Basil and 2 delicious spreads

We recently had a hail storm here in PA with hail the size of quarters or even ping-pongs, so a lot of my plants and herbs got bruised and many of leaves were shredded a bit, so I'm hoping that they recover and keep doing as well as the were before the storm. With gardening, it's always something!!

Basil is one of my favorite herbs to grow, largely because I love pesto. I love to make pesto during the summer and then pop it in the freezer to use all year long. I've already shared a recipe for pesto and a few tips for adding spinach here, but I wanted to post an original photo instead of the photo I borrowed from Cooking Light. As you can see from the photo, I use very little olive oil, but you can add to taste. I like to make it with very little oil initially, so that I am free to use pesto as a spread, a flavorful addition to soups (just add it by the tablespoonful), or as a sauce for pasta or pizza. If you're using it as a sauce, you can add more oil, or to keep it lower in fat, you can add a bit of chicken stock and maybe even a little half and half for a creamier texture.

Pesto

Pesto is one of my favorite ways to use basil, but I recently found another spread that is just wonderful. It's sort of a morphing of pesto and hummus. This spread comes from Moosewood Restaurant Simple Suppers. One of the chefs/owners of this collective taught a cooking class this past spring at a local kitchen store and this was the appetizer he prepared. It's delicious and a little different than other spreads I've tried.

Sicilian Chickpea Spread

As with hummus, it starts with a chickpea base, but unlike hummus, there is no tahini. The chickpeas are given a whirl along with basil, olive oil, roasted red peppers, and pine nuts, resulting in a light, creamy spread. Not only are the colors in this spread pleasing to the eye, but all of the flavors blend nicely - each bite seems to reveal a different ingredient - sometimes the basil shines through, sometimes you are more aware of the pine nuts - no one flavor seems to get muddled or lost.

This post will be my submission for this week's Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Kalyn herself. It's another basil submission, but I hope that readers will appreciate another delicious use for this wonderful and versatile herb.

Banana-Oat Pancakes

We had some eggs that needed to be used up this week, and even though I was tempted to try more chocolate-peanut butter combinations, for the sake of my waist-line, I tried a couple of new whole grain pancake recipes.

First up, a recipe from King Arthur's Whole Grain Baking. Seems I never have ripe bananas on hand when I want them, but I've gotten better lately about freezing ripe bananas to use later on for baking. I just peel them, toss them in a ziploc bag and put them in the freezer. When you're ready to use them, they thaw pretty quickly and a few seconds in the microwave can speed along the thawing process quite nicely.

Banana-Oat Pancakes

These pancakes are nice and moist and I really like the addition of cinnamon and nutmeg. I did halve the nutmeg - 1/2 teaspoon for such a small batch of pancakes seemed like far too much and I was glad I did - 1/4 teaspoon was plenty. These pancakes, because they are so moist, tend to take a little longer to cook, so you'll probably want to cook them on lower heat than a regular pancake or they will scorch on the outside before they are completely cooked inside. To jazz the pancakes up, I added some fresh blueberries and pecans, but a few chopped walnuts would also make a very nice addition.

Coming later on...........a new buckwheat pancake recipe...............

Fajitas Revisited

We make these fajitas every summer, at least once. They are great for entertaining - your meat and vegetables marinate overnight, freeing you up to tend to the sides and condiments the day of the party or get-together. It's also nice for a large crowd with various tastes - they get to assemble their food exactly as they would like it and can choose from chicken or beef or they acn skip the meat and go vegetarian, or even shrimp, if you choose to offer it.

Beef and Chicken Fajitas with Peppers and Onions

I've posted about these fajitas before, but didn't get a photo the first time, so it's time to bring these up again and add a photo of my own. These fajitas are very good, but I'd like to branch out and try a new marinade next time. For some reason, these used to taste fantastic to me, but lately, the marinade flavor just isn't coming through and I feel like I can do better. Still, these are very tasty and worth sharing. Again.

More Chocolate and Peanut Butter

You might think the Chocolate Peanut Butter Crunch Cake would satisfy my peanut-butter chocolate craving for a long time to come, but as soon as it was gone, I was craving more. I probably would not have followed up on that craving except that we had a guest coming to spend the night with us and well, I needed to make something for him, right?

