Shaecation

Spring is a wonderful time of year, with ready access a plethora of affordable and delicious fresh herbs, fruit and vegetables. At the same time, it can be a bit daunting trying to determine what to do with it all. I’m not just randomly mentioning this conundrum. While baking the carrot cake with Rose the other night, her roommate asked me what to do with a large batch of mint she had been given.

My initial response was the same as I imagine most people’s: mojitos and mint-chocolate cupcakes. But I wanted to give her a better response than that, so I thought I’d sit down and come up with some ideas for her. I did this the same way I would normally try to decide what to do with a single ingredient: I searched tastespotting.com. For those of you that don’t know it, it’s a terrific resource, pulling recipes from all over the web and letting you browse through the photos and descriptions and only read the ones that sound/look good.

What follows is some of the highlights from my search. I didn’t get through all of them (there were 29 pages of results) I should also point out that Rose’s roommate is not especially confident in her cooking skills, so I tried to limit the selections accordingly:

Sauces/Dips
Veggies and green pea dip
Mint pesto
Lemon-cardamom and mint dressing
Fruit salad with mint sauce
Tzatziki
Mint chutney

Pasta, Rice and Grains
Red bell pepper salsa with mint on rice
Minted grape couscous
Green pea pulau
Garganelli with prosciutto and peas
Orzo with chickpeas and mint
Bulgur salad with fresh mint and hearts of romaine

Sides
Melon, mint and feta salad
Sauteed radishes with mint
Smashed peas with mint
Roasted carrots with chile, orange and mint glaze

Drinks
Lime, strawberry and mint squash
Apple, avocado and mint smoothie
Mint and lime iced green tea

Others
Mint lamb meatballs
Mint chocolate chip cookies