 long stalks ( I am keeping the stalks as kebab sticks). I peeled an ancient mandarin/satsuma that was lurking in the bottom of the fruit bowl, squeezed the juice over the rosemary, scraped the pith from the peel then chopped the peel into slices. The rosemary and orange peel was blitzed with about three tablespoons of coarse salt using the chopping attachment on my stick blender (I usually use it for making breadcrumbs).

Just a few seconds of blitzing produced a kaleidoscope of coloured salt. The mix was spread on a silicone baking sheet and dried in a low oven for about 30 minutes before storing in recycled herb jars.

The basil version was even easier. Once the basil leaves were blitzed into 3 tablespoons of salt I spread the lovely green mix on a silicone sheet and dried it in a low temp oven for about 30 minutes. I sprinkled dried chili flakes in before storing in glass jars. So pretty.

Try rubbing into chicken before you roast it, over boiled new potatoes or other plain veg, over sliced tomatoes …