I went to my favorite food source, the CLBB, and posted a thread asking for everyone to share their favorite chocolate-peanut butter recipes. It's turning out to be a tasty thread indeed. Joe from Culinary in the Country was one of the CLBB members to respond. I often drool over the baked treats he posts on his blog and I often troll his blog for good baking recipes.

Chocolate and Peanut Butter Filled Peanut Butter Blondies

As expected, these peanut butter blondies did not disappoint. Unlike some peanut butter recipes I have tried, these were not crumbly or dry, but nice and moist. My only complaint is that they did not have a chewier texture. What can I say, I am fixated on chewy. I think the Peanut Butter Brownies I made a while back were closer to the texture I prefer. That said, I would not hesitate to make these again - a moist peanut buttery dough laced with bursts of bittersweet chocolate and more peanut butter. What could be bad about that?

A Fresh Look at an old Salmon Salad

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there!

No SGOTW for me this week. I will be taking a break from it until probably sometime in mid July. It's been fun, but as is often true, life just gets in the way.

After quite a long lull in cooking, I got busy and whipped up quite a few recipes this weekend for an old friend of DH's who was in PA on business and spent the night with us. Some of the recipes were new recipes and some were repeats. I will be re-sharing some of the repeats not only because they are family favorites and worth sharing again, but also because I have improved photos to accompany the recipes.

Ho-hum....boring.....

First up, an oldie but a goodie, Warm Salmon Salad a la Provencal. This really is a terrific summer salad. Fresh, light flavors and to keep the kitchen cool, we throw the salmon on the grill. Not only does it keep the kitchen cool, but any time I can keep fishy smells outside, I'm a happy camper. One of these days, however, I might even remember to add the red onion and the bread with olive paste as written in the original recipe - I always seem to forget that part!

Now that looks much tastier.

I don't generally serve a large piece of salmon with this salad as shown in the photo - I chunk the salmon up and then dress the salad. This not only keeps the protein portions in check (good for the budget), but it allows more of the salmon to soak up the delicious dressing. Speaking of the dressing, the recipe calls for tossing the greens with fresh lemon juice, separate from the dressing - I just put the lemon juice right in the dressing recipe - this makes for a tastier dressing if you have any leftover (which we usually do). This salad is one of our favorite ways to enjoy salmon during the warmer months.

Weekend Herb Blogging #87

My first WHB post! WHB is a weekly event sponsored by Kalyn's Kitchen. This week, however, the even is being hosted by Rachel's Bite. Never heard of WHB? Check out this post for an explanation.

I started blogging about 1 1/2 years ago and since that time, I've not grown any herbs of my own because of our moving around. I suppose I could blog even if I weren't growing my own herbs, but it means a lot more to blog about herbs plucked straight from my own garden, or in this case, containers.

As I indicated on this thread, I'm sticking to just a few small containers for gardening this year while I build a proper plot. I put in 4 basil plants, 2 parsley plants and 2 chive plants. They are all doing quite nicely although temps dropped into the 40s one night and I don't think the basil liked it very much because a few of the leaves turned a bit brown. Still, the stems look healthy and they continue to grow, so I think they'll be just fine as long as temps stay up.

I planted about 3 weeks ago and things seem to be going well:

After the lasagna, garlic bread (made with lots of butter), and the ultra-decadent chocolate-peanut butter cake, it was definitely time for a healthful meal. The weather has been gorgeous lately - more grill weather than lasagna weather, really - so we pulled out the grill to create a grilled chicken salad. This tends to be our go-to meal in the summer since we almost always have chicken breasts in the freezer and salad fixings in the refrigerator. And unlike the lasagna or the cake, this kind of dish requires few if any pots and pans. A welcome break!

What excited me about this salad was not necessarily the salad ingredients (grilled chicken, spinach, cucumber, cherry tomatoes, shredded carrot and red bell pepper), but the dressing. I've started relying pretty heavily on bottled organic salad dressings for convenience, but really, nothing beats a homemade dressing. In the past, I've grown herbs but haven't taken advantage of them enough, so I'm really trying to be mindful of using them on a regular basis.

Anyway, I decided to whip up a quick dressing using some of my herbs and here's what I did:

Lemon Basil Vinaigrette

~3 tablespoons-1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
juice and zest of 1 lemon
freshly ground black pepper to taste (with the lemon and dijon, it really didn't need salt)
~2 tablespoons chopped fresh herbs (I used chives and basil)
1 garlic clove, minced

The Dijon acts as an emulsifier and holds the dressing together very well. The dressing was tart, tangy and refreshing. It made enough to dress 4 large salads.

