Massive Parsley Harvest

What I thought was one giant bolting cilantro ended up being three giant bolting flat-leaf parsleys squished tightly together at the base.  I've been eating it, calling it cilantro all along, but only now realized that the wrong seeds were in the Burpee package (interestingly, they use the same photo for both packages of seeds).  It is SO not cilantro. 

Turns out that the culinary world has a saying to help tell the leaves apart:  P is for Parsley because it's Pointy, C is for Cilantro because it's Curvy.  Should be easy to remember.  Mine has pointy tips.

Here's an action photo of Stormy Pouncing over the Parsley Pile.

8 pounds of parsley! The bowl contains a pound and a half of kale.

Each of those tiles is a square foot, so you can see the crazy amount of herb I dumped on the floor!  Egads!

My task today has been to pluck off all the leaves and weigh them, and separate out the stems to be preserved for use in flavoring soups... this process took me almost 3 hours.  Next, I'll blanch them, then freeze them flat in ziploc freezer bags so I can chip off chunks as needed.  There is just no way I can use all of this at once.

Maybe there's such a thing as parsley pesto?  Hmmm.


The official numbers:  2lbs of leaves, 3lbs of soup stems (veggie soup 4 life!), 3lbs of woody trunk not used.  Just for a mental picture of the mass, the parsley leaves fit very tightly into a plastic grocery bag... same for the stems.  Since I threw so much away, I'm gonna call today's harvest 5lbs.


I have an equal amount to harvest tomorrow!

What would you do with a mountain of flat-leaf parsley?