No soup for you! More like, no soup for me!

Tags

basil, herbs, pistou, quinoa in soup, soup, soupe au pistou, vegetables soup, vegetarian

I did ask her only two or three times. Do you want soup? No. Are you sure you don’t want soup? No! You usually like soup. No!! Okay, okay, no soup for you! And then, guess what happened?

My order of soup came, and she tried a spoonful. Mmm… good! Another spoonful. Then the bowl was transferred to her side of the table. By the end of the meal, I had not one taste of my soup.

I couldn’t blame her really. It was raining and cold and that bowl of soup did look mighty tempting. Plus, she’s my daughter, my only reason for living. And her brother, of course. And their dad.

***

[By the way, what do you think of starting a sentence with “And”? I had this discussion the other day with another blogger. We both like doing it because we are both rule-breakers. And because it feels good to once in a while thumb our noses at the grammar police. And that’s all I have to say about it. And if you see a lot of other grammar errors on my posts, you know why. Thumbing noses!

P.S. Kids, I don’t advise you to do this. Always listen to your teachers and do the right thing! Love, Mom.]

***

So, having been denied the soup at the restaurant yesterday, I cooked me a big pot of my own today. Plus, it’s still raining and cold. I shared the pot with my husband, son, and daughter. All three, my reasons for living!

Soupe au pistou
Get the last of your fresh basil from the garden for this, unless of course you don’t have one. Fresh is the key word. Where you get it from is second in importance.

The son looked at the bit of green in the middle of his bowl (the pistou) and was close to thumbing his nose at the whole thing. I ordered him to tuck in. No, I begged and implored. I was glad I did because he was, too. He liked the soup.

The recipe is inspired by David Lebovitz’s, except mine didn't include white beans. If it did, there would have been more nose-thumbing by the son, for sure. And no begging would have succeeded. Mine also used quinoa instead of pasta. This is not David's soup, I guess. But, hey, he too deviated from using only summer vegetables. Soupe au pistou is supposed to be a summer soup, using summer vegetables. He had leeks (which is more of a Fall crop) in his. So, I blessed mine completely "legit." Especially when it tasted so good!

For the soup
2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 carrots, diced
1 cup frozen peas
1 zucchini, diced
Green beans, cut into 1/2 inch length (about 1 1/2 cups)
Salt & pepper
7 cups vegetable or chicken stock
1 1/2 cups cooked quinoa, or dried pasta, such as orzo or broken-up spaghetti
Fresh herbs (thyme & chives)

1. In a Dutch oven or large stockpot, heat the olive oil.
2. Add the onions and garlic, cook, stirring occasionally, until soft and translucent.
3. Add the diced carrots and green beans. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are completely cooked. Add the vegetable/chicken stock, then the peas, zucchini, and pasta (if using), salt & pepper. If using cooked quinoa, add it at the last minute. Bring the soup to a boil, and simmer until pasta is cooked.
4. Add minced fresh herbs.
5. If you feel that the soup is too thick, thin it with extra stock or water.

For the pistou
1 garlic clove, peeled
Pinch of salt
2 cups packed fresh basil leaves
1/4 cup olive oil
1 small tomato, peeled, seeded, and diced
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, grated

1. Pound the garlic to a paste in a mortar and pestle with the salt.
2. Coarsely tear the basil leaves and pound them into the garlic until the mixture is relatively smooth.
3. Drizzle in the olive oil slowly, while pounding, then pound in the tomato and cheese.

Serve soup with a spoonful of pistou and a sprinkling of cheese, and a piece of baguette.

Pizza Pie

Tags

basil, food, greens pizza, kale pizza, pizza, pizza pie, stuffed pizza, sunburst pizza, vegetarian

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, it’s amore …..

That thing right there came out of the oven and The Saboteur started to bring out his inner Dean Martin. Now you know pizza makes that man croon. No wonder I don’t make it that often. Just kidding, hon! Oh, what the heck, chances are he won’t read this. So, between you and me, I thought he was channeling Jerry Lewis.

Then he called out for the kids to quickly get their hineys to the dining table. And they, too, said ooh … I knew why they were excited. Pizza meant no utensils. Is there a more perfect food?

