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.

Filed under photography | Comment (0)

My Green Tea Recipe

I have been mak­ing my own tea for about one year now. I searched and searched for an alter­na­tive to our pre­vi­ous main bev­er­age expe­ri­ence which was a national brand of green tea sold in gal­lon quan­ti­ties using a cheap sweet­ener called high fruc­tose corn syrup. I have worked hard to remove this ingre­di­ent from our diet which is not a really easy thing to do because it is in just about every­thing. This was the last prod­uct con­tain­ing this ingre­di­ent on our weekly gro­ceries list. Then I found agave syrup in our local health food store. This is a great alter­na­tive sweet­ener and just the thing I needed to begin mak­ing my own green tea.

The recipe I have come to make almost daily is as follows:

• 2 TBSP (heap­ing*) Ban­cha Green Tea Leaves
• 5/8 — 1 cup honey
• 3/8 cup agave syrup
• 2 cap­sules pow­dered gin­seng or 20–30 drops of liq­uid ginseng
• water

Right now, I make tea using a 3 quart Mr. Cof­fee Iced Tea Maker how­ever, I would love to acquire this teapot some­time in the future to heat the water and steep the tea. I mea­sure the tea leaves and pour into the brew bas­ket. Fill the machine full of water. Pour the honey and agave syrup into the bot­tom of the tea pitcher. I do not mea­sure out the honey so the above amounts are esti­mated and will need to be adjusted based on your taste. Occa­sion­ally, if I run out of the agave syrup I find that just adding more honey makes the tea sweet enough to drink. I brew and steep the tea in the pitcher. When the tea leaves have cooled to a rea­son­able enough tem­per­a­ture to han­dle I squeeze the remain­ing tea out of the tea leaves and dis­card the leaves in my com­post pile. Be care­ful not to let the brewed tea cool down too much. You want the brewed tea to still be warm so you can stir the honey at the bot­tom of the pitcher so it blends with the tea; the honey is eas­ier to blend when the tea is still hot. Pour mix­ture into 1 gal­lon sized con­tainer or 2 half gal­lon con­tain­ers (prefer­ably glass or other pitcher made of inert mate­ri­als). Fill pitcher full with ice cubes and/or cold water. Enjoy!

If this recipe doesn’t make you want to drink some then here are 7 seven more rea­sons to enjoy a nice cup of green tea.

* I chose the amount of tea leaves to brew based on the fact that the tea syrup it brews can be mixed with enough water to make 1 gal­lon of very deli­cious “iced” or cold tea.

Filed under food, photography | Comments (2)

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.

Filed under coupons, environment, homemaking | Comment (0)