From the foot of the dining couch, this is hereby monsters.

A couple days ago, I biked up to a plant nursery and came to the edge of the city.

To pick up a couple plants that they said they had there.

I was looking for herbs and I couldn't find them in any of the grocery stores.

So I went out there and just bought them in the plant form.

I think the people in the store might have thought I was going to put them in my yard as ornamentals, but really I'm going to cook with them.

It was two plants. One of them is called Loveige and one of them is called the Rue.

And both of these were kind of central herbs in ancient Roman cuisine.

They're both still cultivated today, but not in any large numbers, at least not here in the United States.

So about these two plants, $6 each.

I took them out to the parking lot and just plucked a couple leaves off of each of them and tasted them.

In the Loveige, it looks very much like parsley, but the flavor is very strong.

It's very bitter.

And just one leaf is enough to fill your whole mouth with this kind of general herbaceous bitter kind of celery-like flavor.

In the Rue, it's like, how do you describe a flavor you've never tasted before?

I guess I could say it was also bitter, but one known quality of Rue,

and this is something that I experienced, is that it makes your tongue go numb.

And that's a pretty weird feeling, you know?

I've heard before that plants that we call herbs, the thing that we like about them,

is the thing that other species don't like about them, right?

Imagine trying to get any nutritionally significant amount of calories off of a plant that makes your tongue go numb.

It's like a pretty good discouraging trait, but what we've learned to do is we've learned to spice our foods.

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