Basil and Arugula Pesto

Lush Basil

When life gives you basil, make pesto. Pesto stash in the freezer will brighten any winter day—and stirred into pasta, ooh-la-la. Make a point to use at least some of your fresh pesto immediately—it is the essence of summer. Lick it off a spoon if you must. Pack any remainder away in the freezer.

This is my basic pesto recipe. I use all basil if that is what I have, but it’s fun to add other greens too. And don’t be stuck on walnuts for the nuts. Feeling luxurious? Use pine nuts. Sometimes the only nuts I have in the pantry are sunflower seeds and I toast and grind them instead. Pesto is also wonderful with pecans or pumpkin seeds. Deer Valley chefs use sliced almonds.

Basil and Arugula Pesto

2 large garlic cloves

3 ounces Parmesan cheese, broken in pieces or already grated (don’t even think of using that sawdust in the green can)

1 cup tightly packed stemmed fresh basil

1 cup tightly packed arugula leaves

1/2 cup walnuts

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

With the motor of the food processor running, mince the garlic by dropping it through the feed tube. Process until it is very fine. Add the cheese, basil, walnuts and salt. Process for about 10 seconds, stopping to move things around if they get hung up. With the machine running, pour oil through the feed tube in a thin stream, processing until everything is well blended.

Makes about 1 cup.

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Green Garlic, Basil and Edamame Salad

Bright green, freshly frozen and shucked, edamame is soybeans, right out of the bean pod. Perhaps you have enjoyed edamame in the shell as finger food, sprinkled with high quality finishing salt, at a sushi restaurant or at Deer Valley’s Royal Street Café. Edamame adds color (and protein) to any salad, and works well in any dish where you might normally use cold beans or green peas. Since we have sweet basil in our Ranui Gardens CSA box this week, it’s in this salad. Chiffonade/slice the basil leaves and add them at the last minute. Or feel free to skip the basil and substitute a different herb, such as chopped flat leaf parsley. This week’s green garlic is looking more mature than two weeks ago and more like the garlic we will see in a couple of weeks with its papery skin skin separating each clove. Now it is still very moist and maybe at the most flavorful of its cycle.

1 ½ cups frozen shelled edamame

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar

2 stalks green garlic, trimmed and minced

2 tablespoons fresh basil, cut in chiffonade

¼ cup grated aged cheese, like Parmesan

Bring a pot of water to a boil. Add some salt and the edamame. Cook 3 to 4 minutes, and then drain the edamame. Place in a bowl and stir in the olive oil, vinegar, garlic, basil and cheese. When everything is mixed, season to taste with salt and freshly ground pepper. Toss again and serve over Ranui lettuce mix.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

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Basil and Cilantro

Sometime the herbs are what are left from the box when next CSA week rolls around. But if you took them out of the bag last week and placed them in a small jar of water, refrigerated or decorating your kitchen counter top, cilantro, basil and chives are just about as sprightly as a week ago. I try to be aggressive and use up the beet greens or any other leafy greens first, before the weekend, because I know I can continue to enjoy the herbs right into the next week. And there are so many international dishes that benefit and shine from their pungent flavor—from Latin American and Caribbean to Thai and Indian.

For us the basil is easy because we squirrel it away made into pesto. I keep walnuts and fresh Romano cheese on hand this time of year in hopes that John will bless us with his beautiful basil. If I feel like I am swimming in cilantro, I turn it into Latino pesto with toasted pumpkin seeds.

About a week ago I was cruising the deli counter at the Salt Lake Whole Foods and spied a fruit and jicama salad with a cilantro lime dressing. I was thinking about making such a salad over the weekend when supper in a hurry became a priority and since we had been gifted some beautiful farm fresh eggs—chilaquiles frittata (with ¼ cup of chopped cilantro) made the cut. Here is last night’s supper, which uses almost ½ cup of cilantro, a bit of basil and spinach greens as well as last week’s scapes. Deborah Madison once again provided the inspiration. In her book Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, she describes this as a Vietnamese dish, though I am not sure about my version with turmeric curry powder and almonds.

