Herbs

Okay - recipe number 2.  Since I already used Heath bits for the symbol "H", I needed something different for symbol "He", and I went with "Herbs".  I don't usually bake savory goodies, since I have a very active sweet tooth, but I found a recipe for Sundried Tomato and Herb Biscotti that sounded interesting.  I found the recipe on a blog with the great name of "The Food In My Beard".  Having recently shaved off my own full beard, I now have to store excess food in my pocket instead.

The recipe actually comes from Giada de Laurentis - the "Food in My Beard" guy just added some sundried tomatoes.  The recipe calls for "herbes de Provence".  I found a whole slew of recipes to make your own "herbes de Provence", many of which included lavender buds (really?  flowers?).  My wife has an extensive herb garden, but it doesn't include lavender (I thought about substituting some zinnias, or even some dandelions), so I made up my own recipe as follows:

-some thyme

-some rosemary

-some marjoram

-some basil

-some (but less than the other "some's") summer savory

-some grass clippings that blew onto the herb garden when I mowed the yard earlier in the afternoon

Reaping the bounty of my wife's herb garden.

I stuck all this in the food processor along with 5 chopped-up sun-dried tomatoes, and pulverized it to a wet powder.  This is what I then used as "herbes de Provence" in Giada's recipe.

Biscotti is a type of cookie that you bake twice - once as a loaf, then a second time after you slice the loaf into cookies.  After the first baking, the biscotti loaf looked delicious, and the kitchen began to smell like a pizza parlor.

I was able to slice the biscotti pretty thin without it crumbling, and the second bake turned the cookies a beautiful golden brown.

The finished product.

I was a bit disappointed with the taste of the biscotti, considering how good they smelled when they were baking.  They seemed a bit flat to me - I think that some black pepper would spice them up a bit (or maybe more grass clippings).  Also, they are quite crumbly, and tend to fall apart when you bite into them.  My official mad scientist rating for these is 5 out of 10.

My wife's parents are visiting from Ohio this weekend.  I used my mother-in-law as a taste-testing guinea pig. She's big on herbs - she gave us a whole pile of dried herbs from her garden for Christmas last year.  She said she really liked the flavor of these biscotti.  My wife really likes them, too.  I'll let them eat as many as they want, and go back to baking sweets!