I’ve never been impressed by curly parsley. I first ate it as a curious kid at a restaurant trying to be fancy by using parsley as a garnish. (It might have been a Long John Silvers.) It was tasteless, it strangely tickled the roof of my mouth, and the small leaves lodged themselves between my teeth after a few chews. Its relegation to garnish status made perfect sense.
As an adult, I was dismayed by how many recipes called for parsley. Was there a highly-funded pro-parsley conglomerate lobbying cookbook authors and publishers to include the insipid herb in their recipes? But then, I found flat-leaf parsley. It was zesty. It had girth. It was so hard to tell apart from cilantro.
Why, why do grocery stores place parsley next to cilantro? Haven’t they noticed the throngs of customers with quizzical looks fondling and sniffing cilantro in one hand and flat-leaf parsley in the other? I tend to stand there and just stare, waiting for herb intuition to kick in, or for someone who can tell them apart to push me out of the way.
Thankfully, Native Greens had clearly labeled Italian Parsley (the same as flat-leaf parsley) at the Denver Urban Homesteading farmers’ market last week. And there was no cilantro in sight. It’s an heirloom variety of Italian Parsley, and has so much flavor– parsley times 100, with a nice earthiness.
Flat-leaf parsley has overtaken the curly variety for culinary uses (or if it hasn’t yet, it certainly should.) Thousands of years ago, curly parsley was more popular, because the flat variety closely resembled a poisonous weed. Happily, with cultivation, we don’t have that problem anymore.
Spring is prime time for flat-leaf parsley, when the young, tender leaves are at their best. I added Native Greens’ Italian Parsley to Baked Manicotti this week. I thought I had retired this comfort food dish from my seasonal rotation, as temperatures have been edging close to 70 degrees here in Denver. But the forecast is predicting 3 to 7 inches of snow tomorrow and I thought manicotti might cheer me up.
When the weather warms up again, Native Greens’ Italian parsley will make fantastic tabouleh. Though if I wait too long, I’ll have to call on my herb intuition again, as cilantro will probably make an appearance.
Want more veggies? Check out last week’s veggie story: Sprouts. Fast Food Vegetables. New veggie stories every Thursday.
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New to The Weekly Veggie? Read how it all began with My Childhood Vegetable Nemesis.
