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
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