Tag Archives: pesto

I’ll See Your Pesto and Raise You an Arugula

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ASA pesto Every garden, every growing season, has its bumper crops, those wildly successful experiments that you can’t anticipate ahead of time. (Just ask my mother, who has been frantically cooking, freezing and foisting tomatoes upon anyone who comes near her. Actually, maybe you shouldn’t ask her, or even get near her, unless you’re prepared to make gazpacho.) In our household, it’s arugula that keeps growing and growing, almost faster than we can use it. So, to the rescue, comes one of our favorite new easy dinners: arugula pesto.

A delicious pesto is not the territory of basil alone. It’s true that you could substitute arugula for basil in the most familiar of pesto recipes (pine nuts, garlic, parmesan), but why stop there? In fact, pesto means paste, so you should feel free add any manner of deliciousness, blend it to a paste and call it pesto. I’ve come up with a couple of variations to get you started.

A quick word on measurements: one of the real pleasures of pesto is that you just keep dropping things into the food processor until you taste it and become convinced that you are a culinary genius. Far be it from me to rob you of that magical experience. So I’ll give you some very general guidelines for enough pesto for two big portions of pasta, but really, the best thing to do is to taste it frequently throughout until you feel like eating big gobs of it with a spoon. Then you’re done.

A.S.A Pesto (Arugula, Sun-dried Tomatoes, Asiago) Continue reading →

Food and Death on the Small Screen (or TV with a Side of Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto)

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sopranosAlright, I admit it: I like watching television while I eat dinner. I KNOW, okay? I am single-handedly destroying the time-honored tradition of family suppers, and Jason and I will probably forget how to have actual conversations, and the world is going to hell in a hand basket. And yes, I, too, hate the zombie-like stare-at-the-screen epidemic of the modern era. But, but, but…I like coming home from a frenzied New York City day and cooking dinner and letting myself be hypnotized for a little while.

Jason and I excuse this guilty pleasure by telling ourselves that at least we watch good TV. And it really is a grand age for television dramas, isn’t it? We don’t have cable, so most of our viewing takes the form of gobbling up the latest DVD releases of shows like Game of Thrones or Homeland or Mad Men or (R.I.P.) Breaking Bad. But I like the “classics,” too. I’ve sat through two viewings of Deadwood and I’m not above a third. And when I heard that Jason had never seen all of The Sopranos, the show that ushered in this golden television epoch, we went back to the pilot and started from there.

It’s funny; after my first viewing of The Sopranos, six or seven years ago, most of what stuck with me was the violence, but this time it’s the food that really stands out. Everyone, even the skinny teenaged daughter, is constantly packing away the ziti and manicotti and cannoli and other Italian foodstuffs ending in “I” that I can’t hope to spell correctly. It’s like they’re defying death with the stuff of life. In the last episode we watched, the recent-immigrant cousin Furio expertly formed a massive ball of mozzarella cheese (baby-soft, lily-white, the closest cheese approximation of mother’s milk), while pulling on a cigarette and almost ashing into the bowl. Then he went and beat some people up. Life and death, man, life and death.

Anyway, you shouldn’t try to take on The Sopranos without the proper sustenance. Here’s a recipe for a sun-dried tomato and walnut pesto that’s hearty and delicious and will leave you yearning for the next episode.

Sun-Dried Tomato and Walnut Pesto Continue reading →

Hurricane Food: Chili Tips from the Midst of Sandy’s Formidable Clutches

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chili!Believe me when I say that I am not trying to make light of anyone’s storm hardships, but let’s face facts: there’s a lot of boredom that goes hand-in-hand with weather catastrophes. Ever since the subways shut down last night, there has been a good deal of thumb-twiddling here in Brooklyn while we count our canned goods, watch storm porn on weather.com (NEW! IMAGES OF SANDY’S WRATH) and wait for the damn thing to finally hit land. An unexpected side effect of that boredom is that Jason and I, unhampered by the burdens of actually earning money this Monday morning, have been eating unusually well.

Jason rescued bags full of basil from the possibly-doomed hoop house yesterday, and then set about producing vast amounts of pesto that we have been gulping down with the last gasp of the year’s tomato crop and anything from the refrigerator that would pain us too much to see spoil. Today I whipped up a big batch of chili. Chili might just be the perfect hurricane food: should the power go, we can warm it up on the stove, and should the gas go, it is not too disgusting eaten cold. Besides, that article in this weekend’s NYT magazine about those crazy-old Greek people indicated that we should all eat more beans. So take that, Sandy!

Here are some chili tips for you, whether you’re in the middle of a hurricane or not: Continue reading →