You are what you eat

An abundance of herbs--what to do? (With pesto recipe)

If you grow herbs, you may be in the same quandary as I am: what to do with them all?

I have a food dryer, so I dry those herbs that retain some flavor after drying. While Mark Bittman claims that dried basil doesn't have any flavor, I beg to disagree. I have some basil in the dryer right now. I'm also stashing some pesto in the freezer--more on that later. I'll be drying thyme later today, and have already put by some tarragon and sage.

We bring our rosemary plant in every fall, so I don't dry rosemary. I just cut the fresh stuff whenever I need some, all winter long. Same with the bay plant. We just dig them up, pot them, and put them in the east windows. I should really try potting some other herbs to have a supply of fresh leaves in winter and early spring.

Herb-infused vinegars are a great way to use any surfeit of herbs. I made a batch of basil and garlic vinegar using purple basil--the color is a deep purple-red, just beautiful. Still to come are some herb combinations, as well as the classic tarragon vinegar.

One of the books I often consult about preserving our harvest is Stocking Up III, published by the Rodale Press. It claims that blanching herbs for a few seconds before freezing preserves taste and color better than freezing them raw. I haven't tried this yet, but with the many herbs in my garden, I just may. Get the water boiling, hold the herbs by their stems and swish around in the water for a few seconds, then blot them with towels and let them cool a bit before removing the stems and freezing. You can chop them or not, according to the book. I might just try some chives this way.

Have you tried compound butters? I like to use a whole stick of butter for this. Let the butter soften at room temperature. Finely mince about a quarter cup of herbs--a single herb, or any combination that appeals to you--and use a fork to mix the herbs into the butter. I like combinations: today I made a butter flavored with basil, oregano, thyme, and chives. This butter is great on cooked vegetables, and I also frequently serve it with freshly baked baguette slices. You can add lightly sauteed aromatics, such as garlic, scallions, shallots, etc., and also a splash of lemon juice, if you wish. I generally just stick to the herbs because I think it's more versatile that way, but go ahead and experiment.

And finally, pesto is a classic. I make a big batch and freeze it in two-tablespoon portions by using an ice cube tray. Once the cubes are frozen, you can release them from the tray and place them in a freezer bag. That way you can use a cube or two any time you want to boost the flavor of tomato sauce, minestrone, etc., or just thaw out enough to toss with pasta for a quick meal. I'm planning to try some with red wine vinegar as a cherry tomato-feta salad dressing.

Here's the recipe I use ( don't remember where on the web I found it), but you can vary the ingredients to suit your taste. I don't use pine nuts as they are so expensive, but walnuts work quite well as a substitute. Traditionally, a mortar and pestle was used to grind the ingredients; nowadays, the food processor is the equipment of choice. I haven't tried using a blender for this, so I don't know if that works efficiently or not. I double the recipe for freezing.

Several recipes I've seen say not to add the Parmesan if you're going to freeze this, but Parmesan actually freezes quite well, and I always add it regardless of whether it's headed for the freezer or not.

This will also keep in the refrigerator pretty well if you drizzle a thin layer of olive oil over the top to "seal" it (helps prevent oxidation).

Basil pesto

2 cups lightly packed fresh basil leaves
1/3 cup walnut pieces
3 small to medium sized garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan
salt and pepper to taste

Combine the basil and walnut bits by pulsing a few times in the food processor. Add the garlic and pulse a few more times.

Slowly add the olive oil in a stream while the processor is running. Stop to scrape down the sides with a spatula. You should have a nice paste. Add the grated cheese and pulse until blended. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Easy ways to preserve your harvest

When you think of preserving foods from your garden, do you think of arduous hours of canning, perhaps of blanching and freezing and all that entails? Lots of people believe that food preservation is hard work and time-consuming, especially if they're new to the processes involved.

But with some vegetables, it's quite easy to put up food for the winter months.

Take tomatoes and peppers (both sweet and hot), for example. Tomatoes can be cored and tossed into a plastic freezer bag, sealed, and popped into the freezer. While the texture when thawed will not be like fresh or even canned tomatoes, frozen tomatoes can be used in soups, chili, spaghetti sauce, and all manner of dishes in which the tomato taste rather than texture is the goal. If you thaw the tomatoes in the microwave, the skins will slip right off.

Same with peppers. They can be frozen whole; big bell peppers can be halved if you like (perfect for stuffed peppers) or even chopped. For cooked dishes, they're wonderful. If you're more ambitious, you can roast the peppers (learn how here), put them in a plastic bag, and freeze them. Don't bother skinning them: when you thaw them, as I do in the microwave, the skin will come off easily. Roasted sweet peppers make a good salad dressed with a little olive oil, while roasted hot peppers can be stuffed or used in dishes like chili or burrito fillings, to name just a couple.

