Everything but the cheese was home grown

Practiced a little "kitchen archeology" a couple of days ago and unearthed a jar of homegrown walnuts from my "uncle of the heart" Lajos, who lives on a small farm in Hungary and brings produce a couple of times a year.

So I went out into the garden and deadheaded my five sweet basil plants (if it bolts, i.e. develops flowers, the flavor changes, so you have to pinch off the flowers at this time of year). Pulled up 5 enormous cherry belle radishes and made a pesto, using walnut oil instead of olive oil. Sauteed some new snow peas from the oregon sugar pods that just started to fruit, a couple of large mustard greens and the radish greens. Added all to a lovely fettucini from World Market (they have really good fettucini), crumbled some more walnuts on top.

As my previous post averred, this is one of the joys of backyard gardening, joined to a fearless approach to cooking. I had never heard of a pesto made with radishes, but I know that pesto is just a "paste" (literal translation) made of vegetables, oil, hard cheese, and nuts. So why NOT a radish pesto?

Radish Basil Pesto Sauce

* 5 medium radishes, diced
* 1/4 cup walnuts
* 2-3 cloves garlic
* 1 cup fresh basil
* 1/4 cup olive or nut oil
* 1/4 cup grated fresh Parmesan

Toast the walnuts and garlic (200F/90C for 5 to 8 minutes).

Place the radishes, walnuts, garlic and basil in the food processor and pulse about 7 to 10 times, until the ingredients are grated, not pureed. Add enough oil to moisten the ingredients and pulse again until blended. My food processor is one of those 3-cup ones, so at this point I moved the pesto into a bowl, but you can mix the cheese right in the food processor if there's room. Add the freshly grated Parmesan and mix it by hand. Taste and season the pesto with kosher salt, as necessary. Don't use pepper with this recipe, as it will mask the peppery flavor of the radishes.

Makes about 2 cups.

Spoon onto fresh, hot pasta to taste. Important that the pasta is hot, because it will soften the pesto. If the pasta is too cool, the pesto will just be in nasty lumps. For additional culinary and aesthetic interest, add sauteed greens and or green beans, diced roasted or sauteed squash, or a diced fresh tomato (or all of them!).

The pesto also makes a terrific condiment for sandwiches.

Ten minutes to yum

One of my favorite things about gardening is walking through when I get home from work, to see what I can harvest, and then figure out what to cook from that. Today I had 2 dozen snow peas, some regular peas I had saved in the fridge, a couple big mustard greens (sliced into strips) and an onion. Sauteed them with a chicken chipotle sausage, then tossed it in the skillet with orzo pasta and boiled the whole thing in a broth I made from carrot greens (1 cup of orzo and 3 cups of broth. Boil until there's just a little liquid left). Add a little cream, seasoned it with dried orange zest and coriander.

Heritage

My mother was Greek, so I grew up eating and cooking Greek. My father’s food heritage—Irish and Swedish—got short shrift. The only thing we ever ate that might have come from his childhood was Zweibach, a nasty, tasteless bread with the texture of stale cardboard. It might have been Swedish, I can’t imagine why we ate it otherwise.

Shepherd’s Pie is sauteed chopped meat layered with green beans and topped with mashed potatoes. It was a staple of my mother’s menu and a childhood favorite. My kids love it too; it’s one of the dishes they request when they come briefly home.

The funny thing is, I never knew it was a Greek dish. I happened upon the recipe one day when leafing through my Greek cookbook. Discovering this gave me a wonderful feeling of continuity. This is how culture descends through the ages. I never saw my mother use a recipe for this dish, and when I started making it, I simply copied what I saw her doing, with an innovation or two of my own. But the basic dish has probably descended in my family from mother to daughter for generations.

Food can be a beautiful thing.

Shepherd’s Pie

3-5 medium russet potatoes
1/2-2/3 cup milk, half-and-half or cream
1 egg

1 pound of ground chuck for each two people eating
medium onion, diced
1-2 T flour
seasoning: thyme, parsley, oregano or mint (dried works best)
salt and pepper

Preheat over to 350

Peel, cut and boil the potatoes for mashing. When the potatoes come to a boil, start the meat layer. Saute the diced onions in water until all the liquid is gone, add the meat. When the meat is about halfway done, add the dried herb (only one of the ones suggested, but they all work with this dish), and salt-pepper to taste. Finish frying the meat until it is cooked through and dredge with flour. Spoon about 1/2 to 1 cup of the boiling water from the potatoes onto the meat and heat it, stirring constantly, until it forms a thick gravy (this will happen fairly quickly. Don’t walk away). Put the meat into a prepared casserole (buttered or cooking sprayed).

Drain the potatoes and leave them in the pot (no sense dirtying another pot). Add the milk and egg and mash (quickly before the egg can cook). The egg gives the potatoes a nice color and body. Add salt to taste and mash to your preferred consistency (if you like a very smooth mashed potato use a beater, otherwise a masher and fork are fine). The potatoes should be wetter than you might want for a side dish, since they’ll bake for 25 minutes and you don’t want them to get dry.

Layer the potatoes over the meat and bake uncover for 25 minutes.

Traditional shepherd’s pie as a layer of blanched green beans over the meat; however my kids never liked it that way, so I serve the vegetable as a side dish.

