Your Herbal Kitchen: Pantry Staples for Healthy Eating

Using medicinal herbs to take care of your family’s health doesn’t have to be complicated! You can begin with the herbs you have in your pantry and make simple herbal kitchen staples for healthy eating any time.

Today, I want to talk about what an herbal kitchen is, what an herbal kitchen is not, and how it can all shake out in your everyday life. I will also share how can you really enter into my book, The Herbal Kitchen. With over 250 recipes in the book, people often wonder where to begin. Here’s how you can put your herbal kitchen to work for your lifestyle.

 

What Is an Herbal Kitchen?

First of all, here is what an herbal kitchen is not. An herbal kitchen is not about you being an over-the-top chef. You can have amazing herbal kitchen if you don’t cook, and even if you eat fast food. If you eat a lot of to-go food or packaged food, you definitely want to herbalize your kitchen because that food needs the herbal kitchen even more.

It’s not about having an incredible herb garden that you’re harvesting fresh from every day. That is awesome, but you don’t have to have an herb garden at all. You can use all dried herbs. Having an herbal kitchen is for anybody. You don’t always have to be so herbally inspired like all the pictures on Instagram.

So, what is an herbal kitchen? I’ve been teaching herbal medicine for 34 years now. The 200+ recipes in The Herbal Kitchen were time-tested and refined over and over again with hundreds of my students. You can have a good recipe, but after you make it 5 or 10 times with a lot of input, then that’s what makes a great recipe. That’s how the recipes in this book were born.

What I’ve tuned into over the years is that the key is having enough herbal kitchen staples and pantry items that are herbified. What we do is put a little effort on the front end, so when you reach for your pantry staples and condiments to use in your cooking, they’re already full of herbs.

 

Herbal Kitchen Staples

Almost every meal that we eat has some kind of fat, right? You’ve cooked with coconut oil, olive oil, butter or ghee. Almost every table has salt. Sometimes we use a sugar or an acid. What you want to do is infuse all of those things—your acids, sugars, salts, fats—in advance so that when you reach for them, they’re already full of herbs. You can have herbed salt, herbal vinegar, herbal oil, herbal sprinkles.

Pretty soon, you put those herbalized fats, vinegars, salts, and sprinkles on some lettuce, rice or steamed vegetables and it’s like, wow! Now, you’ve got 10 herbs in that meal, and you didn’t even really have to do anything because you have an herbal kitchen. It’s not like you’re adding those 10 or 15 herbs right when you’re cooking. They’ve been infusing into that vinegar or oil or salt for a month or longer, so the herbs have time to mellow and blend and the flavor is just so much better.

You know those days when you feel like, “I can just barely make oatmeal or rice”? With a stock of herbal kitchen staples, you can make sure that oatmeal is herbalized. The water that we cook it in has herbal salt in it. When we go to eat it, we use herbal ghee. We use an herbal sprinkle. We use an herbal honey. It’s like we’ve got 10 herbs on that meal.

That’s what an herbal kitchen is to me. It’s not about having the ultimate herb garden or being an ultimate herbal chef. It’s about having your kitchen stocked. In The Herbal Kitchen, you have entire chapters on herbal honey, herbal vinegar, herbal oils, herbal cordials, herbal ghee, herbal salts and more. Here are a couple herbal kitchen staples I wouldn’t be without…

 

Herbal Sprinkles

You can buy herbal sprinkle blends, but it’s a lot cheaper to make them yourself. I usually have three or four savory sprinkle blends for salad dressings, rubs, and marinades and several sweet and aromatic blends that are used in breakfast foods and treats.

For example, an herbal breakfast sprinkle might contain ginger, cinnamon and cardamom. You can put it on pancakes, waffles, oatmeal, any kind of dessert or yogurt. It just changes the game.

I have a family that’s not really interested in the whole herbal trip at all, but they’re like, “Yes, the herbal sprinkles! Hand those over! I’ve realized that when I have that on my food, it just tastes better.”

 

Herbal Pesto

There’s also an entire chapter on pesto, which you can make every one or two weeks and know that it is in the fridge to put on practically everything you eat. Pesto is a highly medicinal food, comprised of several servings of vegetables, loads of antioxidants, and a plethora of antibacterial properties.

I give you the basic framework of making pesto so that you can then plug in any mild green, intensely tasting green, and various herbs like rosemary and lavender.

Even if you feel like all you can do is scramble an egg, you can put your pesto on that scrambled egg, and it becomes a delicacy.

 

Family-Friendly Pantry Staples

When you have an array of herbal kitchen staples right there on the counter or on the table, it’s also easy for your family members to customize their meals. For example, my constitution is on the slower and colder side, more kapha, so eating hotter spices like cayenne or ginger is really good for me. My son is so pitta and fiery that it’s really bad for him. My husband is right in the middle. How do you cook for that?

That’s the great thing about having all these herbal vinegars, herbal oils, and herbal sprinkles, so that you have what your family can handle and what everybody needs. If you have young ones or people that aren’t into the herbal thing, you can start putting those herbal sprinkles on the table and pretty soon they’re gone.

As a busy mom homeschooling my son and teaching herbal medicine full-time, I need my herbal kitchen just as much as anybody else. I’m not always super inspired with my meals. Having my pantry stocked with these herbal kitchen staples that have had time to really blend and taste good, changes the game.

An herbal kitchen doesn’t mean having perfect pictures or being something that you’re not. It can be super simple!

 

Ready to seriously herbify your kitchen pantry? Check out My Herbal Kitchen

 

I would love to hear from you! How are you doing with your herbal kitchen and herbifying your meals? Please share in the comments below.