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Psychedelic Pesto

When you have a plethora of basil, it's time to make pesto. Nothing says it's summer like some beautiful green pesto.

In my last post, I bragged about my basil plants. In all the years I've gardened, I've never had this much basil this early in the season. Now I must brag about my beautiful pesto. Look at how bright green and fresh it is - the picture doesn't do justice the the almost lime green color.

And the taste . . . ahh. I base my pesto on a recipe in the original The Silver Palate cookbook. It calls for the usual basil, garlic, olive oil and Parmesan cheese, but instead of pine nuts it calls for walnuts. The walnuts add a nice, rich taste, and they're a lot less expensive than pine nuts. I pretty much follow the proportions in the recipe except for the olive oil - I tend to use a lot less than the recipe calls for.

From this very large batch, I made one big pot of pasta with pesto, then froze the rest. I spoon the pesto into ice cube trays, freeze, then transfer the frozen cubes into a Ziploc freezer bag.

First Harvest

I harvested the first vegetables of the season on
Wednesday (6/18). I made a salad with the baby lettuce greens, snap peas and chives. I used the tarragon to make a sauce for pan grilled chicken breast. It was a wonderful dinner.

I'm wondering, though, why the lettuce is growing so slowly this year? I planted in early spring, and until this week we've had cooler than average weather - low 70's, mostly. I thought we'd be swimming in lettuce, but instead I just thinned it for the first time this week. Hmmmm, strange.

Local Garlic at the Grocery Store?

On Saturday, I bought two heads of hardneck garlic at the grocery store. So what, you say?

Well, since I've been shopping Lunds - a Twin Cities chain of grocery stores - for more than 15 years, I believe I have only ever bought one variety of garlic. You know, softneck grocery store garlic (either California Early or California Late - the two most popular commercial varieties). And since softneck garlic can only be grown successfully in much warmer climes than Minnesota (mostly California), there's no way that softneck garlic is local.

But on Saturday the big garlic bins at Lunds held these nice, purple, somewhat-smaller-than-usual hardneck bulbs. There was no mention of them being a different type, the price was the same as it's always been, but these were definitely hardneck garlic bulbs. (FYI - the thick, hard stalk in the middle of the head was the dead giveaway. Softneck garlic is all cloves, hardneck still has the stalk in the middle.)

So were they local? I don't really know for sure, but Lunds has really been pushing (and marketing) their local and organic products for the past few years, so I wouldn't be shocked if this garlic was from somewhere in the Midwest. And I think that's kind of cool - the idea that "buying local" was so not-a-big-deal that they just do it when the produce is in season and don't even make a fuss about it.

A Springtime Garden Dinner

Last night we had a wonderful springtime - and mostly local - dinner: Grilled chicken with a sauce made with tarragon, chopped garlic scapes, lemon juice and butter; snap peas quickly sauteed in olive oil and sprinkled with a little lemon juice; and jasmine rice.

When I started planning the meal, I was inspired by Jaime at Greengirls to use the garlic scapes in some fashion. At first I thought I would saute them with the snap peas, but that didn't seem right. I poked around epicurious.com for recipes, and found a tarragon sauce that included shallots. I adapted the recipe to what I had on hand, and voila, a nice springtime garden sauce for grilled chicken was born.

I usually don't focus on how local our meals are - I do my best to buy both organic and local ingredients, but don't always - but in this case it was noticeable just how fresh the ingredients were. The grilled chicken was from Kadejan Farms in Glenwood, MN (140 miles away). The snap peas, garlic scapes and tarragon were from the garden (0 miles).

The only non-local item was the jasmine rice, from Thailand. I had originally planned to make wild rice (wild-harvested from Leech Lake, MN, 250 miles away), but it takes too long to cook, and it was getting late. Besides, the nutty jasmine rice was a better compliment to the other flavors in the meal than the heavier wild rice would have been.

All-in-all, a very successful weeknight meal!

Homebrew Update

A few weeks ago I wrote about Spouse's foray back into brewing beer. We're finally able to sample the fruits of his labor. The first beer he brewed - Phat Tyre from Northern Brewer - is absolutely delicious. Here's to homebrew!