Few people grow leeks, it seems, but we do. All you have to do with leeks is slice or chop them after thoroughly cleaning them (they tend to be pretty gritty) and pack them into can-or-freeze jars. Don't put them in plastic! The aroma of leeks will escape into every corner of your freezer.

Onions can also be peeled, sliced, and frozen without blanching.

Eggplants can be roasted whole in the oven after pricking them all over with a fork or using a sharp knife to make small slits in the skin (no expoding eggplants, please!). Just place in a 375- or 400-degree oven for 40 to 60 minutes, perhaps turning them once or twice. When the eggplant collapses and has a few charred spots, it's done. Scrape out the flesh and place it in freezer containers. I usually chop the flesh, but you don't have to. You can make baba ghanouj in midwinter out of your own eggplant.

Another way I like to preserve some of my veggies is as soup. I made a quantity of asparagus soup minus the cream, which I add after I thaw the soup base and am re-heating it. I did the same with carrots last year, making big batches of ginger-carrot soup. I've also frozen leek-and-potato soup (using our own home-grown potatoes as well as leeks), again omitting the cream. Broccoli soup also freezes well; it turns into cream of broccoli soup when you're ready to eat it and add the milk or cream (and some cheese, if you're like me). It should go without saying that this method is particularly easy and efficient if you've already planned to make soup for dinner anyway--just make a bigger batch and freeze some.

So don't throw out that excess of veggies! While many vegetables must be pressure-canned, pickled, or blanched and frozen, some may be frozen without blanching, others can be roasted and frozen, and some can be turned into soup . . . soup that will be mighty welcome on a cold January day. And you'll feel good about eating food in the winter that you grew last summer.  

A surprise in the garden

No, I'm not talking about the small rabbit I startled, nor the toads either (the latter are most welcome; not so much the former).

I'm talking about a new harvest of green and yellow wax beans. I'd given up on them ages ago. They weren't setting any fruit, there were almost no blossoms, and the leaves were turning yellow and then brown--this at a time when I should have still been gathering much more than we could eat. I'd planned to can some, but I didn't get around to the really big first harvest and, shamefully, had to consign much of it to the compost pile (I hate waste, so this made me feel extremely guilty, I assure you).

To my amazement, when I went out a couple of days ago to pick peppers, which by the way are all too plentiful in our garden, I thought I spied some bright yellow over in the bean row. Today I went out and sure enough, there they were, lovely yellow beans. And plenty of green beans, too, in the next row over. Some were actually too large to be usable. I doubt if there's enough time for those to dry into bean seeds, but I left them on the plants just in case.

I'm delighted by this late harvest and looking forward to some fresh home-grown beans at least one last time.

Meanwhile, I can't keep up with the eggplants and peppers! And I've still got a row of potatoes to dig. Maybe tomorrow ... if I'm not pickling or roasting peppers and blanching and freezing eggplant.

With a garden, you just never know what surprises await you--both delightful and otherwise.

Oh, the shame

You know it's been a bad year for the garden when you have to stop at a roadside stand to buy zucchini.

Ratatouille

No, not the movie, although the movie is wonderful, especially for foodies. I'm talking about the French vegetable stew, a perfect dish to make at this time of year. I was inspired to write about it, and offer a recipe, when a visit to the garden revealed baby eggplants and luscious green bell peppers.

Ratatouille is composed of eggplant, bell peppers, zucchini, onions, garlic, and herbs. Julia Child, in her classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, insists that each vegetable must be cooked separately "before it is arranged in the casserole to partake of a brief communal simmer," in order that each vegetable retain "its own shape and character." For the film Ratatouille, the American chef Thomas Keller used his version of ratatouille, confit byaldi, fanned out on a plate.

Well, I'm not that fancy--or patient. I simply simmer the vegetables all together in a pot and enjoy the delicious flavors of Provence. You may also simmer the stew in a 350 degree oven for an hour, as does Mark Bittman (How to Cook Everything).

The ingredients are humble, but the taste is divine. I have been known to serve this as a main dish with homemade bread and a bit of  good cheese.

Ratatouille

2 T. olive oil
2 large onions, coarsely chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 lbs. eggplant, cut into chunks
2 green bell peppers, cut into squares
2 medium zucchinis, cut into 1/4-inch slices
4 plum tomatoes, cored and coarsely chopped
fresh herbs such as thyme, marjoram, rosemary, bay leaf, basil, and parsley, to taste
salt and pepper to taste

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet. Saute the onions and garlic until softened. Add the eggplant and stir to coat with oil. Add the peppers and stir well. Now cover the skillet and cook for about ten minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking.