Tofu in Curry-Coconut Sauce

1 pound firm tofu, cut into cubes

1 huge handful fresh spinach or other green, thick stems removed

1 tablespoon coconut oil or peanut oil

1 small onion

1 large handful garlic scapes

2 carrots

1 to 2 teaspoons Thai curry paste, red or green

1 to 2 teaspoons curry powder

½ cup canned unsweetened coconut milk

½ cup vegetable stock

½ teaspoon Real Salt

1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons coarsely chopped cilantro

2 tablespoons chopped basil leaves

Pinch cayenne pepper

1/3 cup chopped roasted whole almonds or peanuts

Bring a saucepan of lightly salted water to a boil. Gently drop the tofu cubes into the water and let them simmer gently for 5 minute. Remove the tofu with a slotted spoon onto a plate draped with a couple of paper towels.

Drop the spinach leaves into the simmering water and blanch a minute or so. Drain and chop coarsely. Set aside.

Slice the onion thinly. As you would with asparagus, snap the tops and bottoms off the scapes, then cut them into ½-inch lengths. Cut each carrot in half lengthwise and then slice into 1/8-inch half moons.

Heat the coconut oil in a large skillet or wok. When it is hot, add the onion and scapes and stir-fry for a minute. Add the carrots and stir-fry a few minutes. Stir in the curry paste and powder, then add the coconut milk, vegetable stock, salt and tofu.

Simmer several minutes, then stir in the spinach, 1/3 cup of the cilantro and the basil. Season to taste with more salt and cayenne pepper.

Serve over quinoa rice*, garnished with the remaining cilantro and chopped almonds.

Makes 2 to 3 servings.

* Quinoa rice is half quinoa and half rice, steamed as you would for rice.

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Gwen’s Parmesan Vinaigrette with Heirloom Tomatoes

Gwen is my foodie and hiking friend who lives in Carefree Arizona. She publishes her own cookbooks and a writes a blog called penandfork. In fact, she set up muffintalk at wordpress.com after she heard how my husband calls it “talking muffin” when he notices me yakking about recipes and bakeries etc. with fellow pastry chefs and other food-minded folk.

I gleaned this recipe from Gwen’s website, also Pen and Fork, in 2003, and I fed Gwen and her fly-fisherman husband heirloom tomatoes with vinaigrette when they came for dinner last month.

Ranui Gardens heirloom tomatoes this year have been prolific, for which we are grateful. I remember years when we were lucky to get 2 tomatoes all season and they’ve been in our box the last 5 weeks!

1/4 cup red wine vinegar

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 clove garlic, minced

1/4 teaspoon Real Salt

2 teaspoons minced red onion

2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese

2 teaspoons chopped fresh herbs (rosemary, oregano, parsley, etc.)

Pinch freshly ground black pepper

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

Put vinegar, mustard, garlic, salt, onion, Parmesan cheese, herbs and black pepper in a blender and whir until creamy, about 20 seconds. With the motor running, pouring through the top, slowly drizzle in the olive oil. Add more salt and pepper, to taste. Pour over lovingly sliced heirloom tomatoes.

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Basil Pesto

If you were to peek into our freezer in January, you would find several recycled cottage cheese or miso containers labeled and dated Pesto; from this summer’s harvest they will read Pesto 2009. I dip into the tubs for pasta sauce, as seasoning for soup and the times when an interesting recipe calls for fresh herbs and I don’t have any.

Stashing a bit of frozen pesto is the most squirrel-like thing I do. And because I use a food processor there is very little time involved–the work is in stripping the basil leaves off the stems. Purists be appalled, but any flavor or texture nuance lost by not using the traditional mortar and pestle is more than made up for with timesavings. You say it still seems like too much work and you can buy pesto in jars at the store—to me that is like saying dried parsley or cilantro, or basil, is an adequate substitute for the fresh leaf.

Here in Park City the sports shops have all the summer gear on sale and over Labor Day weekend they switched over—to skis, boots and winter clothing. I’m getting ready for winter in the kitchen; I’m stocking my pesto larder using the fresh basil in this week’s CSA box. I like this recipe—it calls for more garlic and less olive oil than many. In the middle of winter, a dollop of basil pesto reeking of garlic will bring a rich punch to our dinner. Today, harvest day, I’ll make basil pesto around dinner hour, reserving a little of the emerald opulence. I’ll mix it with an equal amount of pasta water, making sauce for pasta just boiled.

2 large garlic cloves

3 ounces Parmesan cheese, broken in pieces or already grated (don’t even think of using that sawdust in the green can)

2 cups tightly packed, stemmed fresh basil

1/2 cup walnuts (or pine nuts to be extravagant)

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

Add the ingredients in the order directed for efficient use of the food processor. With the motor of the food processor running, mince the garlic by dropping it through the feed tube. Process until it is very fine. Add the cheese, basil, walnuts and salt. Process for about 10 seconds, stopping to move things around if they get hung up. With the machine running, pour oil through the feed tube in a thin stream, processing until everything is well blended.

