A Summer of Vinegar
During the Alaska summer, plants are sprouting, greening up, flowering, fruiting, and storing nutrients in their roots. It is a joy to capture snippets of all this growth energy and preserve it to savor the wild summer flavors and nutrients later in the year. Vinegar makes a wonderful vehicle for archiving summer flavors. Also, vinegar extracts many medicinal constituents from plants, including minerals like calcium, magnesium, and potassium. I found Beverley Gray’s “Nourishing Vinegar Tonic” in her book, The Boreal Herbal, and got inspired to build a recipe that includes plants that come into their own at different stages of the summer, like rose petals and rose hips both, for example.
Another way to preserve herbs is in honey. Honey is sweet and delectable on its own but infusing it with herbs makes it even more flavorful and healing. Honey has antimicrobial properties, making it a good preservative, but you want to make sure not to dilute it with the water in fresh plants, so first dry the herbs you plan to infuse.
Infused honeys and vinegars are very flexible, and I recommend using whatever kinds you have available and enjoy eating. Once you have created infused vinegar or honey, you can use it however you would normally use those ingredients. I recommend not cooking them so that you preserve the herbal properties. I love a sweet and sour flavor, and often combine vinegar and honey to make a shrub or a salad dressing.
Ratios in the following recipes are by volume, for instance: 2 parts vinegar to 1 part herbs could be 2 cups vinegar to 1 cup fresh herbs or 1 cup vinegar to ½ cup herbs.
