If you are anything like me, you buy fresh herbs every week because you are imagining yourself as someone who leads a Fresh Herb Lifestyle. You will scatter them across your meats. You will use them as punctuation marks on photos. You will use them to diversify the kinds of leaves included in your salads. You are a fresh-to-death Fresh Herb Person now and nothing can stop you!!!

The problem is that by the time you will get around to being a Fresh Herb Person in practice, those fresh herbs have probably already gone bad. That is because fresh herbs involve work. Maybe they are not work for you. But they are work for me.

Because I am much more ambitious buying herbs than I am using herbs, as a result I often have a few bags of fresh herbs left over come the weekend. I follow a one-in one-out rule, meaning those herbs need to be used before I can buy more on Sunday. Friday night has become the de facto “use the herbs” night. Last Friday, I had a staggering amount of fresh parsley, dill, and basil. I can now confirm for you that this is the best use of A Million Herbs.

Spaghetti with a million herbs is an equal opportunity pasta, meant to be flexible so that you can use what you have and be done with it. The primary component is herbs, yet it’s also the most subjective ingredient on the list. The combination I picked is highly recommended, but if you have other lingerers—mint leftover from that night you planned to make mojitos, or tarragon from that one NY Times chicken dish I’m obsessed with, or chives because you got the wild idea to make your own buttermilk ranch to put on fried chicken tenders—throw them in there.

Dill in particular makes this dish feel different and unexpected. It reminds me of the one and only time I had pasta with dill pesto at a long-gone restaurant on Williams St. in Portland, OR, garage doors thrown open to the sidewalk and the 9pm summer sun. Definitely use it if you can.

The second component is pasta, again a flexible ingredient. I like this with a long pasta, as it distributes the herbs evenly throughout the dish, without little herb cliques forming in rigatoni holes. But your choice of long pasta is yours to make. Here I used hand-cut egg spaghetti I had in the freezer, but feel free to use the fresh or dried long noodle of your choosing: I’m imagining fresh tagliatelle, linguine, fettuccine, all the way up to pappardelle on the thickness scale; among dried pastas, I would think spaghetti, bucatini, or even fusili bucati are up to the task.

The third, final, and non-negotiable core component is the butter. Because butter is the main ingredient in the sauce, use the very best stuff you can find. I had some of the fancy Bordier butter around that I picked up on impulse at the restaurant supply store the last time I waited for my cat to get a haircut, but Trader Joe’s makes an excellent cultured butter from Brittany that’s supposed to be almost the same. Whatever kind of butter you buy, make sure it’s high fat, salted, and cultured for a little tang.

The process itself is not really a whole lot more complicated than combining those three ingredients. When your pasta is nearly ready (towards the end of the cook time on dried pasta, or right as the water boils if you’re using fresh), you saute a few cloves of minced garlic in the butter, then add about half of each herb to the butter to infuse the sauce with herb flavor, cooking them down while you wait for your pasta to cook. You then toss the hot pasta with the butter and a few hefty splashes of pasta water, more than you might use for other dishes, which forms a glossy sauce. Add a squeeze of lemon juice and the remainder of your fresh chopped herbs, give it a toss, add a little salt, and serve with cheese.

That’s it! That’s the recipe. The only reason I bothered to write it down at all is so that you can save it, make it, love it, and think of it the next time you too are faced with an incongruence of your herb reality and your aspirational self who bought them: because if you tell me this is not the most satisfying way on earth to transform One Million Herbs from future waste to pure genius, then I will be asking to speak with your supervisor.

recipe

It’s literally buttery spaghetti with a million herbs.

Effortful time: <10 minutes

Total time: 20 minutes; most of this is waiting for water to boil

Makes about 4 servings

you need

1 lb. spaghetti, fresh or dried
4 tbsp. really good butter, preferably high-fat cultured European style butter
4 cloves of garlic
A ton of herbs: I used big handfuls each of parsley, dill, and basil
Salt and pepper
A squeeze of lemon juice
Parm for serving

make it

Get prepped. Boil some water in a large pot. Combine your herbs and then divide them into two piles. Coarsely chop one pile, and finely chop the other. Mince your garlic.
Figure out when you want to throw in your pasta. The sauce needs only 3 minutes to cook. Time your pasta cooking directions accordingly, and subtract 1 minute.
Create the herb-butter sauce. When your pasta is almost ready, heat the butter in a deep skillet over medium heat. Melt and let it foam. Sauté the minced garlic until fragrant and garlicky, 30 seconds or so. Add only the finely chopped herbs and gently sauté until wilted. Stir in a pinch of salt. Lower the heat to low.
Toss the sauce with the pasta. Using tongs, move your pasta directly into the skillet. Add some of the pasta water to the skillet (I needed close to a cup, but this depends on the pasta). This will emulsify with the butter and create a glossy sauce. Once that happens, spritz it with lemon juice, then turn the heat off and use tongs to fold in all the remaining coarsley chopped herbs. Finish with parm, maybe some black pepper, definitely a glass of wine, and serve.