Basil Pesto, Chipmunk Style

Fresh basil has hit the Homer Farmer's Market and I'm into industrial production of basil pesto, storing it up against winter. Although stopping short of storing it in my cheek pouches.

In food processor, put

2 cups pine nuts
2 cups grated parmesan cheese
4 to 6 cloves of garlic, squished

Puree for about a minute, adding a little bit of

1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups olive oil

Add the leaves from

1/2 pound of basil

Alternate basil leaves and olive oil, pureeing until as smooth as you want it to be.

Spoon the pesto into a silicone muffin tin.

Freeze overnight. Pop them out the next day

and put in a Ziploc bag. Back into the freezer and on to the next batch.

Each portion is a scant half cup.

There is always a little left over, so you can have fresh pesto on the day.

Cook's tips:

*Don't go cheap on the parmesan. I use the best I can get in Alaska, Costco's Kirkland brand Parmigiano Reggiano.

*I can't be more specific on the amount of garlic. I know when the smell hits my nose. So will you.

*There is enough salt in the cheese. I don't add more.

*I like my pesto a little gritty, so I stop adding olive oil and processing the basil before it's completely smooth. Your choice. Also an excuse to taste the batch multiple times.

Como

Some of you may remember my recipe for artisanal bread, or rustic loaf. I've been refining it, and I've got it pared down to a much simpler process. Try this.

At 6pm the day before:

20 ounces unbleached white flour
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons table salt
1 scant teaspoon yeast
2 cups cold water

Stir all ingredients together into stiff dough. Spray lightly with oil, cover tightly with saran wrap, and let sit overnight on the counter. It will double, if not more.

Anytime before noon the next day, with oiled spatula gently fold dough over on itself.

Spray lightly with oil, cover tightly with saran wrap, and let rise until double, 4 - 6 hours.

Heat oven to 450F, with cast iron dutch oven and lid in the oven.

When oven is heated, remove dutch oven and lid from oven. With oiled spatula encourage dough gently into dutch oven. Shake to round and center dough. Spray dough lavishly with water, cover, and put in oven. Bake 50 minutes.

Reduce oven temperature to 425F, remove lid, and bake for 20 minutes more.

Cool on rack.

It still takes two days, but man is it worth it.

Cook's tips:
*I get my bread water out of the refrigerator dispenser. It's filtered. This bread seems to really like it.

Cook screwing with the recipe even more:
*For this batch, I substituted 5 ounces of whole wheat flour for 5 ounces of unbleached white flour. A visiting friend likes brown bread.

King Crab Chowder

So I went to the Homer Farmer's Market last Saturday and came home with half a king crab. I won't tell you how much it cost, but believe me when I tell you it was worth every bite Saturday, Sunday and Monday. It was a darn fine Memorial Day weekend if we're only going by my palate.

So this morning I looked to see if I could go back to that well one more time.

Not a lot there, but enough that it deserves more respect than eating it standing over the sink. So how about some chowder?

Saute a little sliced bacon over low heat, until it's browned but not burnt.

Add half a small onion, chopped, and a small potato, diced. Add a couple of grinds of sea salt and black pepper each and cook over medium high heat until the onion starts to brown, about three minutes.

Add a couple of cloves of garlic, pressed, and stir through until the smell hits your nose.

Add a small can of corn kernels. Add one part whole milk to one part chicken broth, just enough to cover. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and let cook for 15 minutes.

Stir in the crab. Turn off the heat and walk away for five minutes. Serve.

Cook's tip:
*This chowder works with just about any seafood I've ever tried, cooked or uncooked, shrimp, clams, salmon, rockfish, halibut, or all of the above. If it's already cooked when you put it in, wait only until the fish is heated through before serving. Do not overcook (remember the curse!).

*Add a little saffron if you feel like it.

*Add rice instead of potato. Or quinoa.

*I keep my bacon in the freezer, and slice off just enough to use for each recipe. Then I roll it up, put it in a Ziploc bag and put it back in the freezer. Get thee behind me, Satan.

Cream of Vegetable and Truffle Oil Soup

When I'm in Seattle, I spend a lot of time mooning over the stock at La Buona Tavola, where one can buy truffle oil, white or black. And I do.

A little goes a long way with truffle oil, so it takes a while to get through a bottle this size. I'm always experimenting, but carefully, because it's too good (and too expensive) to waste. This is my latest experiment.

Trim broccoli and cauliflower florets, about a cup each.

Chop some onion, carrot and celery.
Saute in hot olive oil for five minutes, until the onion begins to brown.

Add a heaping tablespoon of flour, and stir till combined.

Add a cup of cream and a cup of homemade chicken stock or canned chicken broth.
Add a tablespoon of truffle oil, salt, pepper, and some grated nutmeg.

Bring to a boil and reduce heat, stirring until the soup begins to thicken.
Add vegetables. Cook until the vegetables are tender.

Serve and enjoy.

Cook's variation:
*Good with vegetables of almost any kind. Sometimes I use leftovers, so long as they are only steamed.
*Substitute some white wine for some of the stock.

Cook's confession:
*Sometimes...I add more truffle oil.

Corinna Chapman's Cordial

About this time of year my friend Joan in Cupertino sends me a box of lemons from the tree in her back yard.

These are not the lemons you buy at Safeway, all rind and dry and tough as an old boot on the inside. I'm always looking for things to do with them, as witness the lemon pull-apart coffee cake from last year. This year...

