A Recipe For Disaster
(Cooking With Herbs)

I’ve bought a lot of plants—and killed most of them. Only two hardy philodendrons have survived my tender loving care (and I water them with diluted coffee to thank them). So I’m a little nervous about buying herbs in pots. I have loads of dried herbs and spices, including weird ones like black salt—which is actually pink, and never shows up in recipes. Ever. But I’ve been avoiding fresh herbs.

Then, two weeks ago, I heard a TV chef blather on about how fresh herbs “transform boring and bland into bursting with flavor.” It was time. I bought four potted herbs—basil, thyme, curly parsley and flat leaf parsley. Here’s what I’ve discovered:

1. Herbs want to die. Herbs are not like philodendrons—a weekly coffee shower is not enough to keep them happy. Every morning—every single morning—I find my herbs dangling over the sides of their pots, pale, lifeless and gasping for water. Turns out if you don’t water herbs daily, they commit suicide. Yes, they’re Green Drama Queens.

2. Pruning is an art. I’m not good at art. When I needed fresh basil, I pulled off the biggest leaves close to the soil, leaving the smaller, higher-up leaves so they could grow. Makes sense, right? Don’t be silly. Apparently, basil is only happy if you chop off the leaves at the top. Since I angered my basil by not decapitating it, the stems grew freakishly long and straight—they looked like green pencils topped with leafy little hats.

3. Flat leaf parsley is stupid. My curly parsley just sat there, patiently, waiting to be used as a garnish and then thrown out. Not the flat leaf parsley. No, my flat leaf parsley shot up twice as tall as the basil, then each skinny stalk—weighted down by the big tuft of leaves at its tip—crashed face-first into the dirt. Go home, parsley, you’re drunk.

4. Bouquet garni should be left to the professionals. I figured I’d better start using my herbs before they died. So I tied a bunch of them together with string (a mess called bouquet garni) and tossed them into a stew. Two hours later, I had a layer of stems and leaves floating on the surface of the stew, and a hunk of wet string stuck to a piece of beef. Yum.

The TV chef had said cooking with fresh herbs requires savoir faire. I now realize savoir faire is Latin for “a skill I don’t have.” I’m going back to my dried spices. There must be some recipe out there that uses black salt. The pink kind.