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 first fried zucchini blossoms

My spouse doesn't know this, but a big motivation for my planting zucchini this year was that I wanted to eat fried zucchini blossoms. Mark Pascal had gone on and on about how delicious they were on The Restaurant Guys Radio show and I was dying to try them.  But zucchini blossoms are not too easy to come by in the shops, at least not here in Victoria, where we don't have a very large Italian population.  So I knew I needed to grow my own. 

The first blossoms appeared a few weeks ago and since then, I've been waiting for a day when there were enough new blossoms to fry some up for the family dinner.  So far, there have only ever been four or five blossoms ready on any given day:  not really enough to feed four people.  Today I decided I was tired of waiting, and that I would make myself fried zucchini blossoms for lunch, and the rest of the family would have to wait.  Score one for the lonely housewife!

The first step was picking the blossoms.  I had to be careful not to pick the daylilies, since they look very similar to zucchini blossoms.  The key here was to only pick flowers that were growing on the actual zucchini plant.  I picked five blossoms and managed to leave the daylilies intact.  ;)

Zucchini blossom = good eats

Daylily = strictly ornamental.  Do not eat!

The next step was heating the oil.  I don't like deep-frying in general, but I'm getting braver.  I courageously poured about 1/2 inch worth of canola oil into my cast iron frying pan and turned the heat to medium-high.  Then I put 1/2 cup of water in a bowl, and sifted in slightly less than 1/2 cup of flour.

I beat the mixture with a fork until it looked sourcreamy.  Then I cut a little slit into the edge of each blossom, and flattened them.  (By the way, I didn't get these directions out of my own brilliant mind or anything.  I found them in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan.)

Then I dipped them in the batter. 

Before we get to the money shot (sizzling blossoms), a quick word about mommies and daddies.  According to this very informative article, the mommy zucchini blossoms cost more from suppliers than the daddies do, which makes me think that they must be tastier.  However, Marcella says that the mommies don't taste good at all, and specifically indicates "male zucchini blossoms" in her recipe.  The only thing to do was to try both, I figured, and so I did. 

The photos above depict a daddy, with a thin stem.  Here is (rather blurry) one of a mommy, with its little zucchini baby attached.

When I cooked her up, I just fried the baby as well.  The result?  Surprisingly, I think I agree with Marcella.  I often find her diktats overly strict and ignore a lot of her advice.  I put (gasp!) chicken broth in my risotto and may turn my eggplant slices more than once when frying them for pasta sauce. But in the case of the zucchini blossoms, Marcella is right, and while the female was not gross or anything, I think I'l stick to the males in future, for the purposes of frying anyway.  It's not worth giving up a potential future zucchini. 

And now for the sizzling.  Mmmm...

If you're going to make these, for heaven's sake do yourself a favour and use a splatter guard.  These things spit like nobody's business!

I drained the blossoms briefly on paper towels, before sprinkling over a few grains of kosher salt, and then gobbling them greedily. 

My first impression was that zucchini blossoms taste like popcorn, but with a delectably creamy centre.  After a few bites, I started to get more of the zucchini flavour.  The baby zucchini was okay.  It made me think that all the flavour that it was going to get was already in it, and the growing of the squash just diffused the flavour a little bit.  I like that diffusion though, and prefer normal-sized zucchini to the little baby I tried. 

Despite all this talk of mommies, daddies, and babies, I realized that I had made a vegan dish!  This hardly ever happens, but I'm excited when it does, because I like to tell my vegan friends that I am totally down with their cuisine. 

My 14-year-old babysitter arrived at the Yellow House just as I was taking the last blossom out of the frying pan and gamely agreed to try it.  She agreed with my popcorn comparison and thought it was pretty tasty.  This means that I can try them on the picky-seven-but-almost-eight-year-old next.  I may not tell her what she's eating until after she's taking her first bite though. 

This entry is my submission to Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by its founder Kalyn.  And yes I know that zucchini blossoms are not an herb, but Kalyn graciously allows flower blogging in her event also.  I've been wanting to participate in WHB for ages, so I'm really excited to finally be a part of it. 

Wednesday Night Small-Plate Extravaganza

Sorry about the disappearing act.  Having a sick baby has meant not much cooking and not much time for blogging for the last several days.  I did manage to sneak out and enjoy a great meal at The Little Thai Place on Monday night.  That restaurant is, I think, my current favourite take-out place in town.  Eating in is pretty good too, though the tables are a bit rickety and the atmosphere is stripmallesque.  Their green curry with eggplant, beef and coconut is amazing.  I could eat it every day. 

Time away from the kitchen got me thinking of lots of things that I've been wanting to try so last night I did a hodgepodge sort of dinner: lots of small plates, all ready at different times as I fit the preparing of them into a schedule of doing dishes, supervising homework, playing with trucks, sweeping, assisting my spouse in the backyard with a garden project he's working on, and helping my seven-year-old prepare for an upcoming Taekwon-Do rank evaluation. 

The first one is the dish I alluded to last week, the one I made with the beet cooking water.  Presenting...beet jello!

That's caviar and sour cream on top.  I was excited to try making this, and it was fun to make, but unfortunately - and this is extremely rare - I didn't actually like eating it.  The flavour was just...bleh.  It's jellied borscht, which sounds weird, but good.  It's a little better with sour cream and dill, even though I love caviar and the caviar was recommended.  My picky seven-year-old hated it, which was sad because she dug into it with such relish (thinking it was a typical sweet Jello).  My spouse liked it, making this the only food in the world that I really dislike and he likes.  It sure looks good though, no?

The next dish is just as weird, and I was just as keyed up about making it.  Presenting...crispy avocados!

These are made by dredging avocado quarters in a cornstarch/berbere mixture (and the use of berbere should tell you where I got the recipe from), then in egg whites, then frying them.  The result was...sort of okay.  Not smashing.  So far, I was zero for two in my small plates experiment. 

The next dish was not experimental in the least.  It was good old grilled peppers: predictably delicious.

I make Delia Smith's Piedmont Peppers a lot, and these were very similar in flavour, but more nibbly, because the peppers are sliced thinly then marinated.  The marinade is made of mashed up anchovies, garlic, parsley, red peppers flakes and olive oil.  The peppers should be roasted and peeled first.  And of course, they taste better the next day. 

At this point I was sick to death of small plates and needed something hearty to fill up the bellies so I whipped up some pesto chicken salad (chopped up cooked chicken, prepared mayonnaise, prepared pesto), cut open a baguette and slapped some of the salad down on it.  The photos of this do not do it justice, which just goes to show that things that look the best (see jellied borscht above) and are the fiddliest to make are not necessarily the yummiest.