Saturday night is Pizza Night at Downeast Thunder Farm. I get in big trouble when I mix things up and don’t serve Pizza on Saturday – Paul and Hannah have come to count on Saturday homemade pizza. A key ingredient to pizza is the herb mix that goes in the sauce.

My herb garden lines the walk to the front door and has sage, thyme, chives, basil, peppermint, marjoram, and two different types of oregano. The marjoram and oregano are necessary ingredients for pizza night. We chop fresh herbs whenever possible, but when the snow has the garden buried, we rely on the dried herbs we put up.

Kitchen herb garden

Recently, Hannah helped me harvest mounds of marjoram (what The Colonel is eyeing above) and get it ready for the dehydrator.

Hannah harvesting marjoram

One by one, we pluck the leaves off the marjoram stems and lay them out in the handy, dandy, As Seen On TV, Ronco food dehydrator that Granny Gadget gave us years ago. We filled and dried ten trays of marjoram.

drying marjoram in the ronco food dehydrator

There’s not much left after they spend 24 hours in the dehydrator.

dried herbs in the dehydrator

Then we dried five trays of oregano. For the oregano we simply dried the entire stem and the pulled the dried leaves off

drying oregano

We ended up with just under two cups of pizza herb mix. It ought to be enough to get us through the winter. Seems like a lot of work for such little yield!

Downeast Thunder Farm Pizza Herb Mix

Past Pizza Posts:
10 July 2010: Dominos Doesn’t Deliver Here
14 August 2011: Downeast Thunder Farm Rockin’ Pizza Dough