Using Herbs & Spices
Dawn and I learned early on that one of the best of times is being in the kitchen together with some good wine and food. Best of all it’s something we can enjoy together every day.
We discovered we could make great food at home for a lot less money than eating out. No fancy kitchen required and every once in a while you’ll make one of those “as good as it gets” meals.
We own about a hundred cookbooks but rarely follow a recipe from them. We found cookbooks written by professionals not really interested in the home cook can be confusing so we used them as inspiration for our own meal ideas.
After years of traveling and dining at everything from Michelin stared restaurants to local bistros and bringing those ideas to our own kitchen our crucial learnings were that gourmet food is about finding the freshest, best quality ingredients available, cooking them properly, employing spices to accentuate food flavors and keeping it all as simple as possible.
We found that as an independent spice purveyor we can source and offer ultra-premium spices that are fresher, more flavorful and cost-effective.
Our Herbies spices are a simple, effective and inexpensive way to incorporate health and flavor into our everyday life and when you think about how much spice you use for most dishes, it ends up being pennies a serving.
- Tasty Meat Sprinkle gives meats an appetizing color and delicious taste, grilled, roasted or barbecued, but it also works just fine on chicken, fish or vegetables.
- Greek Seasoning is a wonderful marinade for lamb but will also work on other meats chicken, fish or vegetables.
- Lemon Pepper Native Seasoning compliments chicken and seafood when applied before cooking but may also be used at the table as a substitute for salt and pepper.
- South Indian Seafood Masala Mix is a balanced blend of spices for any seafood before cooking but also works just fine on chicken or vegetables.
All our spice packets have a recipe on the reverse side but go ahead and experiment with spices. You'll find you can use them in all the dishes you normally cook.
At least once each day have a nice meal. Our Herbies spices make that meal taste better and may also make that meal better for your health.
Our website also has a spice database of over four hundred spices and spice blends all with suggested uses and many linked to recipes.
We maintain our own in-house culinary team to produce dishes for our more that two hundred events annually. We continually publish new recipes which incorporate our spices for the release of our forty five wines each year.
Our website has a recipe database of over five hundred recipes all linked to our spices used.
You don't need to cook our recipes but you can use them as a guide to the type of spice a dish needs and just find something near to what you intend to cook.
Most or our spice packets range between $5 to $15 and contain about six to ten uses. As you get about half done with a spice let us know or just order more on our website and we will get it to you, fresh and fast.
There are lots of different opinions on what spices to use and in most cases a spice or spice blend will work across a wide range of foods.
Many spices have traditionally been associated with particular ethnic foods and here in America we typically learn to enjoy different cultures through their food, with Mexican and Chinese foods leading the way.
It's natural that a spice traditionally used in a food you enjoy will find its way into your kitchen and perhaps be confined to that one food type, but spices have a much wider use range than just one type of food so have some fun with cooking and spice it up!.
Adding to this desire for spice blends are the traditional American dishes like roasted, smoked, barbecued and grilled meats; pies and jams; mustards and dressings; all containing spice blends.
Herbie takes the basic fifty spices and creates specific blends for different dishes. Finicky chefs will say they create their own spice blends but in reality most simply use a prepackaged spice mix because it's convenient and ensures consistency in the recipe.
This all rolls up to about 350 different spices and blends which can be daunting at first so we have a Spice Club with recipes using spices to help you find the flavors you like in your cooking. There's no big commitment, you save on spices, free recipes, foodie event invitations and more.
An increasing number of spice providers think the safest way around it is to put a blanket statement “may contain traces of nuts or gluten” on all their products, which meets the requirements with minimum vigilance, but means that people with allergies have to do without a product that may in fact be safe for them.
Because some of our more rare spices come from countries where quality control is basic, Herbie has made the investment, both in dollars and time, to test individual shipments, so we can tell you our spices contain no allergen and you can safely enjoy adding that extra flavor to your meals.
Armed with basic techniques, the right tools and the best produce available, anyone can turn out a delicious gourmet meal. Often the smallest ingredient in size is the biggest in flavor and that’s where spices come into the kitchen picture.