A Preponderance of Parsley

Mark Bittman says it's "impossible to overstate its importance," but no one in my house is quite sure what to do with parsley, besides add a sprig of it for garnish here or there. So we have ... an accumulation of it in our crisper.

When an entry on the Bitten blog suggested a method to rapidly reduce our parsley stores, I started looking into purees and pestos:

In a platter of leeks and pasta for two, I would never have used a whole bunch of parsley in chopped form: it would have been like eating some sort of wilted salad. But as a puree it was by no means too much.

We ultimately used a recipe for parsley pesto from the Dallas News. (The article, on "winter pestos," also includes intriguing recipes for kale pesto and black olive pesto.)

I wasn't a huge fan of it tasting out of the food processor, but served over penne with extra pepper and parmesan (and with frozen edamame added to the leftovers for lunch), it was pretty tasty.

Commenter black.of.the.woods suggests trying the cream of parsley soup from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, which sounds promising. We've still got two bunches of parsley left, so stay tuned.

(For the more adventurous, this vintage New York Times recipe for fried parsley calls for a clean coping saw and a twist drill.)