Skip to main content

Must-have herbs/plants in your kitchen

It's 4 years now that every spring I try to create my apartment-compatible garden!
I sow seeds I've collected the previous year or I transplant small plants that I've bought in the supermarket. It requires time (that I don't always have), will and a bit of physical efforts but the reward is incredible.

Sweet basil: I'm Italian and I use sweet basil in many recipes. Especially during summer time you can use it with tomatoes (which I'm growing too), mozzarella, beef carpaccio and in many other ways to prepare quick but tasty plates.



Sweet basil



Cherry tomatoes





Anise basil: a weird but extremely interesting variant that gets along with grilled swordfish and tuna fish. Noteworthy the combination with strawberries (the plant I have, doesn't set many fruits but the few ones are amazingly sweet), red wine and sugar.
Anise basil
Strawberry plant

Rosemary and Thyme: Any BBQed meat and (almost) any fish.
Rosemary

Thyme

Parsley (please grow! please grow!): mainly to prepare sautéed mussels/sea shells, but also for tomato sauce (penne all'arrabiata want parsley on top!) and more.
Parsley

Italian chili peppers or peperoncini (which unfortunately  I'm struggling to grow this year): EVERYWHERE! 
Peppermint: I love it in gin tonic!
Peppermint


In addition, I have a lavender plant from which I hope I'll collect a lot of floral buds for my winter lavender sachets, a tiny Drosera plant that eats mosquitos and an osteospermum hybrid plant the properties/usage of which I ignore but that is very nice and decorative!
Lavender
Osteospermum


Osteospermum
Drosera




Comments

Popular posts

Card making and papercraft magazines

Last month I had the chance to get, for the first time, a couple of Cardmaking & papercraft  magazines: Papercraft Inspirations and Make Christmas card magazine. Papercraft Inspiration December issue had a Christmas window build-a-scene embossing folder and stamp free gift, as well as  free festive papers . Make Christmas cards was offering:  2 embossing folder borders ,  13 stylish stamps ,  32 Christmas papers ,  12 découpage sheets ,  117 toppers & motifs and  73 festive greetings. Here you have some of the cards and tags I've made with the magazines' gifts All cards have been donated to hospitals 

One more way to combine soy wax and gel!

The followings are all two-layered candles with the bottom layer made of gel and the upper part made of soy wax . Why combining the two of them? Because gel is transparent and allows you to embed objects   and soy wax   has an incredible  scent   throw and a long burning time ! Few simple rules for embedding objects: ideally they should be non flammable (like glass animals, shells or stones)! ...but if you do not exaggerate with the amount, you also can potentially use cinnamon sticks, dried flowers etc... To be on the safe side: if you use flammable objects I'd anyway suggest you to pour the thinnest layer of gel as possible (just to cover the embeds) and avoid burning this layer. And remember: never ever leave lit candles unattended! Let yourself be inspired and give it a try! Gel embeddings: glitters (blue candle) or sea shells (peach candle). Soy wax: caramel-scented.   G el embeddings: cinnamon sticks G el embeddings: cinnamon sticks (left) or star