Georgia Terroir

I've been looking for a good (mostly) local alternative to traditional pesto. Inspiration came from the Moosewood Lowfat Cookbook which recommends using tomatoes as a substitute for Parmesan cheese and olive oil. The flavors of basil and tomato are naturally complementary and are naturally growing together right out there in my garden. I added pecans because they are so ubiquitous here in Georgia it's a bit ridiculous. The only time I ever saw a pecan in Minnesota was in the pie at Thanksgiving if we were lucky and went to the neighbors who had more decadant tastes. At the barn where George (the horse) lives, there is a large pecan orchard with trees yielding nuts the size of limes, and the odd twenty or so pecan trees just growing around the place. Pecans litter the ground in the fall. I'm thinking I might go into the business of pecan pressing and start a little cottage industry around pecan oil, which could also replace the olive oil in this recipe--the only thing that isn't local. If you really want to go completely local you could skip the oil. It isn't really necessary, but gives the pesto a luscious mouthfeel. I love the taste of Sun Gold tomatoes (who doesn't?) and think they have the best complementary taste to the peppery bittery bite of basil. Pecans are also sweet and have a delicious caramelized taste and fragrance when lightly toasted. So, this pesto is a bit non-traditional in taste, but heck, we aren't living in Italy. We're living in Georgia, so who cares if it tastes a little bit more like Georgia than Italy?

Sun Gold Pecan Pesto

Yields about 2 1/2 cups of pesto

3 cups packed basil leaves
1 cup Sun Gold tomatoes
3/4 cup pecan halves, lightly toasted
4 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp salt
1 T olive oil (optional)

In a food processor, combine basil, tomatoes, garlic, pecans and salt and puree until smooth.

I regularly have this with sliced Cherokee Purple tomatoes and goat feta with some salad greens. It doesn't need much more than a grind of black pepper and some salt

Butter Addendum

I made butter again this morning (while getting caffeinated). From my last experience, I learned to have something else to do while waiting for butter to happen. This time, I let the cream settle (maybe, rise?) for a couple days and was rewarded with *heavy* cream, which is lot easier to turn into butter. Duh. This time I also am going to let the buttermilk sour and at some point, maybe for supper, I am going to make blueberry buttermilk pancakes with fresh blueberries, blueberry syrup and fresh whipped butter. Oh my god.

Braised Chicken with Thyme and Tomatoes

Two days ago, I had some extra thyme and some very ripe plum tomatoes. There had been a generous yield in the garden and the market take of tomatoes was exceptional last week. Also, now free from work obligations for 6 weeks (for the first time in several years)--I did what most folks would naturally do with some extra free thyme (oh yes, pun intended) on their hands--I cleaned my freezer. While excavating, I found some chicken legs and thighs in the back. Grass-fed chicken (because the bird actually gets some exercise) tends to be a bit chewier than that anemic corn fed stuff called chicken in the grocery store, so it takes a little different kind of treatment, like marinating it in yogurt, garlic and pepper. Normally, this treatment also infuses the already tasty bird with some delicious flavors. I didn't have any yogurt at the moment--it was on the docket for the day and I only had enough left for starter, so I scratched my head (sipped a minty mojito) and looked around for inspiration. Next to my pile of thyme and tomatoes, I had some chicken stock thawing for braising vegetables, and I visualized a delicious mound of eggplant, kale and zucchini holding up a couple of braised chicken thighs and thought YUM! Braising (especially with tomatoes) tenderizes the meat with long, slow cooking, so marinading is not necessary. I made yogurt while this dish cooked. (yes I am the queen of the multi-task).

Thyme and tomato chicken (serves 2)

Oil, butter grease for the pan--2 T
2 of each chicken legs and thighs
Salt and pepper
2 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
1 1/2 cups chicken stock
7-10 plum tomatoes, very ripe
Large handful of thyme sprigs, coarsely chopped

Wash and dry the chicken and sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper on both sides. Heat the oil/grease/butter in the pan and add the chicken. Brown on all sides for several minutes, until the chicken starts releasing its juices (put a cover on the pan to avoid the splattering). Add the chicken stock, garlic, tomatoes and thyme and cover. Bring to a boil and reduce heat to medium low. Cook for 45 minutes-1 hour, depending on your chicken and your preferences. Enjoy!

Tomato paneer curry and sauteed kale

This is an excellent example of why I love local food. This is 100% local and 1000% yum. This is also why I made butter--so that I could make a curry without oil. Okay, so it has some non-local spices, but I'm working on it! This is a perfect light meal for a hot summer day. It's a bit spicy and the cumin is very fragrant and delicious. For lots of reasons I've stopped eating a great deal of carbohydrates for supper and I would eat this with a peach for dessert and maybe some yogurt raita on the side. You could cook up some potatoes in the kale if you want some starch to soak up the luscious juices.

Tomato Paneer Curry (serves 2-3)--From Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian Cookbook

2 T butter
1 tsp roasted cumin seeds
1/4 cup chopped onion
1 1/2 cup peeled, chopped tomatoes
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/4 tsp ground cayenne
1/2 tsp salt
ground black pepper to taste
1 cup cubed paneer
2-3 T chopped cilantro


Melt the butter in a cast iron fry pan and sizzle the cumin seeds for a few minutes. Add the onions and saute until the edges are a bit brown and crisp. Add the tomatoes and cook until reduced, about 5 minutes. Stir in the spices and paneer and cook for two more minutes. Turn off heat, add cilantro and adjust salt and pepper to taste. Serve hot.

Sauteed Kale

1 T butter
1 garlic clove
1/2 cup chopped onion
4 cups coarsely chopped kale

Melt butter and saute garlic and onion until they release their fragrant juices. Add the kale and cook over medium heat until kale turns a bright green and/or until done to your desired texture. I like mine crunchy.

