Dinner in the Yellow House

Putting up Basil for the winter

The stars aligned in a very tasty way for me a couple of weeks ago:  I had just finished reading the chapter in  Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle where she talks about making pesto and freezing it (and railing against a food writer that suggested making pesto in December!) and then, what did I find on the counter when I went to pay for my Aubergine purchases but 10 bags of fresh, local basil, wilting away.  I desired them greatly, but didn't really have a plan in place to make pesto yet (no recipe and a busy day with M'hijo ahead of me) so I decided to wait.  But then the Aubergine guy made me an offer I couldn't refuse.  "Take the lot of them", he said, "and I'll only charge you a buck fifty a bag."  I did so. 

Back at the Yellow House with a pound and a half of basil, not including a bag from Kildara farms that was included in my SPUD harvest box, and of course, our own basil plant, which had a good four leaves on it :), I scoured the cookbook shelf for a recipe that looked good.  This being my first attempt at homemade pesto, I wasn't really sure what to look for, but as Delia never steers me wrong, I chose her Homemade Pesto recipe from Summer Collection.  The recipe calls for 2 ounces of basil.  I tossed four ounces at a time into my food processor (tried the blender and it didn't work at all), and added the following:

2 cloves of crushed garlic

2 tablespoons of pine nuts

12 tablespoons of olive oil

some kosher salt

Then I pureed it all until it looked like this:

Then I stirred in two ounces of grated romano cheese and voila!  homemade pesto, ready to freeze in little ziploc bags.

Except for the batch I gave to my uncle-in-law, who is renovating my bathroom at the moment, and the tablespoon I added to my shells for lunch.

The taste really was unlike the prepared pestos I've bought at the store: much greener tasting and less salty.  I'm really looking forward to grabbing one of my little baggies in the dead of winter and squeezing it into a bowl of steaming pasta: instant dinner!  I also plan to try making paninis at home and will put some pesto into these as well. 

If you want to put up basil without making it into pesto,  check out these instructions from the Organic picks blog.

Thanks to Myriam of Once Upon a Tart for hosting Weekend Herb Blogging this week!

My Moss Street Market Haul

Hello!  I am still alive!

Very sorry to have taken two weeks off blogging unannounced.  Every day I thought I would find some time to blog and I just didn't.  You see, since August 17, my spouse has been travelling, making me a temporary single mom.  Somehow, that, combined with a big work project, has resulted in my having very little time for myself :)

But I'm back now and with lots of foody things to report on.  The first is my haul at the Moss Street Market yesterday.  Moss Street Market is sort of a miniature urban farmer's market (not that the farmers are urban, I mean, the market is in an urban location) with a bunch of crafts and stuff thrown in.  I don't go there much, but when I do go, I always love it.  My two favourite things about it are the International Women's catering co-op tent (always a huge line for their delectable samosas, empanadas, curries, and more) and the playground.  Whoever came up with the idea to have the market in the parking lot of Sir James Douglas school, with a playground right there, was a genius.  Even fiesty little anti-shoppers like 20-month-old M'hijo can be cajoled into visiting a market like this.  Here's my little monkey right after he took the pint of baby squash I bought and poured them all over himself.  He's also holding a bear-shaped bottle of B's honey.

Apart from squash and honey, I was thrilled to find, for the first time ever, rapini.  I have read about this dark leafy green, also known as broccoli rabe, and wanted to try it for a long time.  But I've never seen it for sale.  The closest I've found is something called broccolini, which is less leafy, more broccoliesque.  I'm hoping to cook it up with some Galloping Goose Italian sausage tomorrow.

I also bought a spider wort plant, having fallen in love with the electric purple blooms the day before when I saw them for the first time in a garden.  But the pièce de résistance was this:

TAMALES!

Real good Mexican tamales!  Hot to eat right away or frozen to take home!  3.50 a piece!

Mole, salsa verde, and poblano!  For sale in Victoria, which is located, don't forget, in the Great White North.  A real miracle find, to be sure.  I was so excited that I forgot I hardly had any cash left.  Luckily, the owner of the tamale stand, called, appropriately, Mexican Tamales, took pity on me and gave me a two for one deal.  He also had agua de fresa (strawberry water), a glass of which he gave to the very thirsty and grateful M'hijo.

So, quite a good little shopping trip, if I may say so.  There were plenty of other tempting veggies (bitter melon and Japanese eggplant among them) and plants (fig tree), and I didn't even get around to visiting the International Women's Catering Co-op, so I'll be returning to the Moss Street Market soon.