Makes about 1 cup. Scrape into small containers immediately and freeze. To use in winter, thaw the pesto only enough so you can scrape some out.

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Heirloom Tomato Caprese Salad

Even though we ourselves were contributing to the traffic and smog, I loved having our car for the trip last week to California. We drove out of the dry Santa Monica mountains on Sunday, dropping right into Malibu on Highway 1.

A toast to the bride and groom

I was craving an egg breakfast after a late night of wedding celebration with sparkling wine and tequila and I kept my eyes alert for the perfect stop. The day was brilliant ocean and sky bright, the highway busy with weekend warrior bikers in full regalia, on “hogs” and road bikes both, with no lack of eye candy in all ways. An hour down the coast, about the time I decided that the granola and soy milk in our ice chest would be just fine, we passed a coffee shop with people waiting outside. “Let’s go there!” Found: cora’s coffee shoppe, at the Santa Monica beach. We grabbed seats at the counter—no line there—and besides, I love sitting at the bar and watching cooks juggle orders; there is so much to see and hear, especially since much of the banter was in Spanish. One glance at the menu and I knew my mojo was working. At the bottom, in bold, “all our food products are freshly made and organic whenever appropriate.” I ordered the burrata caprese omelette; burrata is artisan mozzarella cheese and caprese indicates mozzarella cheese with tomatoes and basil. While we sipped our Illy coffee, a bowl of heirloom tomatoes a foot from my face dwindled its contents to the prep cook in front of us who replenished more for display. He diced the tomatoes and with chiffonade of basil, toppled them over omelettes, and eventually one of them was mine. It came with olive bread toast and a 2-inch slice of baked potato, griddled, golden and drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil. Where could we get some of those heirloom tomatoes today? Voila! The fellow diner to our right told us about the farmer’s market 3 blocks away. We fed the parking meter again and walked there with happy tummies. Life’s a beach.

Caprese Salad with Fresh Mozzarella, Tomatoes and Basil

This is salad in the style of Capri Italy—simply dressed to show off the bounty of the season and region.

Red or yellow summer tomatoes, very ripe

Fresh mozzarella cheese balls

Fresh basil leaves

Coarse sea salt

Freshly ground pepper

Extra virgin olive oil

Balsamic vinegar (optional)

Slice the cheese into 3/8-inch thick slices. Wash and trim the tomatoes and slice them also into 3/8-inch thick slices. You want as many slices of tomatoes as you have slices of cheese. Select and wash basil leaves—you will need as many leaves as you have slices of cheese.

Place a slice of tomato on a serving platter. Lay over it a slice of cheese, with about 1/2 inch of tomato showing. Place a basil leaf on the cheese. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Continue around in a circle, arranging like a flower and seasoning each layer of ingredients with salt and pepper. Drizzle with olive oil and the vinegar, if using.

Makes as many servings as you wish, figure 2 or 3 slices per person of the cheese and tomato.

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Creamy Cucumber Salad

Garlic, ripe for picking

Even with organic cucumbers, I like mine peeled. And I prefer the seeds removed; it’s a longstanding kitchen habit and I think you will appreciate the more pleasant eating too. Another detail—soak the red onions in ice water to mellow the bite of the onion.

This recipe can be varied in many ways. Add more yogurt and bump up the seasonings to make a saucy condiment—to curries or grilled meats. The full-fat Greek yogurt will be creamier, and low-fat or fat-free yogurt will make a thinner dressing. But if you are watching your calories…

1/2 red onion, thinly sliced, soaked for 10 minutes in ice water, drained

2 or 3 cucumbers

1 cup Greek-style plain yogurt or low-fat or fat-free plain yogurt

1 clove garlic, minced

3/4 teaspoon sea salt

Pinch cayenne pepper

1 tablespoon finely chopped dill leaves, optional

2 tablespoons fresh sweet basil, 1/8-inch chiffonade

While the onion is soaking, peel the cucumbers. Cut them in half and using a spoon, gently scoop out and discard the seeds. Slice about 1/4-inch thick–or thinner or thicker, it’s your preference. Mix with the yogurt, garlic,

salt, cayenne pepper and fresh herbs. Taste and correct seasoning. Serve immediately.

Makes about 6 servings.

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