Fresh Pesto with Garden Grown Basil

Grow Your Own Number 11 - Fresh Pesto made with garden grown basil

Last week I gave some beautiful Thai basil from my Tecolote Farms basket to my chef son. He used it as part of an amazing looking grilled prawn dish that he blogged about here. As I was reading his post, and admiring his results, I began to consider my GYO prospects for June.

As I stared hungrily at the basil garnish on his plate, it dawned on me, we'd gotten basil for two weeks in a row in our CSA baskets. I strolled outside and took a good long look at how vigorously the basil plants in my own garden were growing and noted they were beginning to set flowers. I knew it was time to start harvesting my own plants.

Some aspects of growing food crops require expertise and experience. Other aspects only require observation. Even as a somewhat entry level gardener, I know this much - big basil plants plus the beginnings of basil flowers equals time to harvest.That bumper crop decided for me that my GYO for June would have something to do with basil. I'd bought pine nuts knowing that a batch of home made pesto would be in the works at some point. However, I also have tomato plants. I figured I could get some some fresh mozzarella from the market and make one of those amazing salads with mozzarella, basil leaves from my garden and beautiful slices of my own home grown tomatoes. A GYO double header. Very appealing.

However, while the basil is growing great guns this year, my tomato plants are apparently taking a hiatus from setting fruit.They look great, they are producing wonderful healthy leaves, loads of flowers, but I'd just harvested the one last smallish ripe fruit. To top that off, there was a tomato recall from a large grocery chain locally for salmonella tainted tomatoes so supplementing my one small remaining tomato with store tomatoes was suddenly very unappealing.Grow your own...salmonella? Uncheck! Mozzarella/basil/tomato salad went off the list.

This past Monday had rolled around with the appearance of Romano beans in my CSA basket and a suggestion from the Tecolote folks in their newsletter that they'd be great "cooked with new potatoes and coated with pesto". That meant beans and potatoes with pesto were very likely going on our dinner menu for the week to come.

Pesto! Yes! I had a nice supply of pine nuts laid in last week, just in case, so I was ready.

I started with this basic preparation from Simply Recipes. If you are a home cook with certain holes in your repertoire, as I most definitely am, this site can be a fabulous starting point whenever you are venturing into new territory.

Because, ladies and gents, home made pesto is new territory for me. This was going to be my first batch.
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FRESH BASIL PESTO

INGREDIENTS
2 cups fresh basil leaves, packed
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan-Reggiano or Romano cheese
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/3 cup pine nuts or walnuts
3 medium sized garlic cloves, minced
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Special equipment needed: A food processor

METHOD
1 Combine the basil in with the pine nuts, pulse a few times in a food processor. (If you are using walnuts instead of pine nuts and they are not already chopped, pulse them a few times first, before adding the basil.) Add the garlic, pulse a few times more.
2 Slowly add the olive oil in a constant stream while the food processor is on. Stop to scrape down the sides of the food processor with a rubber spatula. Add the grated cheese and pulse again until blended. Add a pinch of salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste.

Makes 1 cup. Serve with pasta, or over baked potatoes, or spread over toasted baguette slices.
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I was excited to get to use my own home grown basil in this deliciously simple, and "new to me" fashion. Before I unveil my results however, please allow me to share with you one reservation I have about the cavalier use of a term such as "packed into cups" in a basic recipe.

When I pack brown sugar into a cup, for instance, it stays packed. I know when to stop because the cup won't hold any more.

Basil leaves, however, are an entirely different proposition. Apparently I can pack a more than ordinary amount of leaves into a cup. I am not bragging here, it is simply a fact that somebody like me who types a lot and hand pulls weeds frequently, is going to be able to stuff a lot of helpless green leaves into a cup.

But they won't stay there like brown sugar will, neatly packed into the cup. As soon as the pressure is off the top they start springing back up out of the cup, trying to be independent leaves again. This led to a bit of indecision on my part as to when that cup was really "packed"...

So when I tell you I ended up with more than the stated yield of one cup of pesto, you will understand why I might be wondering if I took things a little far with my basil leaf packing step. All I am saying is that I would have appreciated a little more help for a first time pesto maker as to how I would know "when" a cup is "packed". A very minor point really and obviously not a problem for everybody. Onward.

Taking two liberties I felt were justified by the comments provided after the recipe on the web site, I added extra garlic, used my super-toasted pine nuts (see related post here), and otherwise followed the rest of the recipe as written.About halfway through processing the most amazing aroma began to waft up from the food processor. This answered, before I could even mentally formulate the question, of whether my fresh pesto was going to be worth the smidgeon more of trouble it takes than picking up a container off the store shelf.

