How to Cook with Fresh Herbs

How to Cook with Fresh Herbs Hi everyone. Eat when you’ve got lots of healthy endeavors, the clean eating coach and I’m here today with this week’s video tip about one of my favorite herb, something that I use a lot of especially in the summer and that is fresh cilantro, fresh cilantro. And here’s the thing with herbs. What I find that happened in the past is that I get a bunch of an herb to use in a recipe but I only use a small amount, so what happens? The plate in the refrigerator, I forget about it. I realize a week later that it’s gone bad. And this tip is all about some simple ways that you can take a bunch of any of your favorite herbs and you could use this whole thing, no waste. I want to give you an example of what I mean today and I’m going to show you three simple things that you can do. So we’re going to make three different things, actually two different things and you’ll see the ingredients for the third thing. But first of all, we’re going to bake some delicious mango salsa and this is so easy. Mango salsa is -- because it features fresh mango which is so good for us so we’re putting in a whole mango that I’m putting in right here, some fresh mango and I’ve got a beautiful tomato, vine ripen tomato that we’re also going to put in and mix that up. We have some fresh cilantro of course that we’ve chopped up and we’re going to add to the mix here. It’s a very simple way, nicely chopped up and this is what I love about this too is that there’s only four ingredients in this whole recipe. And then we’re going to add a little bit of lime juice, just a couple of tablespoons of lime juice. We’re going to mix this bowl up and I would say that this is so fabulous especially when you get a really ripe mango and a nice ripe tomato it’s so much native and so delicious. And if you just see here, it looks so beautiful even just the color combination it is so beautiful but that’s one simple way that we’re using the cilantro. And I want to tell you that this is great condiments on fish, on chicken, you can grill chicken and put a little on top of that. You can do the same thing for any kind of fish, you can even do it with pork and so there’s an endless array of different options that you can use to make that. Okay, so that’s number one on the list, okay, that we can make mango salsa. Now, here is my second thing. We’re going to make a simple marinate. This is great and you can really use any combination of different herbs but because I’m sort of in my cilantro-lime combination, cilantro is something that’s really popular in Mexican cooking. You can find it a lot in guacamole. It’s also popular in different Asian cooking especially with Thai, so this is simple. So I have here the juice of a couple of limes, it’s about a quarter of fresh lime juice. I’m simply taking this cilantro that I chopped up and I’m going to add that in here, voila. We’re going to add in some olive oil and just like that really simply. I’m going to add in just a little bit of garlic to give it some added flavor and then we are going to take a little - - I love kosher salt, I love the coarseness of kosher salt, that is that we sprinkle just a little bit, just adding a little pinch of salt there. We’re going to take some fresh ground pepper and we’re going to add that in as well. And we can get it go in here, there we go. And this looks great because all we need to do is put this into a casserole dish or you can even take a plastic bag like the Ziploc bag. And tomorrow night, we’re going to just take some nice lean skinless chicken breast, boneless chicken breast and we’re going to put them right in and I’m just going to give a little stir here and we’ll get a lovely marinate with all of our fresh cilantro. You can only imagine that this is going to be so flavorful. Alright, so this is number two. Our really simple marinate. And then number three, it’s just really simple we’re just taking our cilantro. We’re going to take a little cilantro we’re actually going to make a pesto. So usually, we also think of pesto as using basil and often pine nuts and so there’s different -- there's always different way to you can have a spin on this. Ours is really simple and all we’re going to do is -- what I like to do is take some of the cilantro and I take usually about three quarters of cup. We’re going to take some nuts three quarters of the cup of walnut we’re going to add that in. We would then take some nicely chopped up garlic that we have and then add some olive oil and you’re getting just a different spin on a pesto, a cilantro walnut pesto that’s delicious. One of my favorite things to do with this is that I will take a nice salmon fillet. I’ll put the pesto on, so that it will make -- I don’t want to make it too oily. I’m adding bacon on the oven for about 15 minutes in a 400-degree oven. It’s so delicious, so flavorful and so good for us. So look at that, three different things that we could do with this one bunch of cilantro and use the whole thing up. So what do you think about that. I love to you know your thoughts about that, any ideas you have or other ways that you use fresh herbs and what you do to make sure you mix them all up. And keeping it’s all in the planning. When we plan ahead, when we have a mission on what we can make during that week to use up our fresh products. We have a lot less waste, we actually get the full value of what we spent and of course we’re feeding ourselves, our families the cleanest and healthiest food. So that’s my tip for the week. I hope you enjoyed that. I would love to know your thoughts and please write your comments below on the blog and you can check out some recipes as well that I’ve listed for you to enjoy. And remember, it’s Wendy Battles of Healthy Endeavors, the clean eating coach wishing you a week of optimal health and abundant energy and remember, don’t worry, get healthy.