Remove the leaves and chop them. There is a good deal of flavor in the stems. If you want to save them, put the stems in a tea ball infuser and use it in making soup or stock.
Remove the leaves and chop them. There is a good deal of flavor in the stems. If you want to save them, put the stems in a tea ball infuser and use it in making soup or stock.
--CM
In chopping fresh parsley, do I chop the stems also? Or should I pull the leaves off the stems and chop them only? Would chopping the stems and including them spoil the meaatball?
Originally Posted by PattyLu
What you do depends on how you want to use it. If you want it finely chopped, there's an easy way to do this, even without using a food processor. Wash the bunch first. Then fold it in half, forming a very tight little bundle. Hold it tight together and chop off very thin "slices" from the bundle. It goes fast. You can remove the stems first, or not, as you see fit.
Stems are every bit as tasty and nutritious as the leaves. The leaves are simply more attractive. You can include stems while mincing the parsley, or cut them off first. By all means, though, use them somewhere else. They can be added to ANY soup or stew, homemade or canned, and will immediately "up the nutrition" of the dish considerably. Parsley, and also cilantro and spinach, are the most nutrition-laden single foods you can buy.
We've all heard about using the cooking water from boiling veggies in other dishes, like soups. The same goes for the liquids in canned veggies. What I do with canned veggies is rather simple. I remove about 1-2 Tbs of the liquid first, then cook the veggies in the rest of the water, and when cooked, I add a generous knob of butter. I mix about 1 Tb of cornstarch per can of veggies to the reserved liquid, then add that to the pan. It thickens the water into a sauce - a lovely, buttery sauce. You can do this with water from boiling fresh veggies as long as there isn't a whole lot of it left when you take out the veggies. If there is, take the time to boil down and reduce the amount of water to the amount of "sauce" you wish to have. You can reduce it a bit more and replace just enough of it with wine, if desired. Then thicken it, using about 1 Tb of cornstarch per cup of liquid. And don't forget the butter!
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