ALL PURPOSE SPICE AND HERB MIX

This all purpose spice and herb mix is the perfect base for many dishes.  Just like my universal Chinese marinade and sauce, this dry mix is a combination of herbs and spices that can be the base flavoring for dishes like taco meat, beef stew, meat sauce, a vegetarian bean soup and dry rubs or seasoning for steaks, BBQ and seafood.  It's one of those great items to have in your pantry that you can use instead of bringing out 10 different containers every time for a particular dish. This seasoning blend is the perfect base for a multitude of dishes.

When your herbs are going wild and you need to do major pruning, wash, dry and lay the herbs on a towel for a week before stripping off their leaves and putting them in containers for blending.  This is the time to use up the dried herbs and create this spice mix that will making cooking a cinch and enhance all your dishes as well.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be making dishes that use this all purpose spice and herb mix as its base.  My hope is that you start to experiment and create more interesting dishes using the spice blend as the base!

Tips for making this universal spice and herb mix.

Digital scale

Although not mandatory, this digital scale is very helpful in the kitchen and due to the structure of the dried herbs, a tablespoon of a herb for one person will have a very different weight than a tablespoon of a finer ground herb for another person.  By weighing the herb, everyone's weight will be the same.

Coffee grinder

A coffee grinder is helpful to grind small amounts of herbs, nuts etc.  Sometimes, a blender is too big, and the amount of ingredient is below the blade, so nothing gets ground.  A dedicated ingredient grinder is useful in the kitchen.  A pestle and mortar can do the trick if you don't own a coffee grinder. 

Funnel

A funnel helps to expedite the pouring of the universal spice and herb mix into the permanent container.  I use a wide mouth preserve funnel since the opening is larger which allows the spice mix to go through quickly.  However, a regular funnel does. work.

Herbs

As I mentioned earlier, this all-purpose spice and herb mix is a great way to use up your herbs from the garden.  It is easier to dry your herbs whole before stripping the leaves from the stems.  If your herb plant has bolted, dry the flowers and grind them too!

Let me know in the comment section what dish you've made with this all-purpose spice and herb mix.