I should have made this more often. It’s a fool-proof guarantee that your greens will be eaten. Smothered in cheese, mixed with a bit of meat, on a piece of bread, why even kale, arugula, and senposai passed the taste test of vegetables hating boys!

Of course The Boy had to mention that next time there should be less kale, but he ate his piece clean off his plate. Think I’m going to make it less green next time? Not a chance. Not when you have kale and senposai. Did I mention how remarkable these plants are? Still making leaves, nary a flower in sight.

The best part about this was the good amount of basil used. Whew! Now I can relax and let my basil grow a little more. It felt like a marathon for a while, trying to finish up all the basil.

This pizza pie would likely be really good with spinach, too, but who has spinach in the summer? One has to work with what one has growing in one’s garden. 

Speaking of which, one is about to lose one’s garden over here. The neighbor’s bamboo is all over it. I just want to cry. It may not look it, but I work very hard in there.

***

Recipe seems unnecessary. It was just store-bought pizza dough (there’s no shame in it whatsoever, especially when they were only $1 a piece), stuffed with cheese, meat of choice (or no meat if you’re vegetarian), chopped tomatoes or peppers, and blanched & chopped greens. In my case they included arugula, basil, kale, Moringa, and senposai. You can certainly use other vegetables.

The only thing to remember is to make sure you roll your dough on a surface lined with parchment paper. The paper will allow you to transfer the pizza onto the baking sheet or stone without ruining the design.

Also, once you flip out the slits, you can spread them apart and fill them with more stuffing, as needed. More stuffing, edges get eaten. At least in our house.

Harvest of Basil

Tags

basil, basil thai, herbs, lemon basil, Thai basil, Thai cuisine

Up to yesterday
I have tons of basil, now what? Most of these are volunteers. They sprouted from seeds left to mature and then fall on the ground last season. They seem to be a cross of Lemon and Thai basils, which I grew side by side. They have a slight tinge of purple on the flower spikes, not the deep purple of the Thai and definitely not the white of the Lemon, and a mixture of lemon and anise scents from the crushed leaves. Obviously, it’s a new kind of basil worthy of a patent. Anybody knows how to contact Burpee?

For all practical purposes, though, they are Thai basil. Thai basil – attractive and aromatic. But what else to do with it besides adding it to Thai beef stir fry? And I did cook that earlier this week and it was wonderful. Maybe next week I’ll repeat the recipe but for now, I’m scratching my head looking at all the basil.

I also know, by the way, that you can put it in pho noodle soup, but seriously, don’t you just put a couple of leaves in? It seems a crime to load up too much herb in that wonderful beef broth that tastes so clean yet flavorful. And how many times do you really endeavor to make pho in your own kitchen?

So, every year this basil grows in my garden, lush and bushy with the beautiful purple flower spikes, but only once or twice graces the dinner table. One time, for a baby shower I hosted, the flower spikes were used in a flower arrangement. That, I thought, concluded its third and final use. 

I’ve been harvesting it a few times a week, however, since you’re not supposed to let basil go to flower. It’ll cause the plants to shut down  leaf production.

I’d bring all these leaves in and carefully wash them in the sink, so there wouldn’t be a single speck of dirt. Then, I’d put them in Ziploc bags and store them away in the fridge. And then … in a few days, I’d toss them out! 

Because they’ve turned black, so quickly. Sure I could have dried or frozen them, but I still have dried and frozen basil left over from last year. I guess I don’t use dried or frozen herbs that much. Somehow when they’re not growing in the garden, I forget to use them.

Yesterday (Sunday)
I was going to publish the complaint post above as is, but it sounded too depressing and negative, and would seem ungrateful to Mother Nature for bestowing such an abundant, wonderful gift of a perfectly good ingredient to work with in the kitchen, so today I’m changing my tune.

After perusing cookbooks, blogs, and websites to find recipes that utilize Thai or Lemon basil, I’ve come up with a pretty good list. The plan is to make lettuce cups (appetizer), seafood curry (entrée), and sangria (libation) for dinner today.

Today (Monday)
I did make the planned dinner last night. Was in a food coma after eating, and was unable to function for a while. The post had to wait until today.

Dinner is served.

Everything was delicious. All the food and the drink went together like love and marriage or is it horse and carriage? Why am I quoting Al Bundy? I think I prefer Oreo and milk, more apt since we’re talking food and drink.

