Oregano or Basil?

[Ken Anderson]

I've concluded that I definitely like oregano better than basil, regardless of dish. The basil seems to have a soapish flavor to me. The board has been quiet lately. Anyone care to opine?

[Katra]

Well, to each their own taste... ;-) Oregano I can only use in very, very small amounts as it is strong and too much upsets my stomach.

I adore basil, but that's just me.

Might be the variety? There are a few different types of basil.....

[Frank Miles]

Maybe you should try a different kind of basil. There are many if you grow from seed. Worth it!

(Of course, everyone's nose and tongue are a little different. YMMV.)

-frank

[Ken Anderson]

I must confess blasphemy. : \ These herbs are off-the-shelf. Dried and in bottles, no less. McCormick's? The home-grown I assume are much better, if you know how to do it. I recall growing both oregano and basil one year, but thought the results left something to be desired. There was too much of a plant-like chlorophyll taste, as I recall.

[Katra]

Heh. There is NO comparison between the flavors of fresh vs. dried and bottled herbs... ;-)

Kat

[nina]

I've never liked Basil, never had much of an opinion,but I have a nice purple bush basil with a sweet almost licorice type smell that I adore. I'm bored with oregano, I prefere sage and rosemary. nina

[Ken Anderson]

Several minutes ago I placed my seed order. At the last moment I deleted the fancy basil that I had on my list. It's so easy to go overboard when ordering seeds. : \ I'd like to post the link to the site I ordered from. I ordered last year also, and I think they have a great selection. The Redorta San Marzano tomatoes are outstanding. Unusual URL, I'll agree. : )

blah blah blah

[Katra]

Every tried Thyme?

I have 3 different varieties growing and there are quite a few more available! I just picked up a beautiful variagated variety that has a loverly smell..... and taste!

Goes well as a creeping ground cover around walkways. As you step on it or brush by it, it realeases a lot of scent into the air.

[nina]

Thats what I dont have! Well, that and sage too,oh and tarragon. They dont seem to be as common down here (Puerto Rico) as in the States.I had regular thyme and lemon thyme in Colorado. I adored the lemon thyme.I need to get new plants as I am starting to run low on the little bit that I harvested and dried before moving. I've got my Richters catalogs right here. I cant wait to start ordering!! nina

[Katra]

If you have any trouble getting Thyme, let me know! My creeping thyme is doing well and I may be able to air layer you some. :-)

[Claire Petersky]

My oregano not only requires no care, it is a bit on the invasive side. I have to pull it out and cut it back every year, and it always comes back with a vengence, with little oregano plants appearing in other parts of the garden that have to be weeded out.

Basil, in the cool summers of the Pacific Northwest, takes patience. I usually buy starts, not seeds. Then I make mini greenhouses: I save a liter clear pop bottle, and cut off the top part. Each one of these is then inverted over the basil. The interior gets warm and traps dampness inside, and keeps the slugs out (they *love* basil!). By the time the basil plant outgrows its little house, it is warm enough for it to grow without needing it any more.

By the end of the summer, the few basil plants I put in before are now like bushes. You have to pinch back basil on a regular basis to keep it from going to seed, and the plant can grow to a couple feet in height. It also won't turn as bitter if you pinch it back.

When cool fall weather arrives, I hack down both the basil and the oregano. The oregano winters over with no problem. I freeze basil leaves in a big ziplock bag, and through the following months I can pull out frozen basil leaves and toss it into sauces and stews. The stalks of both plants I dry in the rafters of the garage. Then I put the dried stalks in the barbecue when grilling. The smoke of the basil or oregano imparts a smoky herbed flavor to the foods that are grilled.

[Jim Carlock]

Just passing on a thought on how to improve the menus on your website using some good old down home CSS.

your css page, try something along the lines of the following for the menu tags.

When working with web-pages, ALL tags are either: block or inline. The display: block; tells the browser a.menu is to be represented as a block element rather than an inline element. By default tags are inline, meaning they don't expand to the size of their containing tag. Tables, paragraphs and are block style. Sometimes you'll see and tags. The only difference between these tags, is their "display" property. are all inline, are all block. This is probably one of the most important things to learn when working with style sheets (css).

You can "override" the default behavior of any inline element to make them display as block.

The css code above works for links. I put in the mechanism to turn off the underline and change the way the border looks. Something that helps me out when I run into troubles...

have to do these tutorials every so often to keep my skills up and refresh my css knowledge, otherwise I'll forget things. I hope this helps. You can copy the code to an .htm document on your hard disk and mess with the border-size, width, and so on. It's 100% compatible with IE 4.0 and netscape 6.0 or later. Netscape 4 doesn't seem to recognize the border-style tags.

Hope this is helpful.

-- Jim Carlock Please post replies to newsgroup.

[nina]

thx I added the display:block thingy. Was there a problem with it before or is this just an optional improvment? It checks out ok for me in Firefox and IE6.

I do these sites to keep busy and to give myself a chance to work on CSS since I've been out of school 3 years and will forget everything if I dont keep at it. You will also notice that I took the easy way out and used tables for my layout. I am not a paying customer, so my personal sites get crappy code.