Add the tomatoes, zucchini, and herbs, stir to mix well, cover the skillet and cook on low heat until the eggplant is nice and tender, probably about 15 minutes or so. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and drizzle a little more extra virgin olive oil over. Garnish with more fresh herbs, if desired. 

Summer harvest: vegetables done simply

There's really nothing quite like harvesting part of your evening meal less than an hour before you sit down to eat. Fresh and bursting with flavor unknown to supermarket produce aisles, the veggies cry out to be enjoyed simply, so that the flavor can shine.

Last night i went out to the garden and picked some tomatoes and a pattypan squash meant just for dinner (other vegetables were waiting to be picked, but they had to keep on waiting). I cut some basil and brought it in. Sliced tomatoes sprinkled with fresh chopped basil and sprinkled with good quality extra virgin olive oil served as our salad, while the squash was halved and pan grilled, also sprinkled with basil. Just superb. If I'd had enough cherry tomatoes (they're really late this year, for some reason), I'd have thought about making them into a salad instead of the slicing tomatoes: halved cherries tossed with a variety of chopped herbs and a vinaigrette. I could have chosen green and yellow beans; I like them with parsley in a butter-lemon sauce, or sometimes with fresh oregano.

One simple way to prepare vegetables in order to really bring out their essence is to grill them. We particularly like baby vegetables, like summer squash and eggplant, halved, brushed with olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper and perhaps a fresh herb of choice, and placed on the grill until tender. Sweet peppers roasted on the grill in wide strips are also delicious.

The broiler is a handy device for eggplant or zucchini slices. Zucchini rounds brushed with oil and sprinkled with freshly grated parmesan makes a tasty side dish. I've taken large eggplant "steaks", added a little oil, placed a fresh tomato slice on top followed by a bit of shredded mozzarella, broiled them (usually giving the eggplant a head start and adding the other items a bit later), and called it a main dish.

 We grow potatoes, and it's about time to dig the small ones sold as "new potatoes" at the store. These are unbelievably delicious freshly dug, cleaned (gently, as the skins rub off so easily), halved, and sauteed in butter with fresh rosemary.

The point is that when vegetables are this fresh and tasty, simplicity is the key to appreciating their flavors. There's no point in elaborate casseroles or sauces, at least early in the season when your palate still finds just-harvested veggies a novelty. When the shine is off a bit, well, maybe. But for now, I'll take mine straight.

My new favorite way to cook asparagus

My former favorite recipe, which I still love, can be found here. But recently I've been using a recipe from Cook's Illustrated for pan-roasted asparagus.

Don't use pencil-thin stalks of asparagus for this dish; thicker stalks work better.

Pan Roasted Asparagus

1 T. olive oil
1 T. butter
2 lbs. thick asparagus spears, woody ends snapped off
Salt and freshly ground pepper
balsamic vinegar (optional)

Heat oil and butter in a 12-inch skillet over medium-high heat. When the butter has melted, add half of the asparagus to the pan with tips pointed in one direction; add the other half of the stalks with tips pointing in the opposite direction. Use tongs to distribute the spears evenly (they won't quite fit into one layer, but that's fine). Cover and cook until asparagus is bright green and still crisp, about 5 minutes.

Uncover the skillet and set heat to high. Season asparagus with salt and pepper. Cook until spears are tender and well browned along one side, using tongs to occasionally move spears from center to outside of pan so all the spears are browned, 5 to 7 minutes. Transfer asparagus to serving dish, adjust seasonings, and if you like, sprinkle with good quality balsamic vinegar.

First spring harvests: lovage and asparagus

How lovely it is to see green in the garden after a long, snowy winter.

Along with chives, lovage is the first herb to really show off in April. Lovage is somewhat like celery--you can see that the leaves even resemble celery leaves--but there is a darker, earthier undertone that's hard to characterize. Lovage can be harvested all spring and summer, and it dries beautifully, retaining most of its taste (unlike some herbs). It can grow to be 4-5 feet tall, and gets bushy and big around after it's been growing for a few years. You can divide it and give some away to friends and neighbors, too.

You can find a lovage-and-potato-soup recipe here. I'll be drying some lovage tomorrow.

But the real spotlight at this time of year is occupied by asparagus. Ah, how we wait each year for the first stalks, the first harvested-just-before-dinner delectable spears. This year's harvest was earlier than any previous year; we cut the first stalks on April 23. Below you can see two days' harvest from our small patch--about 4 pounds of asparagus.

Some of those spears became pickled asparagus.

For some asparagus recipes, go here.

In a time of waiting--waiting for the seeds to germinate, waiting for the last day of frost, waiting to plant all the luscious vegetables that will see us through winter--how grateful we are for these foods fresh from our garden.

It doesn't get any better than this.