Update: Homemade Green Tea

As I briefly men­tioned in my first green tea post I really don’t like brew­ing my tea into/with plas­tic. Sim­i­lar to my rea­sons for get­ting rid of our microwave over eight years ago, I just get the hee­bie jee­bies these days about ingest­ing food or liq­uid which was sur­rounded by any kind of plas­tic espe­cially if it was heated/cooked/brewed etc. in or around plas­tic. Because of my feel­ings on this mat­ter, I am try­ing lit­tle by lit­tle to rid our kitchen of all plas­tic items which have inert alter­na­tives.¹ So when the plas­tic pitcher which came with my tea maker broke yet again last week, I was forced with a deci­sion: obtain yet another plas­tic pitcher by means of order­ing a new one online², search thrift stores for a plas­tic pitcher with lim­ited chances for suc­cess, buy a new whole machine at a poorly-lit dis­count store³ or search around for a glass or stain­less steel alter­na­tive I could buy that day for the all impor­tant imme­di­ate sat­is­fac­tion. I opted for try­ing to find a per­son­ally more prefer­able replacement.

Con­tinue reading »

1. cof­feemaker is next on the list [↩]
2. wait­ing over a week for deliv­ery [↩]
3. all of which I have done sev­eral times [↩]

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Yum! Homemade Pesto Bruschetta

At the end of April, Brian told me about the annual plant sale at the ASU Depart­ment of Biol­ogy Green­house. I had heard about this in the past and couldn’t wait to go so I could get some plants. I wanted a cou­ple of ferns but mostly longed for fresh herb plants for my kitchen win­dow shelf so I could spon­ta­neously add fresh herbs while cook­ing. When I got there they had so much to choose from that I would have gone way over­board if I hadn’t stop myself from get­ting one of every­thing they had. I bought some basil, oregano, spinach, arugula, mesclun let­tuce, and tomato plants as well as some ferns. I have from time to time added fresh oregano to spaghetti sauce, mixed in some arugula and mesclun let­tuce with my salad and I can’t wait to enjoy some toma­toes from the tomato plants but by far my most favorite cre­ation from the plants I acquired would have to be the pesto bruschetta I made one week­end afternoon.

Since a friend of mine had shared with me some pesto a while ago, I had been want­ing to make some of my own. We needed an appe­tizer before lunch and decided I would try to make some pesto, which was sim­i­lar to a tra­di­tional top­ping for bruschetta, to go with the last bit of yummy spinach feta bread we had left­over from our local bak­ery. I searched “the g**gle” for a pesto recipe and decided to use this one.

I was a lit­tle sur­prised we actu­ally had every­thing I needed to make it but that is begin­ning to be more and more com­mon as I exper­i­ment more with cook­ing. To make pesto which looks more like a bruschetta top­ping, use chopped ver­sions of all the non-liquid ingre­di­ents, instead of fol­low­ing the pesto recipe instructions.

• 2 cups fresh basil leaves, packed
• 1/4 cup grated Parme­san cheese
• 1/2 cup Olive oil
• 3 table­spoons pine nuts or walnuts
• 3 gar­lic cloves, finely minced

Place basil leaves in small batches in food proces­sor and whip until well chopped (do about 3/4 cup at a time). Add about 1/3 the nuts and gar­lic, blend again.
Add about 1/3 of the Parme­san cheese; blend while slowly adding about 1/3 of the olive oil, stop­ping to scrape down sides of con­tainer.
Process basil pesto it forms a thick smooth paste. Repeat until all ingre­di­ents are used, mix all batches together well. Serve over pasta. Basil pesto keeps in refrig­er­a­tor one week, or freeze for a few months.

While tech­ni­cally I may not have made text­book ver­sions of pesto or bruschetta, it sure did taste good.

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Natural Dishwasher Soap

So, tonight I ran out of my reg­u­lar dish­washer deter­gent unex­pect­edly. I loaded the dish­washer full ear­lier in the day but hadn’t real­ized I used the last of what was left in the box the day before. I usu­ally use Sev­enth Gen­er­a­tion brand which does a good job and they do pro­vide coupons for their prod­ucts but hav­ing run out and not want­ing to go to the store for just one item I searched around for a nat­ural dish­washer soap recipe. I found just what I was look­ing for at Nature Moms. This recipe calls for castille soap, water, white vine­gar, tea tree oil and fresh lemon juice. I just hap­pened to have all of these ingre­di­ents on hand except for the fresh lemon juice for which I sub­sti­tuted lemon essen­tial oil. I really enjoy mak­ing other house­hold clean­ers and this one might just have to stick around. CAUTION: A low-sudsing soap like castille is the ONLY soap that should be used and NOT reg­u­lar dish­wash­ing liq­uid as it foams up way too much and you could end up with a mess on your hands (or rather all over your floor). I found sev­eral other recipes all using borax (wash­ing soda) and bak­ing soda and I plan to try these as well. I had no idea that such a sim­ple and nat­ural alter­na­tive to com­mer­cial dish­washer deter­gents lay inside my cab­i­nets all this time.

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