pesto goes on everything.

basil season is in full swing here in the bay area, and we've been getting bunches of fragrant basil bouquets in our farm box, and at the farmers market. which means it's absolutely time to break out the blender, suck it up and shell out some dough for pinenuts - those little buggers are pricey. as you see from the photo, according to the korean market down the street these are "finenuts." indeed, they are.


i found in my recipe box - and by "recipe box" i mean recipe folder on my computer - a recipe called the pesto manifesto. i can't rightly recall where i got this, so my apologies to whomever i'm plagiarizing by posting it here.

The Pesto Manifesto

Here it is, the ultimate in pesto recipes, the world expert's final word in pesto making! PESTO, THE RECIPE
Place 2 large cloves of garlic in the bottom of a blender or food processor. Add 3 cups very firmly packed fresh basil leaves, 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese, and 1 cup olive oil. Grind for 10 seconds. Add ½ cup pine nuts. Grind for 8 to 10 seconds longer. The sauce should contain small pieces of leaves, and the nuts should be just broken up, not pulverized. Remember that pesto was traditionally made by hand, and you don't want modern appliances to give it a baby-food consistency.

tips i have about the process:

one - use a food processor. because i have a hard time committing to relying on just one recipe at a time, i consulted several other pesto recipes. one i found at epicurious suggested that "using a blender rather than a food processor produces a smoother puree," and though this flies in the face of what the pesto manifesto thinks is legitimate pesto consistency, i took their advice. let me save you the trouble and say what it really does is burn out the motor on your blender and make your kitchen smell like an auto shop. and let me tell you, my kitchen already smells enough like an auto shop on the regular.


two - storage is key. you're making fresh pesto here, so don't expect to have a jar in your fridge for weeks and dip into it for every meal - which is precisely what i'm doing right now, but that means the top layer of my pesto is a yucky brown color, so do as i say not as i do. i say make it within the day that you're going to use it for some yummy purpose, and freeze the rest. pesto freezes really well, and my recommendation is filling up an ice cube tray - which makes perfect one serving cubes of the stuff for later.


three - suggested use. since i have been dipping into that jar for several weeks now, i've discovered that pesto goes with pretty much everything i want to eat. pizza, omlettes, sandwiches, pasta, garlic bread, fish, polenta, pretty much everything that's ever tasted good tastes better with pesto on it. until you get sick of pesto and/or it turns yucky brown because you haven't put it in the freezer.

dried apricots = better than the real thing

apricots are one of the few fruits i actually prefer dried over fresh. i just found that out this week. we've been getting apricots in our farm box lately, and while i appreciate their rich, tangy flavor, i actually find myself wishing for the chewiness of dehydrated fruit rather than the kind of mealy fleshy fruits themselves. sorry apricots, your texture gives me the creeps.
thankfully, aryn owns a dehydrator, which i was able to borrow last night after our dinner party celebrating the end of school (oakland public schools, that is).
dehydrating apricots is a nice sunday morning activity. the process goes like this:


juice a lemon or lime and add about a quarter cup of the juice to one cup of water. this is your dipping bath for the apricots to prevent oxidation (browning when exposed to air). cut your apricots in half - they come with a convenient guiding cleavage down the one side which makes this process even easier. remove the pit. you can chop them up smaller at this point, but i prefer a good mouthful of apricot, so i left them in halves.


grab each half and pop it inside out, meaning give the skin side a good poke with your thumb. this is called "popping the back" and i guess it helps it dry more evenly. my halves ended up more flattened than inside out, but i can see how that would be helpful. let them soak in the citrus bath for about 5 minutes, and lay them out on your dehydrating racks. if you don't have a dehydrator to borrow you can theoretically dry your apricots in the oven - if your oven gives you the option to go as low as 120-150 degrees fahrenheit, or even in a sunny window if you happen to live somewhere particularly hot and not humid.


from what i've gathered online, if you're using the dehydrator you'll want to set it between 120-140 degrees fahrenheit. you can start it out on the high temperature end, for an hour or so and then turn it down for the remaining time (somewhere between 12-48 hours). you'll be able to tell they're done when they are leathery with no pockets of moisture, and if you tear them in half and see moisture beads along your tear line you'll know you need more time.
for now, the dehydrator is pumping out a soothing hum of hot air and apricot smell into my kitchen and i'm enjoying it immenseley.

raising pea shoots

i bought some fresh peas from the korean grocery the other day, thinking i'd sprout them and have some pea sprouts to sprinkle on salad. plus i'm really enamored with growing vegetables in the house since i popped a couple mung bean sprouts in a pot on the kitchen window sill and was amazed to see them grow into real plants that even bore little bean pods.