We kept the chicken simple and just rubbed it with olive oil and then sprinkled it with Kosher salt, freshly ground black pepper and a bit of dried rosemary.

I served the salad with garlic bread leftover from our big birthday dinner to round out the meal. We heated it up on the grill which made it nice and crusty and gave it a few aesthetically pleasing grill marks to boot. The garlic bread featured a garlic-butter sauce that made use of some of our fresh parsley.

I can't wait for later in the summer when our dinner might be featuring our fresh herbs along with maybe some tomatoes and green beans........mmmmm..........

Birthday Dinner

So, I officially have a teenager in the house. AHHHHH! Yep, my first born turned 13 this week. The funny thing is, it's my 9-year-old who ACTS like a teenager. So far things are quite smooth with the "real" teenager, but I suppose things could change.......

Anyway, my teenager chose a birthday dinner of lasagna and for his birthday cake, a decadent peanut butter and chocolate cake. To the lasagna, I added some homemade garlic bread and a tossed salad. I think I was probably looking forward to this dinner as much as he was! If you favor healthful, low-fat meals, you'll want to run screaming from this post immediately. I did not lighten anything here one little bit - full-fat all the way. So consider yourself warned......

I kept the lasagna quite traditional - just a simple, basic lasagna with sweet Italian sausage, ricotta, mozzarella, a bit of Parmesan, and of course, marinara (I used my own recipe). I didn't have a particular recipe in mind, but as I was beginning to assemble the lasagna, I noticed a very basic recipe on the back of the Barilla lasagna noodles. This recipe calls for adding two beaten eggs to the ricotta, something I really like (it gives the filling a nice, rich texture), but never remember to do, so I followed the recipe pretty much to the letter. Mmm...it turned out very nicely. We're having leftovers tonight for dinner....

Lasagna with Meat Sauce

Nothing much special about the garlic bread or salad - just your typical, basic thing, so on to the cake. If you have a chocolate-peanut butter lover, this is something you'll want to try. When you look at the recipe the first time, it looks quite overwhelming. Don't be intimidated - this cake is actually quite straight forward. It does take a while to make - with all the different layers and the chilling times - and it's one of those cakes that dirties every dish and bowl in the kitchen, but no one part is particularly difficult.

Actually, this cake is really a bit more like a pie. There is one cake layer topped with layer after layer of chocolate and peanut butter deliciousness. The first layer is a rich, moist chocolate cake. Next comes a chocolate-peanut butter crunch layer - much like a Nestle crunch bar, but with peanut butter too. The next two layers are mousse layers, first a chocolate mousse, followed by a peanut butter-cream cheese mousse. Lastly the whole thing is iced with a bittersweet ganache. Oh my!

The cake layer gets a little lost under all of the other decadent layers, which is why I really consider this to be more of a pie. You could make a slightly thicker cake layer if you wihs to have more cake with your cake, but you will need to find a different method of constructing this cake. The recipe calls for constructing it in a springform pan - this works very well, but the layers come to the very top of the pan, so if you increase the thickness of the cake layer, you may not be able to use a springform pan.

Whatever you want to call it, it's delicious. Each layer is fabulous in and of itself - combined all in one cake - wow. The amount of ganache is just right - ganache is quite rich, so a thin layer is really all that's needed, in my opinion. The only difficulty I had was getting the whipped cream to combine smoothly into the chocolate and peanut butter mixtures - it took more work to get a smooth consistency than I expected. I think I ended up with a few clumps of chocolate in the chocolate mousse, but, IMO, that's not necessarily a bad thing.....

Chocolate Peanut Butter Crunch Cake

I actually constructed this cake over 3 days because I was very busy and didn't have an entire day to devote to it - I baked the cake layer on the first day, added the crunch layer on the second day and then did the mousse and ganache layers on the third day. The mousse layers need to freeze for 3 hours before adding the ganache, so if you do these 3 layers on the same day, just be sure to allow for the chilling time. This process actually worked quite well for me - at no time did I feel overwhelmed - by stretching it out over several days, I had plenty of time to concentrate on each step.

I don't even want to THINK about how many calories and fat grams were in that meal! We were all pretty stuffed after the lasagna, so we ate very small portions of the cake, but still! As much as I like to eat healthfully, I have to admit that I really look forward to creating and eating these splurge meals.

