Procrastination central

  Inspired by the recent cookie related post from my South African friend, I casually threw some ingredients in a bowl, scrunched them up with my hands, formed the resulting goop into balls and fired them in the oven. You can see the result below and though the picture was only taken yesterday, I can assure you that by the time you read this, all evidence of the aforementioned activity will have been comprehensively destroyed. (Except the photo. -Ed.).

  Something that occurred to me while making the goop was the similarity between (some) cookie dough and granola. (It's important to put, 'some' in there as there are cookie recipes that are basically butter, flour and sugar). The reason I was so casual in my approach is because all I did was use butter and egg to moisten oats, nuts, sugar, chocolate chips and raspberries enough to stick them together. Lose the egg and switch the butter for oil and that's granola. Oh, you could also switch the sugar for honey or maple but you get the idea. However, I'm procrastinating and there's herbs to talk about.

Long since gone. Vanished. Disappeared.

  Let's do herbs first and spices later. Herbs are easier pretty much because they come fresh or dried and, in my mind at least, there are less of them. Though the idea of adding herbs for flavour is a sound one, in reality you need to add quite a bit to feel their effect. For example, when was the last time you tasted something and spat it out saying, 'Blimey, there's too much parsley in that!'

  This is a good thing because now you can see it's hard to mess things up when adding herbs. In future, you can be as bold as you like and will probably still not be able to taste the difference. Think of the last time you went to your herb stash, opened a little bottle of rosemary (that you probably bought twelve years previously) and sprinkled some into whatever was boiling away in front of you. How much did you use? Unless you tipped in half the bottle, the chances are that in a blind taste test, you couldn't tell you had added any.

  There are two ways this can go. One, read between the lines and realise that herbs make no real difference to flavour so only use them for decorative purposes, (which is no bad thing). Or two, use a lot more and taste the dish to see if you can detect any change and add even more until you can. You may also want to add herbs to your cookies, which is great idea but probably something best discussed in private.

Kirk out

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