Oregano

    We use oregano every Friday night when we make ourselves a pizza.  Of course we use it a lot for other meals too, but by far our pizza is by far its most important use.   (You can watch a video of me making our pizza here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb0KES-GB8A  and  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9X32-P5M-k )

    We have been growing oregano in our garden for decades, but we never really harvested or used it until last year.   In the past, whenever I crushed its leaves to smell it or tasted a leaf, it never seemed like the same thing we bought in the grocery store, so it just grew out there in the garden every year and was ignored.

    Last year it started to crowd out our strawberries, and so I started pulling it up just to get rid of it.  It seemed wasteful just to put it on the compost pile, so I thought I would try to dry it and try to use it,  just for an experiment.  When I sprinkled the final product onto our pizza, I was very impressed, the pizza was just as tasty as usual.  I was so happy to know that I could grow the stuff instead of buying it.  It was the big success of last year’s garden.

    Over the past week I have again been harvesting, drying, and crushing the dried leaves of the oregano and now have a whole canister of it that we can use throughout the year.   I tried drying it by just hanging it in the lanai, but it didn’t really dry out enough, so in the end, I put it into our food dryer to really get the leaves crispy enough to crush.  Below are photos of the drying oregano, and of the powdered final product.

You can see my paintings at:  www.davidmarchant.ca