phood adventures

What to do with all the basil?

I harvested a load of basil from the Aerogardens today, and it’s now too cool to just make salads out of the stuff, so I decided to do soups. I made a HUGE pot of tomato basil soup. I found this recipe that emulates La Madeleine’s soup. It’s a pretty close approximation. Yummy! I also made a vat of coconut basil soup. I glanced at a few recipes online, but none of them were exactly what I wanted. Ultimately, I ended up dumping in a couple of cans of chicken broth, a couple of cans of coconut milk, a can of evaporated milk, basil, ginger, cilantro, coriander, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, cumin, and lime juice. My Braun hand blender came in very handy for making these soups. I was able to puree them until they were silky smooth.

Cups of the soup went down nicely with slices of the Sally Lunn bread I made in the bread machine last night. I cheated and used a mix that we bought in Williamsburg last year. Made things simple.

I’ve made gallons of these soups, so I’m going to package them up in individual serving sizes using my food sealer and toss them in the freezer for consumption at a later date. They’ll make great lunches!

I am supposed to make my three bean salad for Turkey Day at my cousin’s house, so I bought kidney beans and garbanzo beans. I put the garbanzo beans in the pressure cooker, but I let them go too long and they got all mushy. So I just broke out the hand blender again and whirled them up with garlic, parsley, paprika, tahini, olive oil, and lime juice and made a big old bowl of hummus. I suppose I’ll either have to freeze that, too, or I’ll have to take it to Thanksgiving. The thing is that I’m not sure that either my family or Lex’s likes hummus. Hrm.

Believe it or not, but after all this cooking, I still have basil left over. I suppose I should just make some pesto. I bought some walnuts today, but I’m running low on olive oil. Hrm. We’ll see what happens, I reckon. I should make ice cubes from pureed herbs and water and freeze them for use in soups and stocks. That’s the way to do it!

insalata caprese, skull island style

it turns out that there’s a variety of tomato in our garden that produces HUGE tomatoes, on average weighing more than one pound each, sort of the size of tomatoes you’d expect to find on skull island, where king kong lived. amazingly enough, the tomatoes aren’t mushy like those big ones that are found at grocery stores!

a picture of the ingredients: the tomato from skull island, fresh basil from the herb garden, and fresh mozzarella from the store.

that’s the huge 1.5lb tomato that i called my dinner.

you can see the insides of the tomato, which weren’t mushy. i did make sure to use a bread knife, it cuts with more ease than regular knives.

a bed of fresh basil ontop of the tomato slices.

although it doesn’t show it, i included balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil on.

i thought it would be a good thing to put in the fridge to eat tomorrow, but i have a feeling that it wouldn’t have lasted. either i would have eaten it or the tomato would have gone to waste instead. i was originally intending to eat it as an appetizer, it turned out to be the main meal of the night… well worth it.

very yummy, even if i do get heartburn later!