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How about an easy gift idea from your garden or even decoration for your kitchen? You know,
recently, I received this herb vinegar as a gift. And it reminded me of, well, you could
actually make these herb vinegars and also flavored oils very easily in your own kitchen.
They're great for giving as gifts. They're also wonderful for using in the kitchen for
cooking all sorts of things. And, well, there also beautiful as a decorative element in
the kitchen. Let me show just how easy it is. For a marinade, what I like to do is just
take some rosemary–and you can see, I just got some stems of rosemary that I've cut out
of the garden here. If you really want the aroma to come through, gently bruising the
rosemary by just taking a spoon and just stroking the leaves like this will release some of
those essential oils. Then I just drop the rosemary down in the bottle. And then over
here, I just have some ordinary white vinegar, and it's just coming to a boil, and that's
what you want, you can just see the bubbles coming up around the edge. So what I'm gonna
do now is just take this warmed vinegar, if not hot vinegar –I'm gonna be careful here–
and just pour it into this bottle. You'll notice, I made sure that the stems were well
below –or just below– the neck of the bottle. Now, all I have to do is take a cork
and put it in the top of the bottle, but I'll wait for this to completely cool. And you're
probably asking: How long is this gonna last? Well, you wanna keep these vinegars in an
out of direct light place. And if you do that, they'll last up to, say, four months. But
in the refrigerator, about six months. Now, let's talk about oils for just a moment, while
this cools. You can create these flavored oils using just about any type of oil you
wanna cook with. In this case, I'm gonna use some oil olive. So, I'm just gonna take another
bottle. And I like to use this in a salad dressing. And this is where I take just a
bundle of well-dried, fresh thyme leaves, and I'm just going to bruise them gently with
a spoon here. And then, I'm gonna drop these down into the bottle, okay. Now, with this,
I'm gonna actually add some peppercorns–this will be really good in salad–about 2 teaspoons.
And about 2 teaspoons of dried lemon rind. And then, I'm just gonna take a really nice
olive oil, and I'm gonna fill this up with olive oil. See, look at that–isn't that
beautiful? Now, what you want to do is you want, whether it's the vinegar or the oil,
you want this to sit for about two weeks before you use it. Again, it's all about distribution
of flavor in there. You're gettin' the idea here. What you wanna do is come up with your
own little blends, you're own little flavor. Have a little fun with it. Flavor your world.
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