More snow peas than you can shake a wok at

The trick to urban subsistence gardening is keeping the yields from overwhelming you. You want to harvest a couple-three meals a day, not 40 all at once, or you either spend all your time trying to preserve things (and store them), or you end up throwing out or giving away too much produce. And as you can see, at this time of year, you get a lot of produce.

I did pretty well this year, largely due to the great management tools at MyFolia.com, which helped with planning out successions.

So, as the title of the post says, I do have an awful lot of snow peas, but the first planting is just about done, just in time for the first of the green beans to ripen. If those act true to past behavior, they should be done just about when the second snow pea planting matures.

But in the meantime, I’ve started running out of things to do with snow peas. (Harvest so far-- about 30 servings.) We’ve had a couple of stir fries and a plain side dish. My son got some, and another impoverished friend just out of college is getting some tomorrow. For the remaining 2 dozen or so in my fridge, I used a altered version of this recipe from Everyday Foods, but didn't have the ingredients. So I used what I had (like all good cooks).

Fettucini with snow peas and salami

12 ounces fettuccine
1 tablespoon butter
1 small onion, finely chopped (1/4 cup)
2/3 cup heavy cream
Fresh snow peas, strings removed
8 slices salami (about 4 ounces total), halved lengthwise and thinly sliced crosswise, about 1 cup
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for serving (optional)

Set large pot of salted water to boil (4 quart pot)

Meanwhile, make sauce: In a large skillet, melt butter over medium-low heat; add onion or shallot and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add snow peas and sauté until bright green. Add cream, salami ; bring to a gentle simmer over medium heat. Simmer 3 to 4 minutes. Add lemon juice, continue to simmer.

Cook pasta until al dente, according to package instructions. (Some fettucinis take only 3-5 minutes. Don’t overcook!) Reserve 1 cup pasta water; drain pasta and return to pot.
Add enough reserved pasta water to thin sauce as desired. Pour sauce over pasta; add Parmesan, and season generously with salt and pepper. Serve immediately; top with additional Parmesan, if desired.

Cool dish for a hot day

The spinach, which never really grew, bolted, so I cut it all back. Just enough, supplemented with a store-bought lettuce and potatoes, and garnished with nasturtium flowers and salad burnet, for a lovely nicoise.

Salad nicoise a la Xan

Spinach
Head lettuce
Salad burnet
Nasturtium flowers
Small red potatoes
Olives
Tuna (fresh is nice, but canned is cheaper. Get a dolphin-safe brand)
Vinaigrette

Blanche the spinach and burnet (very quickly-- boiling water, spinach goes in and immediately back out). Arrange artistically (very important) with other ingredients. Drizzle with vinaigrette to taste. If my tarragon and parsley were large enough to cut some fresh, I'd garnish with these herbs, but alas, still no herbs in the garden big enough to bother.

I also must confess, I had no small red potatoes and used roughly cubed Idahos instead. My bad.

I had some nasturtium flowers left over, so I made some cheese and crackers. Something tells me my kids (for whom I ostensibly write this) are not going to be making these.

Cooking, NOT from the garden

"redloon" over at MyFolia made a salad with garden greens and strawberries, which inspired me to try my hand at creating a slaw to go with the crab cakes I had prepared. These ingredients (most of which are actually in my garden) are all store-bought, because they aren't ripe yet out back.

Strawberry-leek slaw

• 1 cup sliced leeks
• 1 small baby bok choy
• 1/2 teaspoon ginger, fresh grated

• 1 tablespoon remoulade
• 1 teaspoon orange zest (fresh or dried)
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 tablespoons lime juice (fresh is best)
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper, fresh ground

• 2 cups strawberries, thinly sliced
• 1 cup celery cabbage

Sautee first 3 ingredients until leeks are golden. Toss with thinly sliced strawberries. Add additional ingredients to the remoulade and whip. Mix with vegetables & strawberries and set aside at least one hour. Serve as side dish with crab cakes.

This dish did not keep well, eat it when you make it.

Cooking from the garden

I started this journal because my daughter is a performer on a three-year tour, cooking on a hot plate in hotel rooms, and she wanted to be able to make some of our family recipes. So the early recipes are all stove-top, or things that can be adapted to stove top. But that leaves out lasagna, and casseroles, and baked chicken, and too many things, so I thought, well my son can use this too!

And then I started this year’s garden.

As I mentioned last time, in the summer all of our meals come from the garden. Meat consumption plummets as the plants get going. So I’ve decided to join the legion of Chicago garden bloggers and start posting about the garden, and about the food I make from it. I’ll try to keep it linked to the cooking for now (all food gardeners are cooks) but who knows.

Thanks for inspiration to my many, many friends on the MyFolia community garden blog, and to MrBrownThumb, who knows about it, and to YouGrowGirl and MySkinnyGarden, where I lurk.

Stir Fried Garden Vegetables







Ingredients for a cooking gardener are “what is in the garden today?” This batch:

From the garden:
Early spinach
Mustard greens
Sugar snap snow peas
Wild onion greens
Broccoli

From the cupboard:
Onion
Almond slivers
3 slices of bacon
rice

For tips on stir fry, see Rock stars need to eat, too.