Pesto is apparently like guacamole or margaritas in that everybody has their own tweaks and favorite ways to make the "best ever". But however you might personally categorize what makes the "best" pesto, I suppose fresh is just always going to taste better than preserved. One taste of my own results today and bingo! Color me an instant convert.

Now that I am a (caff caff!) experienced pesto maker, I will turn soon to the task of finding some natural way to work the pesto into our dinner plans. As previously announced, my plan from afar, always subject to change, is to prep the Romano beans and new potatoes from my weekly CSA basket and coat them liberally with pesto, as is reportedly "traditionally" Italian. I figure that dish, with some left over roasted chicken, good bread and a nice glass of wine, will make for a really lovely dinner.

With delicious and easily prepared pesto in the refrigerator, the abundantly productive basil plants in the back garden now look a lot less like a culinary threat, and a lot more like a wonderful resource for future meals in the bag. Or jar.Because fresh pesto, as it turns out, is delightfully quick and easy to make. 6 ingredients, maybe 15 minutes (or longer if you aren't a really pushy/packy type like me) of prep time, and et voila, you are in the pesto biz. If you haven't tried making pesto and you've wondered if fresh would be better? It is. Try it and see for yourself.

Ask Not For Whom the (telephone) Bell Tolls...

This started out to be my official GYO post for June.

However, my well organized midday stint in the kitchen yesterday was interrupted. A home cook is often subject to unscheduled breaks, and the resulting missteps can sometimes take a well planned mise en place and turn it into something more resembling a disaster area. The GYO Post resulted, but not quite as directly I as had originally planned.

What follows immediately may seem to have nothing to do with food OR fun, much less a GYO offering. But trust me, like trying a new recipe, all the ingredients finally come together - eventually.

Here in Texas we all just expect folks "of a certain age" to obsessively talk about the weather. In a state where most folks used to ranch or farm, knowing about, anticipating and/or coping with the weather used to play quite a dominant role in financial success.

As the years passed, cities grew, the economy changed, and now so few folks are directly involved in agriculture, that most of the time when older Texans gather, their weather talk takes the form of a "top this" exchange of inclement weather stories.

It typically plays out as a variation on this theme: "I remember when I lived in (name of city/town) and it (description of some sort of natural disaster). "Yup!" starts the next turn. "It started to (weather action verb) so hard a (heavy inanimate object) was sucked through/shoved over a (large geographic feature)!".You get extra style points for severity adjectives and if you can remember the month and year of the event, you win that round and the game begins again. The only addition to the rules of "top this!" is that now, if you have a first person Katrina experience, you automatically win the entire exchange. Fair is fair.

All this by way of explaining how it came to pass that when our insurance adjuster, a guy venturing into that "certain age" category himself, called today about the eventual (think:hopefully during our natural lifespan) replacement of our hail damaged roof, he began and I nearly automatically responded with a typical Lone Star style back and forth about places we had lived, and bad storms we had seen.By the way, if there were ever need in a court of law to establish beyond any shadow of a doubt that I have personally crossed that territorial divider between "slightly older" and "geezer-in-training"? No need for birth certificates or calendars either one. This slip into "top that weather story" domain would grant an automatic "dotage" verdict from any jury, any day.

So, today, I spent more minutes than I care to admit on the phone with an insurance adjuster (a nice guy, don't get me wrong), reminiscing about bad weather I have personally experienced.

And while I was indulging my inner Texas Weather geezer on the telephone today, I frickin' French Roasted the second of my two batches of pine nuts.See for yourself. Two batches, one golden, one, um, "super golden".

I'd already successfully roasted one batch of pine nuts, and even photographed the contrast between the raw pine nuts (bowl on the right) and the very nicely toasted pine nuts (bowl on the left) to showcase the difference. Those poster children for nicely toasted nuts were going safely into the freezer for later in the season. That left me with their evil super roasted not so identical twins. So, unless I was willing to throw the over browned nuts out altogether, my only remaining hope was that the grinding up of that second batch would add an "extra layer" of flavor into my GYO pesto that nobody would quite be able to put their finger on. It would be great, I thought, if the more-than-toasted-nuts would join their little ingredient hands to the other strong flavors in the pesto without raising too big a "she burned the nuts!" stink about it.

I couldn't be certain at all that this optimism would be justified because, truth be told, in addition to the fact I had gotten distracted while on the telephone and burned the pine nuts, I have never (EVER) made pesto from scratch before. (Cue gasp from reader.) I know it is silly but pesto is so readily available and comes commercially prepared in so many delicious varieties, I never thought to make my own. The locally made stuff I get from the store is amazing. Could/would fresh taste any better? Would the French Roast nuts take the advantage of home made away?

I had my ingredients, including my French Roasted pine nuts, all assembled for Grow Your Own #11. It was time to answer the question, "How hard is it to make good pesto at home from scratch (with nearly burned nuts)?".