Peace Through Pesto Pappardelle

It’s been a little while, well about 2 weeks to be exact, since I last wrote. To get a little personal here, my mind has been absolutely consumed by the sheer thought of moving away from Seattle, (where I would live, how I would live etc.) and at the time the idea of sitting down to write about slow food and cooking was like pulling teeth. See, I was really upset about it all and couldn’t figure out why, until I realized last week that I actually don’t have to move if I don’t want to. I know that sounds a bit crazy with how simple it is, but I never really gave myself that option. The truth is, is that I have been working so hard for the past two years to elevate my career and “make something of myself”, but along the way I lost sight a bit of my personal priorities and suddenly my career objectives became bigger and bigger, and morphed into something was definitely not me. Anyway, long soul searching story short, I have basically taken the past few weeks to concentrate on what makes me happy, one of which is cooking (I think the full list is cooking, yoga, friends/family and love, but that is a blog post for another day). So I have cooked, and cooked, and then cooked some more, some nights until the early hours of the morning. (Seriously, I was up until past 2am the other night roasting tomatoes, ridiculous!) I have made salmon, scallops, crab cakes, homemade pasta, tomato sauce, pesto, scones, quiches, crepes, frittatas, jam, jellies, cookies and ice cream, as well as pickling fresh beets, carrots, onions and zucchini. I even revived my herb garden and planted a fig tree! Cooking and all the steps leading up to cooking (sourcing, shopping etc.) is like a form of mediation for me. In a way, my personal mini-crisis is your gain and I am so happy to share all the tips and ideas with you! I have also thought a lot about what I want to do with this blog. I would like to continue to share recipes but also I would love to share also some of the interesting things I have been learning more about, like, how safe is raw milk? And what are the health benefits? And is the type of milk that is sold in the stores actually good for us? Anyway, l have learned that I have some very serious “hippie-tendencies” (as a few girlfriends like to tell me) and I will write about them here if you are game. But for today, pesto and pasta….

First up,

Pesto Pappardelle

I honestly do not know how Alice Waters does it. She lives without a food processor, mortar and pestle only. When I read this, being the AW devotee that I am, I thought, well if Alice can make delicious and amazing food with only a mortar and pestle, so can I. So I bought a beautiful mortar and pestle and was excited to try my hand at it with pesto, a la AW.

It did not go as well as planned. Pesto is NOT a hard thing to make. You have 6 basic ingredients (or 5 if you omit the pine nuts): Basil, garlic, salt, pine nuts, parmesan cheese and extra-virgin olive oil, and it is all about getting these things in the right proportions. (I am a firm believer in the fact too that if you grind garlic too long in the food processor, it can become bitter, so watch out for that.) However, my end product using the mortar and pestle seemed to resemble some sort of dark fern smoothie.

Alice’s recipe goes like this:

1. Grind 1 garlic clove and some salt together in the mortar and pestle
2. Add ¼ c. pine nuts and continue to pound
3. Add ¼ c. of parmesan cheese and pound
4. Transfer this mixture to another bowl
5. Take 1 c. of lightly packed basil leaves and coarsely chop
6. Put basil leaves in mortar and pestle and pound to a paste.
7. Add back pine nut mixture and gradually pour in ½ c. of extra virgin olive oil
8. Taste, and add more salt if necessary.

This might sound easy enough, but let me assure you, it is not. Step six of grinding the pesto leaves to a paste did not work out so well for me. Maybe I am just weak and Alice has more upper body strength than me, but I found this impossible. Everything else worked well though. I added about 4 garlic cloves instead of just 1, and I doubled the amount of parmesan cheese (bc, why not?).

Later when I made a second attempt at this pesto, I used a food processor for step 6, along with the substitutions I mentioned and the pesto turned out as pesto should! Beautiful and bright green (I swear its much brighter, the right side one that is, than this picture shows!) Not, some crazy mixture of dying basil leaves…

 And clearly, what better to eat with fresh pesto? Uhh.. but fresh pasta of course!! And this is an easy-as-pie recipe that I think we have mentioned before of simply flour and eggs. I mixed up 2 whole eggs and 2 egg yolks (all room temperature, very important) and basically added bit by bit of to 2 c. of white unbleached flour that I had mixing in my handy-dandy mixer, until everything was incorporated. Once incorporated, I kneaded the dough a few times on a floured surface and set aside in plastic wrap for an hour or so.

Later I rolled out the dough, separated it into 3 or 4 long rectangular strips and used my new pasta maker to roll out some lasagna sheet and cut them into long large noodles (which were borderline too big), but nonetheless, they turned out beautifully and I ate a batch with both the sad basil-death pesto, and the beautifully crisp and fresh basil. You can make your choice as to which one looks more appetizing!

Bon Appetite!