Ricotta yogurt

My multi-tasking on Sunday yielded some interesting results with my yogurt. Instead of heating it to a boil and then letting it cool, I just took out the milk for yogurt when it heated to about 150 degrees and stirred in the yogurt cultures and let it sit (or rather forgot about it again...). The result is a rather strange, but delicious, mix of ricotta cheese-like curds and thick cream. It smells fine and there is no evidence of spoilage...so what to do? Well...when life gives you green velvet curtains, you make a green velvet dress...or so I hear women do here in the south. So for a decadent snack yesterday, I diced up some juicy peaches and ladeled the ricotta cheese over them and stirred in a good dollop of local honey. That was pretty close to heaven. Then I took a nap.

Fast forward to butter

So, it's been awhile. Since I last posted I have started volunteering for Athens Locally Grown. There is a *line* for this volunteering gig, it's so good. For four hours of fondling beautiful produce and homegrown foodstuffs you get a $50 credit towards your purchase AND the take at the end of the night in case somebody forgot to come get their stuff. Yo, I did it once. See athens.locallygrown.net for more info on this cooler than cool system. Anyway, in the downtime between filling about a thousand orders, I get a chance to muse on the goods. So, I decided to try making butter out of the rich, yellow cream from Johnston Family Farms.

The reason I decided to do this is simple. It irritates me when I have to go to the grocery store. I went in the other day for the first time in a couple weeks and I felt a bit dizzy and sick to my stomach with all the lights and crazy processed garbage. My blood sugar jumped a couple of points just walking into the place I think. While I can get all the veggies I can dream of eating in a week at the farmers market, my garden, ALG, etc, etc, (and goddess I am thankful for it) grains, legumes and oils are hard to come by in most local food systems. Fruit is easy to come by, just not so much at the markets yet since they are pretty strict about organic standards. To get a good bucket of peaches at a price that lets me eat 4 a day, I have to go down the road to the local conventional orchard. Grains and the like require a lot of processing and are really hard to do without machinery. Ever try to shell beans to get enough for chili? It's about as tedious as making butter (as I found out).

So, I decided to reach for the packaged butter for the last time and make a commitment to cream, which I did a couple weeks ago and then just put it in my shade grown, fair-trade coffee from Ecuador (http://www.1000facescoffee.com/) and on my peaches. But today I got motivated again and had a bit of an impromptu dairy processing day. I had a full gallon of milk and a half gallon of cream. I've been making cheese (paneer) from the milk in addition to the yogurt and so I decided to do this all in one shot. Streamlining my efforts, I guess. So I threw the milk on to heat and researched making butter. This is a good site: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/article/113/Making-Butter. (while it goes into *washing* butter, it's not so clear about *drying* butter...think about THAT for awhile)

Glad I decided to multi-task on this one. I am pretty sure what the seventh level of hell would be for me--being that girl who had to churn butter by hand for an entire family... After about 15 minutes of standing there with my hand on the mixer, and not seeing much but bubbly milk, I got a little worried and thought about how nice that bubbly milk would be on my ripe juicy peaches... But I persisted and expedited the process by ladling out the heavier creamier parts and processing them seperately. Presto! Butter. It is soooooooooooooo delicous. I just ate a wee bit on a chunk of rosemary and sea salt baguette from Luna Bakery. It takes a lot of milk to make a little bit of cheese and the same is even more true for butter, but it's totally worth it. I can't wait to fry my local free-range eggs in it tomorrow morning. Good lord.

Now, if I only had a cow. And a bull....

Homemade Yogurt, Yah

So, I went online and looked at all those fancy yogurt makers cuz I thought I needed one to make yogurt. Wrong. Some kind soul set us all straight in the product review (!) and said all you need is some kind of place that will heat the milk to a temperature of 120 degrees consistently over 6-8 hours. Investigating further, I found out that people made yogurt in the old days on the back of a wood stove (which gets hot!) and in the new days on assorted electronic devices like heavily used DVD players, for example, (which don't get that hot). So, I thought, this can't be that hard. It's not. And so far the only common denominator I have found is some kind of heat source (however erratic), milk and starter culture. I even left the last batch in the cold oven all night (forgot, oops) and it was so fine. Better than fine. It was YUM. The longer it sits, the tarter it gets. Oy. Did I mention you can save a lot of money doing this? I used to pay over 4$ for a quart of yogurt. Now I pay just under 1$ if you don't count the time I spend mixing it up and forgetting about it.

So, get a gallon (or half-gallon) of locally produced milk. It should be pasteurized, so you don't have bacterial interference, but it can be very lightly pasteurized, and you could do it yourself at home by heating raw milk on the stove top if you are so lucky to get some of that good stuff. Take a very clean pint jar and fill it almost to the top with milk. Stir in two tablespoons of yogurt from the last batch or (horrors!) if you have to, store-bought yogurt with active cultures. I use Stoneyfield Farm Organic Whole Milk Plain cuz I like to eat it and they do good things in the world, generally. Place the pint jar (and 3-7 other jars if you are ambitious) in a baking dish, heat the oven to about 200 degrees and pop those babies in. Leave it for an hour or so at that heat, er, until you remember, or after you get that load of laundry done, and then shut if off. I have a gas stove, so I'm paranoid about leaving it on at low heat for hours. But it doesn't need to heat continuously and you can save the energy and the atmosphere by just firing up the oven every couple of hours for about 6 hours to maintain some heat. But like I said, I forgot my last batch overnight and it turned out fine. Resist the urge to poke around and stir it cuz, it seems to resent being disturbed (I don't know why). Anyway, look in on the little white jars of happiness every once in a while and bless their multiplying cultures and in no time you'll be enjoying some yumminess with your local blue berries. Good luck!