You can check out the Lemon Verbena Lady at her blog  http://lemonverbenalady.blogspot.com.

When you think of Thanksgiving, I hope you think of all the good food, your family and your friends. (And maybe a little sage in the stuffing of your turkey.) One thing you don't tend to think of is Peru. About 26 years ago my adoptive mother was in the hospital so my friend and her husband invited me to their Thanksgiving dinner party in Peru. (That is how I met The Herbal Husband!)

Of course, Thanksgiving is not a traditionally Peruvian holiday, but The Herbal Husband loves to eat well! He also never passes up an invitation for good food! I do not remember exactly what the menu was we had to eat that fateful Thanksgiving, but I do remember that our hosts served wild rice. (They vacationed every summer in Minnesota and a capon.) Neither The Herbal Husband nor I have much family in our immediate area, so we usually are on our own for the holidays. Even if we are invited to a friend's house or we are out of town, we always have to have Thanksgiving dinner of own. Love those leftovers! We just cook a turkey breast since most of the time it is just the two of us, but I think as long as you aren't stuffing the bird, you can do this with a whole bird as well.  If you have to have stuffing, you could make a compound butter and place it under the skin of the bird for maximum flavor. I have included an herbal butter recipe below. This is the way we have found the turkey is the most moist and tender.

Defrost your turkey in the refrigerator as recommended in the instructions. I rinse the turkey in cold water and pat it dry. Make sure you take out any turkey parts and plastic bags from the interior. That has gotten me in trouble in the past! With the turkey breast you usually do not have to worry about that. Here is the recipe we have used for several years now.

A fall sage wreath at Phipps Conservatory & Botanical Gardens.

Recipe for a Great Turkey:

• Roasting pan
• Stick of butter
• Can of cola
• 2 tablespoons hoisin sauce, or more if you like it sweeter
• Salt, pepper and garlic powder
• Turkey breast
• Small lemon
• Small onion
• Full hand of sage, thyme, chives, oregano and rosemary

1. Set oven at 325 degrees.

2. Leave cover on the roasting pan for most of time.

3. Mix butter, cola and hoisin sauce, which you can find this in the Asian section of your supermarket, for basting in a 4 cup measuring cup.

4. Baste every 15 minutes until done.

5. Use salt, pepper and garlic powder on top of the turkey breast.

7. Place a small lemon, cut in half or quarters and a small onion in quarters, a hand full of sage, thyme, chives, oregano and rosemary inside the cavity. You may have to juggle the lemon and onion parts around to hold in the herbs. Again, you could make a compound butter with the herbs, lemon zest and butter and place it under the skin and then stuff your turkey as you usually would do.

8. We cook a 6 1/2 pound breast (unstuffed with stuffing) for 4 hours and it was perfectly moist. It may be more time than you think is necessary, but The Herbal Husband likes his meat and poultry well done!

Here is a recipe for an herbal butter I especially like:

Herbal Butter

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) of butter or margarine, softened
• 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
• 3 tablespoons fresh herbs, chopped (your choice)
• 1 clove of garlic, pressed

1. Finely chop herbs and mix into softened butter, add other ingredients.  Put in a covered container.  Refrigerate for 24 hours before using.

2. Herb butter may be kept refrigerated for two weeks or frozen for up to six months.  Put butter on vegetables, pasta, fish, meat, poultry, bread, etc.

Courtesy of  Pete Louquet, Tom Hamlin and Don Haynie, Spring and Summer Herbal Sampler, Raphine, VA:  Mid Valley Press, 1993, page 10.

You can easily double this recipe if you need more butter or butter spread and who doesn't especially at the holidays!

The picture at the beginning of this posting is not my handiwork, but a wreath from the Fall Flower Show at Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens several years ago.  Life in the Gardens:  Frabel Glass at Phipps is on now for those readers in the Pittsburgh area.  A very enjoyable day for your family over the Thanksgiving holidays.  Hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving with your family and friends from Lemon Verbena Lady and The Herbal Husband!

I live in Denver, Colorado and baking is usually a bit of a challenge for me. I’m not sure if it is because of my high altitude, my inability to bake, or a combination of the two. After some research online and in an assortment of cookbooks, this is what I've learned for those of you who, like me, are forced to bake in high altitudes:

• Reduce the amount of baking powder and baking soda you use in your recipe by 1/8 teaspoon.

• Raise the oven temperature 10 to 15 degrees.

• Increase the amount of liquid you use in a recipe in relationship to the amount of flour used. According to the Quaker Oats Company, you should increase the amount of liquid by 1 to 2 tablespoons per cup of flour.

Photo by chotda/Courtsey Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/santos/

My cookies always come out of the oven looking like pancakes. On the one occasion I tried to alter the recipe for high altitude baking using the tips above. They came out looking a little better, but not presentable by any means. I think I may have taken them out of the oven way too quickly. 

