Last year’s parsley plants in the garden have come back with a vengeance: they’re beautiful and huge and just keep getting bigger. We’re putting parsley in a lot of different meals, but I’d love to get some recipes that feature parsley very prominently. I’m not a big fan of tabbouleh, but my wife is. What else can we do with it?
alton brown has a recipe for parsley salad that looks, well, as good as a mouthfull of parsley is going to get. Another option is tabbouleh, which also falls in the “mouthfull of parsley” category but is almost saved by the presence of couscous.
Make lots of Chimichurri sauce! Mix it into meatballs and meatloaf! Chew on it as a snack (it’s good for your breath)!
Throw it on top of almost anything savory.
Make parsley-herb salad.
Make it into a pesto-like sauce (just replace the basil in your favorite pesto recipe with parsley). This goes great over fish. Sometimes I thin this with yogurt, add some hot pepper flakes, and eat this over polenta.
Lots of Italian meatballs. Make them, freeze them, lots o’ yum. We have the same problem with our chives, which thrived over the winter. You can only eat so many scrambled eggs with chives, though.
How about making some bruschetta or pesto?
Mix with a ton of oregano, and add to everything.
Once I mistakenly dumped about 1/2 cup of parsley into an omelet, and then had to eat it because we were all out of eggs. I expected it to be disgusting, but it was actually pretty good. So make some omelets!
It’s called a persillade, garlic and parsley chopped together. Depending on how much you like garlic take 8 to 16 peeled garlic on your board. Smash them with the flat edge of your big chef knife and add a good bunch of parsley and go to town chopping it to small bits.
Next step is sear your ribeye on both sides and turn it into the oven to finish at your doneness. Transfer the steak to a platter and cover with a piece of foil. Return the pan to the stove top on MH heat. Add a splash of vermouth to deglaze and a knob of butter and then throw in a handful of the persillade. Cook for 1 minute or so and spoon over the steak. The persillade can be used on fish and chicken and just about anything… I find it is best to cook au jus for a minute or so to remove the rawness.
Great ideas, folks–keep them coming! If you have recipes you’ve tested, all the better.
I’m thinking of making some falafel at some poit, if I can find a recipe that uses sufficient quantities of parsley to make it worth my while.
I’ve found most dishes with parsley will improve by doubling the quantity, and most dishes without parsley improve by including some, so go parsley crazy.
You can dry the leftover parsley and freeze it. It’s not as good as fresh, but better than the average dried parsley flakes when you have nothing else.
You could also pot excess plants and give them to people to start their own.
What’s your secret to parsley abundance? I’ve planted them before, and got only spindly little growths. Of course my thumb is whatever color the opposite of green is.
You could always do parsley soup. Here’s a typical recipe. There’s another recipe I had for this, which I can find at the moment, but basically was a bread-thickened broth with a slew of parsley blended in.
Tebbouleh salad also uses lots of fresh parsley, though it does need mint as well.
Damn, now I want to make some for lunch, and I don’t have the car today =(
This is my experience as well. Chop it fine and dump it on everything!! Woo hoo, parsley party!!
“Parsley party” sounds like one of those Internet pictures that you can never unsee.
Parsley soup looks delicious. I’ve got some frozen homemade chicken stock at home that I might make it with for dinner tonight.
If I liked tabbouleh better I’d be more excited by it. But my wife loves it, and we’ve also got crazy amounts of spearmint and peppermint, so I could do that.
Tripolar, if I knew why it was happening I’d tell you. I don’t know whether it’s growing up from overwintering roots or from seeds, but it’s been crazy this year. Our chives, which were puny and pathetic last year, also resprouted early this spring, and we’re eating chives with every meal as well.
And we also have 32 pounds of beef in the deep freeze (well, closer ot 28 now–we’ve been munching our way through it), one of my wife’s weirdest work benefits being discount meat. She’s not crazy about meatballs, but if I can eat tabbouleh for her sake, she can eat Italian meatballs for mine.
Chop it up with garlic and lemon rind and put it on pasta, or with meat.
Get a tortoise.
Actually I am hoping the monarch butterfly caterpillars will come back: last year I found three of them in my parsley. It’s apparently among their favorite foods.
That’s what I was gonna say. Let the caterpillars have it!
Me too! Someone on this board once called it the placebo of the herb world – a very apt description.