Up tomorrow........the low-fat grilled chicken salad we made last night to try to counteract all the fat from this birthday dinner............

SGOTW #57: Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2000

While I've been MIA from blogging, I've also been missing out on the SGOTW games! I did get in a quick and simple dish for this week's game sometime earlier this week.

For this week's game, we were to go to cookbook #143 which, for me, turned out to be my Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2000. It was yet another busy night and I needed something healthful (to counteract some of the less-than-healthful eating we've been doing on the run lately), quick and easy. While leafing through the cookbook, I came upon a recipe for grouper or any white fish (I had tilapia on hand) that called for a charmoula (chermoulla, chermoula) sauce. Charmoula is a Moroccan marinade made up largely of parsley - another bonus since the parsley I planted is doing pretty well.

I did have to, as is often the case, change the recipe around a bit. First, I did not have any cilantro on hand, so we skipped it and add more parsley. Instead of using the charmoula as a marinade, I used it as a sauce. I didn't read the recipe correctly and did not have time to marinate the fish first. Besides, the sauce seemed to delicious to simply throw away after marinating the fish. Just as the fish was getting close to being fully cooked (I cooked it on the stovetop in a nonstick skillet), I added the charmoula and simmered it just long enough to heat through. This worked quite well and if I made it again, I'd be tempted to do it the same way.

Tilapia (Grouper) with Charmoula

This is a great sauce for fish - it's very easy to throw together - just toss the ingredients in your blender or food processor and give them a whirl. Simple and delicious.

Don't forget to stop by the CLBB to see what others made for SGOTW #57. Cookieee has posted for SGOTW #58 and the number is 70. Until next week...........

Back to blogging......

Wow. I've let so much time go by without blogging! Things got very busy a couple of weeks ago and I haven't been doing much interesting cooking. Once I get out of the groove of cooking and blogging, it can be hard to get back into it. Ah well, hobbies - like blogging - should be fun and when they're only another thing to "get done", it's time for a break. Actually, we have been cooking, just not trying anything new - quick and easy meals to get us through those busy nights.

Tomorrow is the last day of school for us. I still have a sub job to work on Friday and then the boys and I should be done for the summer. Hopefully that will mean more time to cook, garden and then blog about cooking and gardening.

I have not had a garden the last two summers due to potential moves and actual moves. This year I have the time, but I don't have a proper garden yet. We've been so busy with sports and subbing this spring, that I really did not have time to get a plot going, so I decided to garden in containers. This way I can still grow a few things and then take advantage of my time off this summer to get a plot going, taking my time to do it well.

Here's what I've planted so far:

2 flat leaf Italian parsley

2 chives

4 Basil (2 per container)

1 Patio Tomato

1 Early Girl Tomato

1 Celebrity Tomato

1 Brandywine Tomato

I'm most excited about the Brandywine plant. In Indiana, none of the local growers carried Brandywine or heirloom tomatoes of any kind and I've always wanted to try to grow them. I was able to find the Brandywine at Lowe's of all places - not a place I would have thought to look for plants - I was actually there to look at containers. Brandywine tomatoes yield large plants and large tomatoes, so they probably are not well-suited for container gardening, but I couldn't resist one a try.

I also put in 4 Blue Lake Bush Bean plants, not pictured above - they have just sprouted. Oh yes, and my youngest son brought home a pumpkin plant that they started from seed, so we put that in the ground next to some of the containers. We didn't do any work to prepare the ground - just dug a hole and stuck it in - it will be interesting to see how it does.

These photos were taken on May 26, so the plants have been in for almost 2 weeks now. They are doing quite well thanks to the unusually warm weather we've been having recently with temps in the high 80s. Tomatoes and basil especially love the warmer temps - in fact, this is the first time that my basil plants haven't simply sat in the ground for 3 or more weeks, stagnant, convincing me that they were about to die. They really don't thrive until temps get up in the 80s.

This is my first time container gardening, so I'm pretty much just crossing my fingers, keeping a close eye on the plants and hoping for the best. The tomato plants are showing possible signs of disease, but I'm giving them a little time to get established before I spray for any diseases - it could just be transplant shock and/or heat stress. Tomatoes like heat, but most plants do not like that kind of heat at the same time that they are adjusting to a new environment.

Last night we had our first meal with parsley from the garden, but I'm saving that recipe for my SGOTW post.........