We want to hear from you! How do you compensate for the high altitude (if you live in an area like mine) when baking? My number one priority is to get my cookies to look and taste like cookies. Then I would like to move on to baking delicious dark chocolate lavender cookies.

Do you have any ideas to solving my high altitude baking issue? Do you have a favorite cookie recipe that I should try? Leave me a comment and let’s chat about it!

You can check out the Lemon Verbena Lady at her blog  http://lemonverbenalady.blogspot.com.

Pineapple Sage (Salvia elegans) is one of my favorite herbs. It needs to be used fresh though. When dried, it loses its flavor. I also love pineapple sage because it is definitely a wonderful fall blooming addition to your herb garden. The hummingbird loves it as well. I have not seen the hummingbird as consistently in the garden as last year. I think the cool summer has kept them from visiting as much.

A blooming pineapple sage plant.

Then came the true test—the Herbal Husband. I tested all three versions on him. We tried the jelly on an unsalted saltine with cream cheese. It doesn't sound good, but it gives you a very clear taste of the jelly. We decided that the rice wine vinegar and lemon juice jellies were best, followed by the white wine vinegar variation. They were so close in flavor though that any of the three were delicious!

Taste testing with pineapple sage jelly, cream cheese and unsalted saltines

Lemon Verbena Lady's Pineapple Sage Jelly

• One 12-ounce can of Old Orchard Pineapple Juice, frozen concentrate, reconstituted with 3 cans of water (It makes three recipes of jelly once it is reconstituted.)
• 2 cups of pineapple juice
• 1 1/2 cups of pineapple sage leaves, packed
• 3 1/2 cups of sugar
• 2 tablespoons of rice wine vinegar, white wine vinegar OR lemon juice, your choice of one
• 1 pinch of salt
• 1 pouch of liquid pectin

1. Wash and dry the pineapple sage in paper towels, then coarsely chop it. Put the pineapple sage in a large saucepan, and crush the leaves using the bottom of a glass. (I use a food processor.) Add the juice, bring slowly to a boil, and boil for 10 seconds. Remove the saucepan from the heat, cover, and let sit for 15 minutes to steep.

2. Strain 1 1/2 cups of liquid from the saucepan and pour through a fine strainer into another saucepan. Add the vinegar of your choice (or lemon juice), salt and sugar, and bring to a hard boil while stirring. When the boil can't be stirred down, add the pectin. Return to a hard boil that can't be stirred down and boil for exactly 1 minute, then remove saucepan from heat.

3. Skim off the foam and pour the hot jelly into four hot, sterilized (in boiling water for 10 minutes) half-pint jelly jars. Leave 1/2-inch (or less) headspace and seal at once with sterilized 2-piece lids. I just leave my lids in hot water not boiling until you need them. Can the jars in a boiling water bath for 5 minutes.

4. To use: I would use this jelly on thumbprint cookies, cream cheese and crackers for a quick appetizer and a teaspoon or two as a glaze for the last 15 minutes of baking chicken or pork.

Patsy Bell Hobson is a garden writer and a travel writer. For her, it's a great day when she can combine the two things she enjoys most: gardening and traveling. Visit her personal blogMy garden blog  at http://patsybell.blogspot.com/ and read her travel writings at http://www.examiner.com/x-1948-Ozarks-Travel-Examiner. 

Every day is a gamble in October. I begin checking the evening temperature to see if the basil will survive another night. The least hint of frost will kill a basil plant. Before we go into mourning over the loss of our favorite fresh herb, consider these five ways to stretch out your harvest.

Basil is best used fresh. If you can’t use all the basil before the first frost, consider these ways to preserve the harvest. When they predict the first frost, madly run out and bring in as much basil as you can carry.

Cross pollinated basil in the Rodale Gardens, Kutztown, Pennsyvannia

1. Fresh Basil: Cut off branches or stems of the basil plant and put them in a vase or jar. Pinch off leaves to use fresh. You might have fresh basil for weeks past the first frost. Basil stems easily root in water. I have a big bouquet of the different kinds of basil in my garden.

2. Basil Vinegar: Splurge on a good white wine vinegar. Fill a jar with basil leaves. Cover the basil with warmed vinegar. Gently shake or press the air bubbles out of the basil and vinegar. Cover and let the vinegar steep for a week. Taste the vinegar, if you would like a more pronounced basil flavor, let it steep for another week. Using a kitchen strainer colander, stain the basil vinegar. Remove and discard the basil leaves. Strain vinegar again through a paper coffee filter or cheese cloth. Label the bottle. It’s ok to add a little water if the vinegar is too strong for your taste.