[nina]

,

States.I

Thanks. I hope I dont have to take you up on that offer. :)

[Katra]

ooh I like that idea for grilling! :-) I've never tried that, thanks!!!

[Jim Carlock]

Well I was thinking along the lines that it could be improved. I'm not going to say that it's bad. That wasn't my intention. I was just passing along some information because it appeared that you didn't understand display: block; and I was hoping to refresh my own memory of things.

I didn't look at the code or what was there. There were a few goals for me.

1) I wanted to throw something out to see what you knew and if you did the coding. 2) I needed to refresh my own memory about it. 3) I wanted to relay that the use of the display: block; tag is really a VERY NEAT and EFFECTIVE way to make a good looking presentation without too much effort.

Now, I still haven't looked at your code, so I'm guessing that you are putting each link inside of a element. I've messed around with tables and such for a long time and with "classes" inside of css. The a.menu tag inside of the css is called a class and I'm not refering to any sort of teaching institution. It looks like you have a fairly good understanding of how to use a class, so I'm just going to drop that topic.

The code I did not post was the rest of the document I used when preparing the last message. I skipped out on that for some reason, but I'll post it all once again and you can copy and paste it into a test.htm document to see where I'm going to head in the next paragraph... keep in mind, I haven't looked at your code yet...

Element Testing

Test Testing More

 

copy and paste everything inside the tags inclusive into a blank notepad. Save it as test.htm.

Now, I want to emphasize one thing in particular, that there are two different modes an element can be in.

1) display: block; 2) display: inline;

Now, there is one thing very important to remember about display: block; It automatically by default has a width: 100%.

So in the code above you can delete the lines, width: 100%. The tags are being defined as block and as such they will automatically have a width of 100%. The actual width is defined by the table cell ().

Now the goal here is to think of that table cell as a cup with solid walls and you can start filling it up. The tags, because we defined them as block elements, will automatically have a width as wide as the container that holds them. You can see this and use this to your advantage by making sure you provide an explicit width for the table cell (above, I set it to 100 pixels, you might consider 150 pixels for your page).

I think you'll be hooked in a moment and will have a greater understanding in this next paragraph...

Did you ever notice that when you highlight a link alot of times it'll pop up with an underline as wide as the link is. Why? Because tags are display: inline; by default. When you set the tag to block it automatically assumes a width: 100%.

Now how does that apply? If you notice on your current page, when you highlight a link it only highlights the link. I'm going to guess that you forgot to declare the .menu:hover as a block element or you are letting the table cell decide how big the cell actually is. I haven't looked at your code yet, but I can see that the tag isn't quite filling a whole table cell. It's only highlighting the link. So using the following should fix that unless you've got an ill formed table cell. .menu:hover { display: block; } Remember, I'm not looking at your code so just add the display:block; to your .menu:hover in addition to the what ever else you've got there.

So my goal with that one table cell is to house the "menu". It will only be one cell and I'm not going to bother with creating different cells for different menu items. The css code takes care of that and you can use it create borders and such, set the text color and the background color and such. The height of the menu grows automatically. I'm using CSS to padd the menu items... padding: 2px; This creates a 2 pixel space on all four sides. You can use padding-top: 2px; padding-bottom: 2px; instead, if you have the text-alignment: center in effect. In such cases you wouldn't need right and left padding, but if you want it all left aligned, just use the padding: 2px; to put a small padding around each menu item.

One important thing though about the tags you will want to keep in mind though, they are broken up into separate elements. So you want to provide the same "class" to the visited links, the active link and so on. By default, browsers supply their own colors for visited links, the active link and for unvisited links. This is where CSS comes in handy to specify the background colors, the text colors and such. I almost always keep the visited, active and links all the same. We'll take the easy way out and they are all the same color in the code above. You could change the visited links though to let people know that they've already visited that link, and that's all I'm going to say about that.

Okay, back to the one cell to hold all the links. We want to make sure that the table cell width is set properly to accomodate the widest link. Once this is done, your .menu items will automatically start to stack themselves into place inside the table cell.

I think I've gone on way too much. If anyone else is messing around with webpages, feel free to read through and use the code on this page. I hope I've done a good job explaining it.

Enjoy!

-- Jim Carlock Please post replies to newsgroup.

Jim Carlock wrote:

[nina]

Oh. But but but... I LIKE it the way it is.

[Claire Petersky]

You can do this with the stalks of any of your herbs: sage in particular is very nice.

[Katra]

I was just thinking that... ;-) I have lots of sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano and basil in season. I often end up with far more herbs in the herb garden than I can cook with. I think throwing some FRESH herbs on the coals could produce interesting results?

I'm also growing a Mexican oregano. It's gonna get hyooge so will provide a lot of growth for meat smoking experiments.

Thanks for the idea! I appreciate it.

[The Cook]

Rosemary stems make great skewers.

Which kind of Mexican Oregano are you growing. I have found 2 different kinds but do not know which seeds to order.