what are your favorite things to do with rosemary?

Hey Carl!

I have a giant rosemary plant in my backyard and want to utilize as much of it as possible! do you have any suggestions? It could be food stuff, recipes or what not, or I saw online some medicinal stuff as well.

Roasted potatoes with rosemary, olive oil, and salt. Amazing.

Rosemary on focaccia with sea salt and olive oil.

Rosemary blossoms taste like butter and rosemary. I'd think someone could make a sort of savory jelly using the blossoms similar to sage blossom jelly. I haven't tried it with rosemary, but I bet it would make a great infused simple syrup.

Drape your sheets over them to dry on a sunny day. They will smell wonderful!

I love rosemary and olive oil on parsnips, roasted. The flavors are fantastic together.

Jessica Gorton wrote:I love rosemary and olive oil on parsnips, roasted. The flavors are fantastic together.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Rosemary bread. Just use a regular white french bread recipe(or other simple white bread) and add 1-2 tbsp of rosemary, depending on how strong you want the flavor. Just before you bake it, give it a coat of egg wash, and sprinkle kosher salt on it. When the loaf comes out, it will have a golden crust with salt embedded into it.

This is a really good recipe to start out with when making bread, because the warm rosemary flavor is so wonderful that it hides and failures of technique you might have.

Hey Cassie

Great question.

I agree with all the replies saying it's great in roasts, with veg and/or chicken, oily fish, lamb or beef.

And rosemary in baking is fantastic, we've just had focaccia with extra-virgin olive oil, sea salt and rosemary sprinkled on it. In bread it's great, I think it partners especially well with bread rolls made with cheese to have with soups.

Your plant will benefit from regular cutting so its stems make multiple branches. You may have noticed how the branches become bare and woody if left and eventually the plant will be more wood than herb. The woody stems make great skewers when they're fresh and green to use on barbecues though. And it also makes a good contribution to a 'smudge fire' to burn to produce a herby smoke that helps to keep insects away from where you are eating.

If you give your plant a good prune and have a lot of rosemary around I suggest making 'romarinade' which is rosemary whizzed up with olive oil, a little salt and garlic to make a paste. You can then use this straight out of the cupboard or fridge when you fancy a quick blast of woody flavour on veg or grilled meats or fish. It'll mean you won't have to go out in the rain in winter to collect fresh herb

I love it whizzed up with anchovies and garlic as part of a thick salad dressing which is great for salads with one or more of fennel, celeriac, potato, artichoke or radishes.

Rosemary is also a traditional herb to use in brewing beer, add a few ounces of the herb to the boil water to extract the flavours and oils. And it makes an ace liqueur if you steep it in vodka or other spirit, it goes well with lemons in the mix or coriander.

I like to chop it very fine when I use it in risotto, soups and stews so that you don't get speared by the sharp needles which tend to feel like bones.

Lastly, you can propagate your rosemary using stem cuttings, so that you can have more and/or replace the big plant when the time comes.

Hope that's a help

If you have a bird to roast, slipping sprigs of rosemary under the skin (between the skin and the flesh) makes it extra delicious.

Rosemary-scented massage oil, if strong enough, has a gentle tingle that is very pleasant -- assuming nobody minds the massage recipient smelling like a roasting chicken.

using it for healing!

was living at a farm on a rural mountain in Costa Rica, south of San Isidro del General, and the roosters liked to escape and wander sometimes. One day I heard something "off" down the coffee plantation hillside and went down quickly, hearing squawking... something ran off into the woods, and I found a rooster ruffled and bleeding. He was cut pretty bad near the neck and one leg. We put him into quarantine, used rosemary tea to clean his wounds and kept rosemary water in his bowl. He did also receive an antibiotic treatment from the vet, so there can be no claim made about Rosemary being the total cure, but, it seemed to help and the bird healed quickly. I have used the tea when I feel something funny starting in my throat with positive results.

Pia Jensen wrote:using it for healing!
...  I found a rooster ruffled and bleeding. He was cut pretty bad near the neck and one leg. We put him into quarantine, used rosemary tea to clean his wounds and kept rosemary water in his bowl. He did also receive an antibiotic treatment from the vet, so there can be no claim made about Rosemary being the total cure, but, it seemed to help and the bird healed quickly. I have used the tea when I feel something funny starting in my throat with positive results.  

Thanks for this information.

Thanks everyone for all the suggestions!

I always have a lot of rosemary. Placing large sprigs under roasts, I've done pork, beef and lamb. The house smells wonderful.

Not cooking, but rosemary can get quite large here, and grow out of the space you have given it. I had some along a path years ago, and my children when playing would fall into it. They smelled wonderful all day.

Well just after high school Rosemary and I would take my truck up some back roads, and at the top of this hill we would...oh wait, I am pretty sure you are referring the Rosemary the herb! (Teasing people).

I have a rub that I use Rosemary with that I use on lamb chops that I find tasty.