Sunday Miscellany

It's a typical winter Sunday. Football on the TV, dog lazing on the couch, seed catalogs spread around my chair, and snow gently falling outside.

Spouse is getting back into brewing beer. It's been about 4-5 years since the last time he made some homebrew, but decided sometime in December that he wanted to get back into it. So, for Christmas I bought him a beer kit: Phat Tyre Amber Ale from Northern Brewer.

The Phat Tyre was bottled last weekend, so Spouse decided to brew another batch this weekend. Here's his next project - a Belgian Witbier, also from Northern Brewer. He just cooked up the wort yesterday, and today it's started to ferment. Within a week or two, fermentation will be complete and he'll be able to bottle it. When Spouse first started brewing, we learned that letting the beer sit for 4-6 weeks after bottling really improves the taste, so we'll just have to wait until March to enjoy this batch.

In the meantime, I've been reading through the incredibly large pile of seed catalogs that have been cluttering up the area around my reading chair. Unlike others out in the blogosphere who have already placed their orders, I'm still trying to decide who to order from this year! The short list (which needs to get shorter) is: Fedco, Territorial, Pinetree, Seed Savers, Seeds of Change, Johnny's, Baker Creek, John Scheepers, and Burpee.

Two companies that I ordered from last year are off the 2007 list. Vesey's had good quality product but it took much too long to get here. They are in Canada and seeds take too long to go through customs I guess. The second is The Cook's Garden. Three of the varieties I ordered from them last year didn't do well, the growing information on the seed packets was quite poor, and the prices were high compared to others.

Of course, if I were really good, I'd get out all my old seed packets, compare them to my potential order, and ensure that I had just the right amount of seed without any duplication. However, what will really happen is that I'll order far too much and my grocery bag of half-used seed packets will fill up even more. Oh well, there are far worse (and far more expensive) habits that one could have.

Doing the right thing ain't easy

Eating well and eating "right" continue to become more and more complicated. Ali's blog, Henboggle, alerted me to the article "The Vegetable-Industrial Complex," published Sunday, 10/15/06 in the New York Times. The piece addresses the reactions and potential long-term effects of the packaged spinach E. coli outbreak.

The article touches on several topics of interest: The potential for more regulation and inspection of the produce industry; industrialization of both meat and produce production; globalization of food distribution, including "natural" and organic foods; and, the potential detrious effect of heavy regulation and testing requirements on small farmers.

The bottom line is that it made me, once again, think hard about where my food comes from and what I can do to support the most sustainable farming practices possible. One of my pet peeves is that some people tend to support the idea of "organic" over all other issues. While I prefer to eat organic, I also like to take into consideration the overall sustainability of the process. For me, purchasing something that is grown locally but not necessarily organic can often outweigh purchasing something that is organic but grown several hundred or thousands of miles away.

The most difficult issue, however, is confronting the fact that I live in Minnesota but want fresh vegetables throughout the winter. Our farmers markets are pretty much done by now, and won't re-open until April. CSA's may deliver into December, but then they close for the season. Yes, I garden, but it's recreational - I don't have the time (not to mention the resources) to set up my own greenhouse for winter greens production.

So what's an ecologically minded gal to do? Even though I live in the middle of a major metropolitan area, there are no co-ops near my house. My local grocery store, which is less than 1 mile from the house and on the way home from work, has been expanding their organic choices exponentially, but they still don't buy locally nearly as often as they should. If I want to shop at a co-op, I have to drive at least 10 miles away from both home and work. While the end result would be 100% organically and/or sustainably grown - and often local - food, the expense of my time and the fossil fuels required to shop at a co-op don't seem to tip the scales in favor of shopping at a co-op.

So, for now, I fret and worry and continue to shop at my local grocery store. The moment a solar-powered greenhouse farm somewhere near the Twin Cities that offers a CSA program for the winter, I'll join up. Until then, though, the only thing to do is to continue to be aware and to make the best choices possible.