🌻🍃🍅 No. 5: Excess Herbs --> Summer Soda 🍃🍓🍃 #100GardenHacks

I am working on a project for the 2017
growing season to work my way through
100 garden hacks*.

Excess Herbs --> Homemade Summer Sodas

Many herbs return as perennials to give us great abundances in so much as just a season, let alone the large populations that can develop in an herb garden over several years. What to do with all that prolific mint, parsley, cilantro, or whatever established herb you have on hand? You can always cut fresh herbs for vases, or use them for popular standardized recipes like mint and mojitos. Here's another fun and generic recipe idea that can flex around whatever prolific plantings you may have throughout a season and through the years. It can be customized infinitely to be a creative yet easy treat for any occasion. 

• Soda Water
• Fresh Fruit 
• Sprigs of herbs: try unfamiliar combos like mixing savory with the sweet. Sweet fruit like melons paired with savory flavors of (e.g. rosemary, parsley, cilantro, oregano, savory, thyme) can really trigger the taste sense of umami, driven by complication of layering contrasting flavors together.** 

via Instagram

🕊, 💌,  & 🍃
~KF

*101+ Garden Hacks magazine. 2017. Rodale, Inc. 

I found this copy on a CVS magazine stand :)
However, portions of this publication
previously appeared at RodaleOrganicLife.com

** These flavor combos are really intended for an adult palate. 🍃🍓🍃For kids, you may want to go with fruit only, or less complicated combinations anyway; young taste buds typically are not yet developed for much beyond sweet, and their young sensory systems may taste bitter more strongly than adults. Park, Michael Y. "How Our Sense of Taste Changes as We Age" on Bon Appétit. March 14, 2014. 

Pollan, Michael. 2013. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
“It may also be that, quite apart from any specific references one food makes to another, it is the very allusiveness of cooked food that appeals to us, as indeed that same quality does in poetry or music or art. We gravitate towards complexity and metaphor, it seems, and putting fire to meat or fermenting fruit and grain, gives us both: more sheer sensory information and, specifically, sensory information that, like metaphor, points away from the here and now. This sensory metaphor - this stands for that - is one of the most important transformations of nature wrought by cooking. And so a piece of crisped pig skin becomes a densely allusive poem of flavors: coffee and chocolate, smoke and Scotch and overripe fruit and, too, the sweet-salty-woodsy taste of maple syrup on bacon I loved as a child. As with so many other things, we humans seem to like our food overdetermined.”

For more on evolutionary explanations for why humans tend towards complicated flavors: Sherman, Paul W. and Jennifer Billing. 1999. Darwinian Gastrology: Why We Use Spices. Bioscience. 49 (6): 453-463.