Total Prep/Cooking Time: Pesto: 15-20 min & Pasta: 10 min + 1 hour of pasta sitting + pasta kneading/rolling/cutting and cooking 30 min

Total Cost: roughly $15-20

quazi-vegetarianism, complete with a burger

I certainly don’t claim to be a full on vegetarian, but for all intensive purposes I am one, in theory. I basically reserve the right not to eat food that I don’t know where it came from and for me, meat is the scariest. See, I have done a lot of reading over the past few years about the food industry in this country (notably: Omnivore’s Dilemma, Animal Vegetable Miracle, Slow Food Nation, In Defense of Food, & Eating Animals). All touch on various aspects of factory-farming and the awful resulting consequences. It was Omnivore’s Dilemmas that taught me all about what was in the vast majority of the meat is in the US (corn & oil) and because after all, we are what we eat, animals too are what they eat, and when we eat animals, we are what they eat; and I certainly I have no interest in being any part oil or hybrid corn.
Eating Animals was the last book that I read and the one that really set me over the edge as the book really got down to the way the animals were grown, treated and processed. But let’s get something straight, I am not really the type to think hunting is murder, but I do care about the way we treat them. I think that even though we might just be raising cattle, hogs and chickens on farms for the sole purpose of food, they deserve a respectful life. We treat them as a commodity now in this country, and their environments and ways of life that have been drastically altered over the past 50 years. Did you know that the largest contributor to environmental pollution and climate change are the factory farms where cattle/chickens/hogs are stuffed with hybrid-corn (not the corn that is sold fresh in stores, but the type that is inedible to us and raised in the Midwest on mostly oil & pesticides), and injected with hormones to grow faster and fatter? This meat is the stuff for sale at Costco, Safeway, QFC, Kroger and Whole Foods- most of the places that we traditionally have bought food and in most of the places we eat out, unless otherwise noted.

This begs the question, what happened to cattle that feed on grass (which their bodies are designed by nature to do), the chickens that were able to roam and develop the use of their legs, or the hogs that were able to play in the mud and lead active lives? We made them go away. We have basically demanded the factory-farms into existence because as Americans we have wanted more meat and at lower prices. This country eats more meat than any civilization, ever, and weird too that our generation might be the first to have a lower life expectancy than our parents or grandparents. I am not saying that meat is the only concern, but it’s time that we became responsible and know what’s in our food.

So that is basically a snidbit of why I claim quazi-vegetarian status. I just have to know what is in my food and where it comes from. I want to be able to respectfully decline food if I can’t figure out what’s in it. This somewhat infuriated my parents when I first announced it since they interpreted it as some food not being good enough for me (I believe the term they used was “snob”). But the more we have talked about the more they have become interested in it, enough so that the other day they announced that they were buying ½ cow (slaughtered) from some friends up the road who raised their cattle solely on grass. :) Change is happening... I just love chatting with people at farmers markets about how they raise and produce their food. That being said, I love me some tasty meat, if I know where it comes from and what it has been fed. I had the opportunity once to go down to Argentina, where the meat there is all literally free-range and grass feed. It was amazingly delicious and had more favor than anything I had ever had in the states (go figure).

So last week, in my relatively new state of quazi-vegetarianism, I was craving a burger. I believe cravings too are some sort of barometer of what your body needs, and sometime we all need a burger! Granted I perhaps would not give in to every ice cream/chocolate/cake craving I have, I try and give into what feels right, and at this point, for whatever reason, I was absolutely CRAVING a burger.

So I set out to the Queen Anne farmers market and there found some fresh meat, cheese, lettuce and bread, all of which are critical ingredients for what I was craving. The meat was from a farmer up in Skagit valley whose cattle ate grass all year round, never any corn, and never any hormones or antibiotics. The cheese was also from there and I sampled about ten of her cheese before I found just the right one. :) Then the lettuce was just romaine from a local organic farmer, and the bread was from a local bakery.

I don’t feel like I need to go through the steps of making a burger here as I feel this is somewhat common knowledge (but let me know if you need help). I basically grilled the burger for about 4 minutes each side on an outdoor grill (about medium-rare), toasted the bread on the stove in a pan, ripped apart some lettuce, coated one side of the bread with some leftover aioli and the other with some HFCS-free ketchup (because let’s face-it, what’s a burger without ketchup?). There you have it, that easy. And you know what? It was simply fantastic.

Total Prep/Cooking Time: 5-10min

Total Cost: $20 (with enough for about 2-3 burgers or more)

Funny story: Last weekend I was at a new restaurant in Ballard whose head chef is fairly famous and was working the kitchen that night. I wanted to know where the chicken came from for a certain dish so our waiter went and asked him. He didn’t know. I thought: "Interesting, he should know" and respectfully declined ordering the dish. But then I don’t think the situation was helped when Tracy asked if the chickens also played Sudoku when and if they were roaming freely… way, to mock me T!

So yes, I might be annoying with my "I gotta know where the food comes from", but I believe that by asking it will help make it clearer to shopkeepers and food providers that more and more people care, and this will help change the way food is produced in this country. And if you haven't seen it already, please stop whatever you are doing and go watch Food Inc (you can rent it on itunes)...

Next up on the blog: Back to the basics with Alice.