Making Herb Butter

 I love herbs - both growing and cooking with them. After attending a recent Medicinal Herb class, I'm exploring using herbs as tonics and for cleaning, so I've been adding a few more plants to my yard that can be beneficial to us.

 I've had this bird cage hanging in a tree and decided to add small pots of oregano and some aloe in it. As the plants get larger, I'll transplant to bigger containers or somewhere in the ground.

One of my favorite ways to use herbs is "Herb Butter."

It's so easy to make and there's no exact recipe.

I let two sticks of (real) butter soften at room temperature, so that you can stir in the herbs. For this batch, I added chopped chives, oregano, basil, salt, and garlic powder. Stir it in good and then refrigerate to let it get firm again. That's all! 

Use whatever herbs you like and to your taste. Now that I think about it, at times I've even added dried cayenne pepper to the butter.  

Grilled corn on cob is so good with herb butter. At Memorial Day, we bought 10 ears of corn and grilled them. Everyone was going crazy over the corn. Later that night, I found out Jeff didn't get any corn. We had 11 in attendance and everyone ate the corn . Ooops! So for 4th of July, I made sure there was plenty of corn for everyone and that he got a piece.

 For grilled corn, I remove the silks, but leave on the husk. Soak corn for 30 minutes in water, liberally apply butter to ears of corn, pull the husk back up over the corn, wrap in tin foil and grill 20-30 minutes. It holds it heat really well, so its the first thing to go on the grill and it'll still be warm after grilling the meat. Remove foil just prior to setting on the table and then watch it disappear! Oh and pass the herb butter around the table!

We also used a pat of butter on the steaks, right before they came off the grill and it's good on bread as well.

Do you cook with herbs? If so, what's your favorites?