Thai Basil Pesto!

Thai Basil

Who doesn't love basil pesto! Well, maybe there are a couple people out there. If made properly (read - home made) it adds a wonderful undertone to tomato sauce or used alone to paint just simple pasta or to spread on hot crusty bread or on fish, poultry or even on the side with a nice steak - wow! Plus it freezes well so it's a good way to save fresh basil for winter. We grow a number of different types of basil in our garden - good ole workhorse sweet Genovese basil, purple basil, lemon basil, curly leaf leaf basil and Thai basil. I guess you have figured out that we kinda like the stuff. Each one of these varieties has its own taste and aroma. 

Pesto comes from the Italian word pestare which is a term that means to pound or crush. So it is a sauce where the ingredients are pounded or crushed together. The Old School way would be to mash the ingredients together with a mortar and pestle. That would be great if you have a mortar and pestle in your kitchen but a food processor will do just fine. The ingredients most typically used to make basil pesto are fresh basil, garlic, pine nuts, Parmesan cheese and olive oil. 

Pesto doesn't have to be made with basil. After all it is basically just a "green sauce" like chimichurri or salsa verde, or green chutney to name a few. You could use another aromatic herb instead like parsley or arugula or oregano. And change the other ingredients around too that better compliment the herb you are using like using cashews or walnuts or peanuts instead of pine nuts or other oils like grape seed oil or avocado oil or sesame oil or changing the cheeses too. Experiment! 

OK, so let's get back to Thai basil. Thai basil does not taste like the sweet Genovese basil most people are familiar with. It has a stronger aroma, spicier and with a mild anise or licorice background. It could, but shouldn't, be used in a traditional Italian basil pesto sauce because other ingredients better compliment the special taste of Thai basil. Lisa harvested the last of our Thai Basil just before we were supposed to have a frost that would turn the basil leaves to mush and put this recipe together to use it all. Here is what she did with it. You will love it.  

Ingredients - 

2 Cups loose packed Thai basil leaves
3 large or 4 small cloves of garlic
1/4 Cup dry roasted or unsalted roasted peanuts
3 Tablespoons Sesame oil
1 1/2 Tablespoons rice wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 Tablespoon agave nectar
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon lime juice
Easy on salt

Put all the dry ingredients in a food processor then add the wet ingredients and blend until smooth. Add a little more sesame oil if it seems too dry but go easy.
The flavor of this sauce is amazingly complex and is best suited with Asian inspired stir fried dishes. We added a couple spoonfuls of this to stir fried chicken, onions, peppers and Japanese eggplant in coconut milk over rice noodles. Bamm!

Horseradish Sauce

Well, it was supposed to be artichoke root stock...

When it started coming up out of the ground, it looked like this -

As it grew, it developed leaves like this - 

This is not what artichoke plants look like. These leaves are huge. Is it tobacco? I did some research and found out what we had was horseradish. Not what we wanted but we let it grow. The leaves are edible, so we cut some and sauteed them up. They taste just like you'd expect horseradish leaves would taste - like horseradish. The leaves are mild, it is the root that has the real pungent sinus opening punch. Grated Horseradish root is what is used in horseradish sauce for prime rib, to make cocktail sauce and Chinese mustard. The root is typically harvested after the cold weather in the fall kills back the above ground leaves.

Here are some of the roots I dug up  on December 14.

We thought about making Chinese mustard but since we had a couple strip steaks, we figured a creamy horseradish sauce would go great with them. You can find horseradish root in most supermarkets. It will be larger than what we harvested from our garden, more like the size of a small turkey leg. You would need to peel and grate it.

Ingredients:

1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup grated for minced fresh horseradish root
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon white wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Directions:

After cleaning the roots, cut them into pieces and chop to a fine texture in a small food processor, then add the rest of the ingredients and blend until the mixture is smooth and creamy. Place in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours or overnight to allow flavors to meld. The sauce can be stored in the refrigerator in an airtight container for 2 to 3 weeks.

Lisa's OCD sometimes comes in handy as evidenced here in how she put all the ingredients together!  : )

The sauce was very good, perfect with the grilled strips.

How to Make Wine Vinegar

I bought an inexpensive, but what I hoped might be, an enjoyable bottle of Zinfandel for us to have with dinner recently. The wine was disappointing. We were going to go ahead and finish it, but since we really didn't like it, we decided to experiment with it and try to make a little bit of red wine vinegar with what was left. Why not? Yes, you can get wine vinegar at every grocery store and it's cheap, but like you, we like doing things ourselves. 