From the recipes in the back of Kerry Greenwood's fifth Corinna Chapman novel, Forbidden Fruit:

Cordial

8 lemons, juice of all and grated rind of three
1 kg white sugar
8 cups boiling water
1 tablespoon tartaric acid
2 tablespoons citric acid

Mix all ingredients together until sugar dissolves. Bottle and seal.
To serve, dilute one in four with water or soda water or, as a special treat, mineral water.
Wonderful with gin...

Cook's notes:
*I hunted up hill and down dale and all over Homer for citric acid and couldn't find it. I substituted Ball's Fruit-Fresh, which is according to the label made in large part from citric acid and I hope and pray accomplishes the same object.
*I substituted cream of tartar for tartaric acid, which Google assures me is the same thing.

Cook's portion:
*I had a little left over after I filled the bottles. I added some water and ice and voila! Lemonade. Divine.

Superingredient: Pomegranate Molasses

From The Awl:

To read the article in full, with recipes, click here.

And click here to read the post I wrote on cooking with pomegranate molasses at home, which I've been doing since I got back from Turkey last spring.

Eighty-three rules for eating well? Eighty-THREE??

I remember when I got to the end of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma thinking, "Well, what the hell CAN I eat, then?" Although the mental image of that potato farmer covered in fertilizer did stick, to the point that I started growing my own potatoes, I was pretty much done with Pollan lecturing me on how everything I buy in a supermarket contributes to the destruction of Planet Earth, and will probably give me cancer besides. I can handle bad news, but not with every mouthful.

So I skipped Food Rules when it first came out in 2009. Then came this edition two years later, which is illustrated by Maira Kalman, whose work I know from her marvelous illustrated blogs in the New York Times. I, too, am in love with A. Lincoln. How could I not at least look at a book she illustrated?

I didn't just look, I bought, and I'm glad I did, although, I must say, Pollan almost lost me on page 20:

Food Rules distills this body of wisdom into eighty-three simple rules for eating healthily and happily.

Eighty-three rules? Eighty-THREE? Are you KIDDING me? I have to memorize eighty-three rules to eat well? What, I'm supposed to take an 83-item checklist with me every time I go to the store? I don't care how simple the rules are, there is no way I'm going to be able to remember, let alone follow eighty-three of them.

Maira's illustration of mom-and-daughter cooks standing on a porch kept the book in my hand instead of flying across the room into a corner, there to lay until it was ready to put in the library donation box in the garage. I turned the page. Pollan writes

I've collected these adages about eating from a wide variety of sources.

which is a vast understatement. Evidently many people took the first edition of Food Rules seriously to heart. The adages contained therein had propagated themselves spontaneously into the wild. Nutritionists, dieticians, mothers, grandmothers wrote in with more sayings promoting eating well. The result is an updated version with the aforesaid, and brilliant, illustrations of Maira Kalman, which make the whole endeavor much more, uh, palatable, at least to me.

Still. Eighty-three rules. Come on. Although he does redeem himself a little by saying

There is no need to learn or memorize them all...Adopt whichever ones stick and work best for you.

Okay.



The book is divided into three chapters, with subheadings from his now-famous saying. I extract the ones that mean most to me below.

I. Eat Food

2. Don't Eat Anything Your Great Grandmother Wouldn't Recognize as Food
I think my great-great grandmother was the one who traveled the Oregon Trail. Pretty sure she wouldn't know a bag of Cheetos if she saw one.
7. Avoid Food Products Containing Ingredients That a Third-Grader Cannot Pronounce
I went immediately to the cupboard and pulled out my box of Triscuits, my favorite cracker. "WHOLE GRAIN SOFT WHITE WINTER WHEAT, SOYBEAN OIL, SALT." No more than two syllables per word. Whew.
11. Eat Only Foods That Will Eventually Rot
The vegetable drawer in my refrigerator is filled with plants that can rot. Too many do. Not only should you buy foods that will eventually rot, you should also eat them. Preferably before that happens.
22. It's Not Food if It Arrived Through the Window of Your Car
I haven't been to a McDonald's since my niece Esther graduated from high school. I'm covered here.

II. Mostly Plants

30. Eat Animals That Have Themselves Eaten Well
My freezer is filled with moose and deer liver, salmon, halibut and shrimp, all of it hunted or fished in Alaska. Covered.
37. Sweeten and Salt Your Food Yourself
Have you ever eaten a Hot Pocket? I tried one once and it was so salty I literally couldn't swallow it. Sweetened yogurt makes me gag, you might as well be eating cotton candy. Processed foods are so heavily saturated with salt and sugar that I find them inedible. If you don't notice this, it's because you've dulled your taste buds eating them. I'm a hundred percent with Pollan on this.
40. Make Water Your Beverage of Choice
Always has been. Covered.

III. Not Too Much

53. Pay More, Eat Less
Support your local farmer's market. My only problem here is, well, winter.
54. ...Eat Less
Sigh.
57. If You're Not Hungry Enough to Eat an Apple, Then You're Probably Not Hungry
One of the seminal memories from my childhood is of my mother eating an apple a day. She had dentures, so she'd quarter and core it, but not peel it, and eat it before she went to work in the morning. Mind you, these were horrible apples, one of only two or three fruits that made it all the way to the grocery store in Seldovia, arriving mealy and dry and tasteless. But she ate one every day. I try to.
82. Cook
I didn't start cooking until I was in my thirties. It's not only good for your body and for the environment, it's good for your soul, a creative endeavor that pays off the very same day. Or not. I regard anything that comes out well from my oven as a minor miracle. I do better on top of the stove.
83. Break the Rules Once in a While
Salvation.