This garden is blessed with any number of herbs that have been planted but never harvested. I’ve already tried the tarragon and am in the process of making tarragon vinegar to take with me when I leave.
This week my attention has turned to sage. The garden has several different specimens; I think this one is golden sage Salvia officinalis ‘Aurea’. It looks more gold in close up:
I’m not normally a big fan of stuffing, but dad makes a lovely sage and onion one, cooked in a dish (rather than inside the bird) so that it goes all crispy on top. With the help of his rather vague instructions I gave it a go myself yesterday evening, for the first time ever.
What do you do with your sage?
1 onion, chopped and sweated in a generous amount of oil
3 or 4 big leaves of sage (dried or fresh is fine), chopped finely
Stock made from a stock cube
Breadcrumbs (or diced bread), about 1 cup per personCook the onion, then add the bread, season and add enough stock to make it moist.
Put in a greased dish, add a bit of grease on top.
Cook in the oven with your chicken, or in a fairly hot oven (to make the top crispy) for about half an hour.
I am not currently in possession of anything that will make nice breadcrumbs, so I simply crumbled my bread in. The result was a bit more rustic than dad’s normally is, and as I was having it with casserole rather than roast chicken I used the casserole liquid rather than a separate stock. If you follow the instructions above you’ll soon notice an omission – it doesn’t say when to put the sage in! I added it in with the bread. As my onion was red, the result was rather pretty:
It smelled completely lush cooking. As I wanted to make sure it was crispy, I left it in perhaps a tad too long – it was rather a thin layer in the dish, and it all came out very crispy. But it was lovely! Not like dad’s, and maybe a bit more sage would have been appropriate, but certainly worth a second attempt :)
What do you do with your sage?
Alison wrote:
...on Wed, Jul 4 '12 (351 days ago)