Parsley ice cubes

In days of yore when I was a small child, the only herbs mothers used were parsley and well... parsley.  In fact, thinking about it, my mother didn't even use that.  My dad was very particular about what he ate which was very little except meat and 3 veg done to death.  You would end up with grey meat and vegies that were boiled till they were mush.  So perhaps it is odd that I now eat almost anything and everything.  Even as a child, I loved to try new things to eat, and relished my schoolmates' strange foods like wholemeal or rye bread sandwiches with huge chunks of vintage cheddar cheese and jam.  Or vegan foods, or Austrian foods like strudel with pastry that you could read through, made by a friend's Austrian grandmother.  We did occasionally eat wild rabbits that Dad would go out and shoot, or chooks that had had their necks wrung by someone's dad, which our poor Mum then had to pluck and gut.  Oh the joy!  My siblings and I planted vegies out in the backyard to supplement our diet.  The only problem being that we rented a house with a huge yard from the local butcher.   He for some obscure reason decided to house his goat in a corrugated tin half-moon shaped shed in the backyard.  This goat used to escape (though we figured the butcher let him free to annoy us) and eat the washing off the old washing line strung between 2 poles, and of course eat our vegies.  There was an old toilet down the back covered in mint, which grew bountifully due I imagine to the wonderful fertiliser!  I think Mum used to put the mint in some of our meals, which horrifies me now to think about.  My sister tells me that we had mint sauce with lamb;  this is odd 'cos I don't remember eating lamb as a child.
So as an adult, my diet is madly different and I eat all sorts of diverse things (even tripe in a Belgrade workers' cafe) though it took me a while to get used to coriander and basil and tarragon and thyme and.... And in my fridge today I saw that we had a bag of parsley which was looking very very sad.  I didn't want to throw it out- so wasteful- so I did the Jamie Oliver thing and decided to freeze it.  I have been very good this week and also saved some excruciatingly limp celery by sticking it into a glass of iced water.  See - I am being very thrifty in my old age!

So here is what I did with the parsley:

limp parsley looking sad

adding salt and pepper and olive oil

ready to blitz

blitzed!

ready for the freezer

I threw the parsley into the food processor, added salt and pepper and a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, and blitzed!  Top up each little cavity with a bit more olive oil and chuck into the freezer.  The next day you can place the cubes into a plastic bag for easy access.
They are now sitting in the freezer, ready to go into stews and soups.  In fact, Mr Pickings chucked a couple of cubes into the vegie stew he made tonight for my vegetarian sister.   Nooiiice one Mr Pickings!

(stock image by Trialsanderrors)