Two of my favorite summer foods are my own potato salad and iced green tea. I’ll save the tea for the next post, but potato salad…quartered potatoes, sliced radishes, chopped celery, spices, mustard and mayo make a wonderful combination, but it is chopped fresh dill that makes it work. The trouble is that you can’t use the entire bunch of dill, unless you’re making enough potato salad for an army, and it goes bad soon. Solution: dry it. Now, this is old hat for those who have dried herbs before, but if you’ve never done it, it’s super easy to dry herbs that keep for much longer than fresh. You can also save a good deal of money: one bunch of dill dries down to about .3oz. of dried dill, which cost almost $6 at the store.
Preheat oven to 300°F. Remove the very ends of stems of dill. Wash and dry dill well in a salad spinner. Put whole dill (no need to remove stems before drying) and spread out on a cookie sheet with tin foil. Lower heat to 200°F and put tray in oven for about 20 minutes. Dill should be dry, crisp, but not burnt. Cool. Rub dill to remove stems and discard them. The whole process takes about an hour at the most and you could do many different herbs at once.
1 Tblsp. Fresh Herb=1 Tsp. Dried Herb
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