The merguez

Do normal people get food obsessions, or is this strictly the realm of food bloggers and their equally food-centric partners?  Ever since Tobias read about the North African sausage merguez in Marcus Samuelssons's The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa, he has been constantly talking about finding and eating some of it.  Several times, he's said "I really feel like having merguez for dinner tonight", despite the fact that he's never tried it.  I wouldn't have been surprised if one day he came home from work with plane tickets to Tunisia to go there and hunt down the merguez, that is how intent he was on trying it.

Today, while at the Village Butcher looking for something to put on the grill for dinner, he was delighted and I was relieved to find that they produce merguez sausage inhouse.  We bought four, assuming (correctly) that the kids wouldn't be too interested in this spicy and unusual sausage. 

Inspired by the merguez' North African roots, I rummaged through my pantry to find an old package of couscous that I bought ages ago, but keep forgetting to use.  It was actually Israeli couscous, which I prefer to normal couscous, and here is how I cooked it.

Israeli couscous with nectarines

250g Israeli couscous
1 medium onion, chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 cups chicken broth
1 tsp cumin
3 tablespoons chopped Italian parsley
1/2 nectarine, chopped
salt and pepper to taste

Heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan, then add the onion and sautee until golden.  Add the couscous and stir to coat, then add the chicken broth and the parsley and bring to a boil.  Reduce to a simmer, cover, and cook for ten minutes.  Stir in cumin, salt and pepper and nectarine.

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I also picked a few things from the garden to go with the sausage.  Tobias put the zucchini on the grill along with the merguez, and I cooked up the beans and chard.

 

The merguez was tasty, with what Tobias called a "slow burn".  I'd be interested to try a more authentically-sourced version to see how close the Village Butcher got with their rendition.  I could have used a bit more flavour other than just heat. 

With a spicy sausage, I don't like to drink to any sort of wine where the nuances of the flavours really matter.  It's the perfect time, therefore, for a little El Torito, a tempranillo/garnacha blend that also happens to be the cheapest wine available in Canada that is actually enjoyable to drink.  I picked up this bottle at Everything Wine (more about that place soon) this week and the cashier actually did a doubletake when she saw the price, CDN$7.99.  Hoorah for El Torito!

Here is the end result: merguez and couscous with veggies and El Torito. A quick, easy, and tasty Saturday night dinner for two.  And hopefully the end of my spouse's merguez obsession.

Strawberry Week(s)

When he saw that I had picked up a whole flat of strawberries from Dan's Farm, my spouse said, "Oh, I guess it's strawberry week then."  Apparently, this was a tradition in the family of his old girlfriend.  Once a year, at the beginning of strawberry season, they would celebrate strawberry week by eating strawberries for dinner every night.  I thought that sounded wonderful, but Tobias explained that the strawberries were always in desserts and it felt like a bit of a sugar overload and he would feel sick by the middle of the week.  I said, "Well, we're going to have strawberry week, but I promise you won't feel sick."

I had some great plans for that flat of strawberries.  I was going to make strawberry and avocado ceviche, Alain Passard's strawberries in hibiscus and vanilla syrup, and strawberry shortcake.  But by Tuesday morning, the ten pints that still remained in the flat were already starting to look like spoiling.  So I changed the plan, and made some jam. 

I used the recipe from the box of pectin that I found in the pantry (don't know why I ever bought that, since I've never made jam with pectin before), adding balsamic vinegar because Nigella does it.  I haven't actually tasted the jam (edit: since I first started writing this entry, weeks ago, we have eaten nearly a quarter of all the jam I made. It is amazingly good.), but the jam-making process went well, and all the jars sealed up nicely and everything.  They also looks very pretty:

Anyway, after the family nibbling and the jam-making, I was completely out of strawberries.  I had to buy a couple more pints at the grocery store to make the ceviche and also to make the strawberries with hibiscus (pictured below), the purchasing of which (from Plenty: the Epicurean Pantry) was the initial motivation for getting all those strawberries in the first place.

Incidentally, I had hoped to have a strawberry harvest in my own backyard this year, but it was not to be. So far, I've only had one beautiful red strawberry come out of my patch. Maybe next year. Until then, I will enjoy the delicious Vancouver Island strawberry harvest. Unlike with the cherries, I can easily resist California strawberries. They simply don't come close to tasting as good as the local ones.