when they started sprouting i realized i had confused pea sprouts with peanut sprouts (which are actually my favorite), and i wasn't really sure what to do with the pea sprouts. then i remembered how much i love pea shoots - they seem like such a gourmet delicacy on salads. so i punched holes in the bottom of an aluminum potluck pan (it already had a hole so i figured i wasn't ever going to make a casserole in it anyway), filled it with soil and sprinkled a couple handfulls of sprouting peas into it.
a few days later i came to terms with the fact that i really wasn't ever going to eat any of the sprouted peas, so i made two more planter trays with the remaining sprouts.


and they grow like crazy. they were tall enough to harvest in less than a week. here are some good instructions on when and how to harvest pea shoots. they say you can harvest every 3-4 weeks, but my peas are growing so fast i'm harvesting every few days. they are so responsive to light you can almost see them bend backwards when i spin them away from the window. they make me really happy.

in fact, if i were going to say something about them, it would be this:

um, sort of.


i was surprised (i dont' know why) by how much they really taste like peas. i've been clipping them and adding to somen salad - which, by the way, is the best potluck dish ever. people love it. hit me up for the recipe if you want it.

cake for breakfast

i figure the best thing about birthdays is that you get to eat cake for breakfast.
we were celebrating my mom's 58th birthday this weekend. she came down from mt. shasta for a visit which included walking on the beach at point reyes - lovely although it's suddenly winter again here in the bay, a goat roast at our friends' new club downtown (what birthday would be complete without a goat roast?), and we did a storycorps interview together in san francisco.


we started her birthday off right with cake for breakfast. every week for months we have been getting a bag of carrots in our csa box from terra firma farm. they are the best, sweetest carrots in the world. but a person can only eat so many carrots. so we have an entire refrigerator drawer full of carrots. i came across a recipe for carrot cake a few weeks ago that my mom had sent me, and i remembered she really likes carrot cake, so i've been planning to use up some of those carrots in this recipe. then i found this recipe from smitten kitchen for carrot cake - so i sort of blended the two recipes together. i like everything that has ever come out of smitten kitchen, so i used that as a base in this cake and added a few extras: toasted pecans (since walnuts make my tongue swell), dried craisins (because i can't stand raisins - as they say in benny and joon, they're like humiliated grapes), a little shredded coconut, and i meant to add some crushed pineapple, but forgot about it until after i'd put the cakes in the oven so that will have to wait till next time.
as smitten kitchen points out, the best part about carrot cake is the cream cheese frosting. she added some maple syrup to her frosting, which i did as well, but then i thought it could use a little extra kick so i grated some fresh ginger in there too. that was a big hit. it sparks the pallet enough to be raise questions but is subtle enough that it's hard to put your finger on.
and here's one of my best kitchen tips ever, learned from my friend rachel's chef friend: keep your ginger in the freezer. it makes it waaaay easier to grate. you'll be amazed. i love fresh ginger, but i hate all the muscle you have to put into grating it - this makes all the difference, plus ginger snowflakes are pretty delightful.
so we're now eating carrot cake at every meal because, well, it's a vegetable right?

strawberry season is here

last weekend, the farm that delivers us a box of fresh, local vegetables every week opened up their fields for u-pick strawberries. sele, aryn, and i took a field trip (literally) up there to gorge ourselves on strawberries and bring home a few boxes for frozen and canned delight. it turns out aryn, having grown up on a strawberry and asparagas farm, is a pro at strawberry picking and we loaded up our 3 flats ($10 a piece!) in no time.


the strawberries were beautiful and picked at the peak of perfection, which means they don't keep long in the fridge, so we got right to work processing them. my freezer is now stocked with little ziplocks full of strawberries, and i was inspired last year when my friend rachel told me her mom was making strawberry cardamom jam. i haven't stopped thinking about it since then, so i figured now was the perfect time to try it out.


as much as i raved about pomona's pectin, the problem with not using sugar in the jam is that once you open the jar it only lasts about 3 weeks before starting to get moldy. so aryn and i decided to revert back to using regular pectin; however, i neglected to buy enough of the regular pectin to accommodate the strawberries we were canning, so we ended up having to do an awkward split midway through the process and using some of the pomonas as well.
so the process went something like this:


we washed the berries, and squished them between our fingers - resulting in strawberry splatters all over the kitchen blinds - which i left as inspiration to myself to get around to making some curtains. then we boiled them down with some hand-ground cardamom, grape juice and honey (just juice for the kerr brand pectin, honey for the pomonas pectin).
i won't detail the canning process here, but if you're interested check out previous posts on jamming.


the pectin snafu resulted in half of the batch becoming jam and the other half becoming something more like strawberry sauce. Still tasty, we had some on waffles this morning.


we also made some fresh daiquiries in the process.