Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do. Do without.Eleanor Roosevelt said that, probably during the Depression or some wartime crunch. But I love its sentiment: the idea that what we have is enough. "Making do" is not really something you see advertised alongside Big Gulps and $35,000 handbags. Last weekend in the Times' opinion section, I saw this piece about a divorced Brooklyn mother of two who fell on hard times and resorted to starting a victory garden and baking her own bread to get by. (A former Bergdorf Goodman shopper and unwilling to give up perfume, she now makes her own from fragrant herbs!) It was very inspiring, and it gave me serious pause when I went to write "mint tea" on the grocery list that's posted on the door of our fridge. Instead, I went out to the garden and harvested huge armfuls of fresh mint. I had cut the unruly plants back a month ago—and frozen and preserved some leaves then—but they had grown in more vigorously than ever. While I was out there, I also snipped lots of other things to dry and use over the coming winter months.
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I'm crazy about shiso and was thrilled that we were able to grow several plants in our garden this summer. Turns out they like a spot that is a bit shadier, neither wet nor dry. We had to rescue armloads of the stuff before the first frost as it immediately and tragically goes black and limp. But then there I was with tons of shiso and only a few ideas as to how to use it. I've always enjoyed the crystallized shiso leaves, coated in a brittle crust of sugar, that are part of the dessert plate at Matsuri, but I couldn't really see making them at home. And I do like the pickled umeboshi-plum-and-shiso roll that is on every classic sushi menu, but that would use up just a few leaves at most. I did go ahead and make a simple syrup infused with the smaller quantity of red shiso I had—great for cocktails and to mix with soda water—but that still left me with vast quantities of the green. A quick scan of the web revealed virtually no inspiration, aside from an edamame salad enlivened with chopped shiso. So I put on my special Glutton's Thinking Cap (looks something like this, or perhaps this), gazed deep into the vast recesses of the fridge, and came up with a rather inventive way to use large handfuls of deliciously pungent, minty shiso.