In it's simplest form wine vinegar is just wine gone "bad". Let it sit open for a couple weeks and eventually the alcohol will evaporate and the wine will oxidize into vinegar. But there are more structured ways. I’ve read in different resources, that you do not need 'mother of vinegar' to make your own batch. Mother of vinegar is a 'slimish' looking substance composed of a form of cellulose and acetic acid bacteria that develops on fermenting alcoholic liquids, and acts as a starter to turn alcohol into acetic acid - vinegar - with the help of oxygen from the air. While not appetizing in appearance, mother of vinegar is completely harmless. You can use unpasteurized vinegar to use as a starter. I used Bragg’s organic unfiltered vinegar, because we always have some and it contains a mother naturally. 

There was about a cup of the zinfandel left but this can be scaled for any amount of leftover (or even just-opened) wine.

Ingredients:

1  cup wine

3  tablespoons starter vinegar, use a living variety. Bragg’s is readily available

Directions:

Pour your leftover (not from other people’s glasses) wine into a container with a large surface area, like as a bowl.

Add starter vinegar

Stir it all up

Cover with a towel and let it sit, stirring when you think of it, for a month. 

With small amounts like this, start tasting it at 3 weeks. It can take longer than a month, though.
Once it tastes like vinegar and not like wine, move it to an airtight container, with very little surface area exposed.  Swingtop and sealable wine bottles of the appropriate size work great.  

Although air is critical to the process of vinegar fermentation, continued exposure to air once you have your vinegar is a good way to ruin it/make it not be vinegar any more.

It's Fig Season!

If you like figs and you have the space I hope you have a fig tree or two... or three. Because figs are so perishable you are never going to be able to eat a fig that tastes as sweet and delicious as the ones you can grow yourself. The fresh ones that you can get this time of year at a grocery store, as good as they are, were picked under-ripe days ago. But if you grow your own, well damn, you can just walk out and pick one off the tree just like that.

Some cool things to make using figs - 
Fig preserves
Agrodolce figs
Roast figs wrapped in bacon or prosciutto
Figs stuffed with goat cheese
Fried figs
Figs stuffed with pistachios and candied orange peel
Chicken breast (or pork chop) stuffed with figs and goat cheese
Pork chops with a balsamic fig sauce
Fettuccine with figs
Fresh fig galette
Grilled fresh figs on rosemary skewers
Cucidati - Italian fig cookies. 
I will be adding recipes for these and more over time, check back often.
   
Fig Preserves - EASY!
Think about how good this will be on a bacon or  sausage biscuit!

About 4 cups of fresh figs

Cut figs into quarters

Make a simple syrup - 1/2 cup of sugar and 2 cups of water. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer

 Add the figs

Add the zest and juice of one lemon.  

Simmer the figs in the simple syrup with the lemon zest and lemon juice until nice a thick - for about 45 minutes.

Spoon into sterilized glass canning jars, add lid and ring. Return to the pot of hot water. Simmer the filled jars for 10 minutes.

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Fig Preserves with Orange

Same as above but use the zest from one navel orange instead of the lemon zest but still include the lemon juice.

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                                      Agrodolce Figs - Sweet and sour figs 
  
3 cups of ripe figs
1 tablespoon honey
1/3 cup of balsamic vinegar 
1 teaspoons fresh rosemary
1 bay leaf
Water as needed

Simmer the figs in honey, balsamic vinegar, rosemary, a bay leaf and a little water for about 45 minutes. As the sauce thickens add a little water to keep it loose.

 Should look like this when done

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Fig and goat cheese stuffed chicken breast

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Fig Infused Balsamic Vinegar

Fig infused vinegar, why not? It's is easy – you can use a distilled vinegar, or a red or white wine vinegar, but for best results, an inexpensive balsamic works best. Just chop your figs (about a pound for every quart of vinegar), add the vinegar and figs to a large saucepan, and simmer it for about 20 minutes or more, until the figs have lost their form and become mush – strain and bottle. This will be thicker than the original vinegar, and is supposed to be – but if it’s too thick for you, add either more vinegar or, if it has a strong vinegar taste already, add water to thin it. Store in the refrigerator – it will keep indefinitely.

You can use this as you would regular balsamic vinegar - sauces, salad dressings, over ice cream, marinades, the figs give it a sweeter more complex flavor.