What to do with fresh mint and basil

In my herb garden I have apple mint, chocolate mint, sweet basil and purple basil. To say they are trying to take over the world seems fairly accurate. So I decided it was time to harvest...again. Especially since they were getting ready to blossom. I ended up with a huge bowl full of mint and a slightly smaller bowl of basil. Staring at the bowls all I could think was now what. My last harvest I dried the mint and turned the basil into pesto. Today I decided to dry the basil and in the end some of the chocolate mint. The basil I washed and removed the damaged leaves. Lined a couple of cookie sheets with foil and laid the basil out on them. After warming up the oven for a few minutes. (200 degrees for about 10 minutes) Turned off the oven and inserted the cookie sheets. It will take a couple of days for the basil to dry completely. Here is what it looks like right now. Sorry for the crappy picture.

The chocolate mint I washed and patted dry. wrapped sting around the ends and hung the bunch up to dry. We'll see how that works out. Here is what it currently looks like.

I wanted to try something new with the fresh leaves, but time was not exactly on my side today. I did a quick google search and really the only interesting thing I came up with was a cucumber,lime, mint water. I'm sure it tastes good, but there are some things that I cannot just wrap my head around. But it did give me an idea. I really love the MetroMint Water. So why not make my own.

Here is my process and some pictures to go along with.

1, Remove mint leaves from stem. (Discard any damaged leaves) And wash leaves.

 2. Fill a blender with about 16 oz. of cold water and roughly 1 c. of leaves and blend for about 30 seconds,

Apple MintChocolate Mint

3. Strain the water into a container. I used a damp paper towel as a filter and a quart jar as my container.

4. Top of the container, if needed, with cold water. Refrigerate for a couple of hours so that it's nice and cold and also allows the mint oils to really flavor the water. 

 I ended up with 2 jars of apple mint water and 1 jars of chocolate mint water. Yes it does look like pickle juice. It is very tasty and refreshing. All the leftovers got tossed into the compost pile so nothing was wasted.

Ones of these days when I have more time I really want to try and make mint chocolate chip ice cream using fresh mint leaves.