I’ll post the recipes separately, so this one won’t be too long. As always, recipes are hard for me to write. I want to be precise but when you’re in the kitchen, you tend to add a little of this and a little of that, and who has time to measure? But I’d like my blog to be helpful to my readers and possibly someday to my kids, if they ever want to recreate all the wonderful meals Mom’s cooked for them :-). So make a record I must, even if that takes up the most of my blogging time.

In other harvest news, I’ve been getting a handful of blackberries and pineapple tomatillos every day (more pies predicted), a cucumber here and there, as well as the first slicers, oh yeah! Those are Cherokee Purple, one picked a bit green, since it was starting to split.

Most of the other green tomatoes came from the dead Roma. The whole plant suddenly just wilted for no apparent reason. Never had this happened to me before, actually. I think I need to practice crop rotation in the future. I’ve noticed my tomatoes are getting worse each year. Maybe the soil harbors tomato diseases. So, next year, they’ll go to a different spot.

And I also harvested these sumac berries. I hope I’ll have the chance to talk about these sumac plants before I cut them all down this Fall.

They’re very decorative and they are edible but please don’t make the same rookie mistake I did. If you see one little sprout growing, don’t save it and transfer it near your vegetable garden, thinking it’ll give it that tropical look, because why, just look at it … from afar the leaves look almost like palm fronds. Big, huge mistake! It’s highly invasive, not at all like palms!

But, the berries make pretty pink lemonade and when dried and ground, great for sprinkling on Chelo Kebab or salads. I’ll show you next time.

I hope everybody had a great harvest week!

Hello … Potato!

Tags

basil, herbs, potatoes, vegetables

I have to admit, I’m a better cook than I am a gardener. In fact, when I first started blogging I was undecided about what I should call my blog, The Novice Gardener or The Novice Cook. But Sabo said it’d be misleading to call the blog The Novice Cook. I guess that was some kind of a compliment.

But my gardening skills are slowly catching up to the cooking. One thing for sure, I now know how to grow potatoes. Just take a look at my potato harvest, all from just one and a half plants. (One plant wasn’t dug up completely.)

Potato harvest

The one that was uprooted produced 20 tubers, totaling 4 lbs of potatoes. I used my bathroom scale to weigh them, so it’s probably not very accurate, but it should give you an idea. And I even scrabbled 3 potatoes from this plant earlier in the season. That made a grand total of 23 tubers, from one original seed potato. That’s pretty impressive in my book.

The plant I didn’t uproot gave me 7 huge tubers, at 3 lbs total. I just scratched the dirt around the plant and felt for the tubers, and extracted them, without digging up the whole thing. I’m letting it grow for now, to see what will happen. It still looks green and lush.

And I have a theory. As long as the potato continues growing green leaves above ground, it also continues to grow tubers underground. So the longer the plant stays green, the more it produces. Am I right?

I based my theory on the fact that when I uprooted the plant with the 20 tubers, the leaves were also still green, and there was even a small cluster of flowers. And look at the number of tiny tubers still forming.

There were at least half a dozen of them. I wonder if they would have continued to grow had I not dug up the entire plant? It would be exciting to have a perpetual potato plant, wouldn’t it? Harvest only as needed, as long as the season lasts.

I have to thank my fellow bloggers for giving me advice and information on growing potatoes. Annie’s Granny taught me how to scrabble for a few new potatoes without digging up the whole plants. And Food Kitchen Garden gave me an explanation and sort of confirmed my theory already, about how potatoes will continue producing tubers as they grow. Thank you, guys!

Harvest this week also included cucumbers, eggplants, kale and senposai leaves, a few blackberries and tomatoes, green rhubarb stalks, and runty carrots and turnips.

Harvest this week

And lots of volunteer basil.

The small carrots and turnips were grazed by the cook as she slaved in the kitchen. 😉 And some of the potatoes were made into oven fries. But I have other plans for the rest of them. Maybe samosa (TG’s favorite) and clam chowder (Sabo’s favorite). But don’t say anything to them yet. I still need to find the time to make them. Right now I’ve got to do some Mom stuff, like playing chauffeur for the kids, etc.

You, on the other hand, can head right over to Daphne’s and view other harvests from gardens across the globe.