Making Pesto With Morgan

Morgan is a wee bit shy and doesn't like for me to post photos of her.  I think she'll be okay, though, with this little pic of her presenting the yummy pesto that she made with me.

Homemade Basil Pesto

2 cups fresh basil leaves
1/4 cup pine nuts
1/4 cup walnuts
3 peeled and roughly chopped garlic cloves
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup grated Parmesan or Romano cheese or a combination of the two
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Use the measurements as guidelines and adjust the amounts to suit your taste.

In a small saute pan or skillet, toast the pine nuts and walnuts over medium heat, shaking constantly, for a few minutes to give them a nice toasty flavor, but being careful not to let them burn ... the difference between toasted nutty goodness and blaring smoke alarm is, oh, about a second, haha.  Let the nuts cool until they can be handled easily.

Put the basil, pine nuts, and walnuts in a food processor and pulse a few times to roughly chop.  Add the garlic cloves and pulse a few times.

With the food processor running, slowly stream in the olive oil.  Stop processing and scrape down the sides of the food processor with a spatula.

Add the grated cheese and pulse just to combine.  Add a pinch of salt and freshly ground black pepper and pulse to combine.

Let the pesto rest for a few minutes, especially if you're using Kosher salt, which has larger granules than table salt and needs some time to dissolve.  Then give your pesto a quick pulse in the food processor, taste it, and add more olive oil, salt, or pepper if necessary.

Roulade Meatloaf

Start with ground beef mixed with some Montreal steak seasoning and dehydrated soup vegetables.  Press the ground beef out flat in a sheet pan, like pastry.  Coat with a layer of fromage fort or any spreadable cheese.  Add chopped mushrooms (or leftover sauteed mushrooms), sundried tomatoes, chopped garlic, chopped spinach, chopped basil, really any flavorful ingredients you can think of.  Roll up into a loaf.  Place on a baking rack over a sheet pan.  Bake at 400 degrees for 15-30 minutes to brown and crisp the exterior, then reduce to 350 degrees until done (use a meat thermometer to check the internal temperature from time to time for doneness).

Here's the meatloaf before baking.  Unfortunately I forgot to take a pic of the finished meatloaf.

Joys of a Kitchen Garden

This beautiful parsley is from our garden. Some of it is from a store-bought parsley plant that's been growing here for a year and a half. Some of it is from parsley plants that grew from seeds that I sowed in the spring. All are raised organically.

Lots of food plants are totally impractical, given the amount of time and money they require compared to their yield. Don't even get me started on those blasted rats with fluffy tails (squirrels) that ate all of our spring/early summer tomatoes! Herbs are a wonderful exception to that. We had great luck this season planting seeds for cilantro, basil, and parsley. We also planted basil, parsley, rosemary, culantro, chive, and oregano plants. We've had a great yield from them. We're already planning what herb seeds to plant next year.

It's so rewarding to grow a "kitchen garden." Fresh, home-grown herbs are the perfect addition to your recipes and besides being healthier than chemically raised herbs, they're also so much tastier when harvested just before cooking. We use organic fertilizers and as little pesticide (also organic) as possible. Of course, when we harvest herbs to cook with, we have to soak them for a while to be sure there are no cute little inchworms clinging to the leaves.

In the case of the parsley, the only real "pest" it has is the Monarch butterfly caterpillar. They seem to like the curly parsley much more than the flat-leaf Italian parsley. One caterpillar will pretty much strip a curly parsley plant of its foliage; however, then it moves along and the plant typically regenerates. Sure, we could use poison to keep the caterpillars away or crush them when we find them, but isn't it worth sharing a little of our parsley to nourish the caterpillars that will become the amazingly beautiful Monarch butterflies soon?