How to Make Herbal Infused Oils...

Jamie Oliver talks you through cooking with herbs...

It's So Easy To Make Herbal Vinegars, - [And, people will ooo and ah when you bring them as gifts to parties!]...

To make these you will need sprigs of fresh herbs.  If you don't grow them you can usually get nice prigs of fresh herbs, or small herb plants in most grocery stores.

Wash the herbs.  Get some glass bottles with plastic sprinkle tops, [like clean hot sauce bottles that you've emptied].  Crush the sprigs of herbs a bit to get them to release their essences faster.

Put the sprigs in the bottles and then fill them with red wine vinegar.  Let the vinegars set at least three months so that they make up well.

Add a fancy label to your bottles.  I've found that oregano, rosemary, basil, garlic chives, sage and the mints make up strongest as herbal vinegars.

The Faerie Market...

What would you expect to find at a faerie market???...  Certainly, you might find luscious and unusual fruits, delights that look vaguely familiar, BUT, as you turn them around in your hand you realize that such fruit NEVER grew in a human's orchard!  The tiny faerie woman; she is scarcely 4 feet tall, who is selling the fruit looks at you out of the corner of her sly and very beautiful gray eyes...  She looks young, BUT, you feel that somehow she is very, very old, as old as the ages of Man.  She is dressed like a peasant in medieval times in a homespun tan skirt and a red blouse, her long wavy brown hair tied in a simple muslin kerchief. She smiles at you; there is no humor or light in that smile.

You gingerly put the fruit back in it's wooden crate.  You remember part of the poem by Cristina Rossetti, -  "Do not taste [Goblin] fruits, for who knows upon what they fed their thirsty, hungry roots!"...

In fact, you just wandered upon this Faerie Market...  Why, it seemed as if it was not there one moment; then, it suddenly appeared, out of the very early morning mist.  You notice that it seems as if you are, actually, the only normal size being at this market.  Then, you realize that all the rest of the people are faeries...

You hurry away.  As you look back at the market it gradually disappears.  Where it stood there is now only a grassy knoll.  Then, you feel a sharp pain in your back.  It gets worse and worse, as you stumble home.  That pain is your punishment for happening upon a faerie market.  You will have it, more or less, for the rest of your life, for the fey hate to have humans at their market.  And, the gold watch you bought at a bargain price from a fast-talking little faerie man, --- overnight it has turned into a huge stinking, dripping toadstool.