3. Basil Cubes: Chop up the leaves into small pieces and place in a plastic ice cube tray. Cover leaves with water and freeze. When frozen, store the basil ice cubes in a heavy plastic freezer bag. Drop a frozen cube, directly into any simmering sauce or soup.

4. Basil Butter: Add 3 or 4 leaves of chopped basil to a softened stick of butter, then roll into a log wrap plastic wrap or waxed paper and freeze.

Fresh coarsely chopped basil for basil butter.
Add a slice of basil butter to vegetables or rice.

5. Pesto: The Herb Companion has printed many recipes for pesto. Basically, only three ingredients are needed to make pesto: basil, pine nuts and olive oil. I freeze pesto in a plastic ice cube tray. When frozen, pop the cubes out and put into a heavy duty freezer bag. Skip the cheese in the recipe if you are freezing the pesto. Add fresh grated cheese when you use the pesto.

Here is a good pesto recipe from the September 1996 Herb Companion article "A Basil Harvest," Italian-Style Pesto

Here is another basil recipe from fellow blogger, the Lemon Verbena Lady: Basil Jelly Recipe.

Mixed variety of fresh basil rescued before the big chill. In about two
weeks the stems will root in tap water.
Photo by Lara Ferroni

I will miss fresh basil. If you see me moping around the garden centers, don’t go overboard. A simple “I’m sorry for you loss.” will do.

Later, when the basil recipe making frenzy subsides, we will talk about starting basil indoors from seed. I use an AeroGarden.

You can check out the Lemon Verbena Lady at her blog  http://lemonverbenalady.blogspot.com.

We love to grow our own garlic. The taste is so much better than from the grocery store. 

Here is a variety called 'Romanian Red'. 

It is a long storing porcelain hardneck garlic. It has a hot and pungent flavor with a considerable bite. I never knew there were so many different types of garlic until I attended  the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival in Saugerties, New York several years ago. It was just this past weekend, but plan on going next year if you are in the area. It is the last full weekend of September.

I am always looking for ways to use my rosemary plants before the cold weather comes since rosemary is not hardy for us. The comments from my last posting encouraged me to give you other herbal jelly recipes especially ones with rosemary. Since I do not drink alcohol, I like to make jelly with it. I have a pet peeve though when I am making jelly. If the proportions are not exact, you get an extra 4 oz. jar when you are not expecting it!  I have found that 1 1/2 cups of liquid and 3 1/2 cups of sugar makes four 8-ounce jars of jelly. If you have more of either liquid or sugar, you get that extra jar. So I have changed CERTO's recipe for Herbed Garlic Jelly and made it my own by combining a couple of different recipes. My notes are contained in the recipe.

Rosemary Garlic Jelly
Makes 4 to 8 ounce jars

• Water
• 1 1/4 cups dry white wine (I use Pinot Grigio)
• 1/4 cup minced garlic (I use a whole head, maybe more)
• 1/4 cup white wine vinegar
• 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh rosemary
• 3 1/2 cups sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon butter or margarine
• 1 pouch CERTO Fruit Pectin

1. Wash jars and screw bands in hot soapy water. Pour boiling water over flat lids in saucepan off the heat. Let stand in hot water until ready to use. Boil jars in water for 10 minutes. Let stand in hot water until ready to use.

2. Mix wine, garlic, vinegar and rosemary in 3 or 4 quart saucepot. Stir in sugar. Add butter or margarine to reduce foaming. Bring mixture to full rolling boil, reduce heat to a simmer and simmer for 5 to 7 minutes. (This helps suspend the rosemary and garlic in the mixture.) Bring mixture to full rolling boil that can't be stirred down. Take saucepot off the burner and add package of Certo quickly. Return to boil and boil exactly 1 minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. If there is foam and there should not be much, it should disappear when stirred before placing in jars. If there is a lot of foam, skim it with a spoon.

3. Ladle immediately into prepared jars, filling to within 1/8 inch of tops. Wipe jar rims and threads. Cover with 2-piece lids. Screw bands tightly. Place jars in pot or canner and make sure that water covers jars by 1 to 2 inches. Cover; bring water to gentle boil. Process the jars for 5 minutes. Remove jars and place upright on towel to cool completely. After jars cool, check seals by pressing middle of lid with finger. (If lid springs back, lid is not sealed and refrigeration is necessary.)

4. Use it over a block of cream cheese with crackers or put a teaspoon or two on a piece of boneless, skinless chicken or pork in the last 15 minutes of baking.

This is a great addition to your upcoming Halloween party. I have one more jelly recipe with rosemary in it, but I am tinkering with it. The cold weather is coming so I will be out harvesting the pineapple sage and rose geranium leaves next week for the additional jelly recipes I am making this year. More jelly recipes to share! Please stay tuned!