Sage-Walnut Pesto

It’s autumn. Before the freeze, those of us with herb gardens are wondering what we’re gonna do with our lovely herbs, because we sure don’t want to lose them, and they’re so perishable!



Sage is a special question for me. I grow it every year, partly because it overwinters and comes back for free in the spring, but mostly because it’s de rigueur to have sage in one’s herb garden. But I don’t cook with sage very much. It’s strong, and it doesn’t figure into many of the cuisines I tend to cook. (Honestly, I’d do much better to have a private supply of cilantro and fenugreek!)

The main things I can think of to do with sage are: 1) poultry; 2) brown sugar–winter squash concoctions; and 3) frying the leaves and using them as a garnish.

“Why don’t you dry them?” —I usually back away from drying herbs, because no matter what, they always taste like straw. Yes, I have a dehydrator, and I agree that drying one’s own is much better than buying it pre-desiccated. But it still loses so much in the process. (Parsley is an exception: Dried, it can still be used as a visual garnish, and since it retains respectable vitamin content, it can go into grilled cheese sandwiches or scrambled eggs as an easy nutrient booster.) But most herbs? Like everything else, it’s just sad to dry them.



Fresh or old, dried sage always tastes old.

But if you can get your fresh herbs melded with oil, they tend to freeze okay. And frozen pesto is great to have on hand, because when you use it, you can make some pretty humdrum foods into something you’d have to pay $6.60 or even $8.80 for in a New York restaurant.

This is based on a recipe I found on the Internet, but I’ve tripled the quantities, plus increased the amount of sage compared to parsley, since I usually have more of the former that I want to use up. So feel free to adjust the ratio of sage to parsley, even to the point where there’s much more parsley than sage. (This isn’t exactly rocket science.)



Sage-Walnut Pesto

1/4 cup parsley
3/4 cup fresh sage leaves
3 garlic cloves
2-3 teaspoons salt (to taste)
3 cups walnuts (English/Persian walnuts this time, not black walnuts)
1 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 cup grated parmesan cheese

Put the walnuts in a food processor, first, by themselves, and pulse/grind until you obtain a rather coarse, meal-like texture. Then dump that into a mixing bowl and set aside.

Then, put the rest of the ingredients in the processor, and process until it’s well-blended (puréed).

Then pour it into the ground walnuts and stir to combine. It will seem rather dry, for pesto. It should make about 3 cups of pesto.

Pack into two or three 1-quart freezer zip bags and flatten to about 1/3 inch thick; as you do so, squeeze as much air out of the bag as you can (air causes freezer burn). Freeze the bag flat on a cookie sheet for easy storage. To use, open the bag and break off the amount you need (be careful, since you probably don’t want to tear the bag). It will thaw quickly in a bowl.

Note #1: If you are using it to stuff, say, chicken breasts, you might just leave the pesto frozen as flat little chunks, since it handles better that way. Why not?

Note #2: I suppose you could use pecans instead of walnuts . . . but then it would be “sage-pecan pesto,” eh?

Note #3: I don’t know how your food processor works, but with mine, I kinda have to pre-chop the herbs, and press the garlic, before I process it. Maybe my blades are getting dull; it’s an old machine. Anyway, be advised . . .



Using Sage-Walnut Pesto

This probably isn’t the kind of pesto you’d put on pasta or use as a spread on sandwiches or pizza. It’s rather crumbly. And its flavors don’t seem to go with stereotypical “Italian” or “Mediterranean” dishes. However, here are some things I’ve done with it, and gotten good reviews:

Filling for stuffed chicken or turkey breasts. Great for chilly evenings. Not great if you don’t like sage. (But then, if you don’t like sage, why are you reading this?) Cut a pocket into chicken breasts, or pound them to about 1/2 inch thick (sprinkle water on the chicken, put it in a large resealable bag and don’t seal it all the way, or put it between layers of plastic wrap, and then pound with a rolling pin, say, or an empty wine bottle). Put a big bunch of the sage-walnut pesto into the pocket, or wrap it in the pounded chicken, and then tie with butcher’s twine or fix it closed with toothpicks. Oil it, brown it, and cook however you want—covered with foil in the oven, or in a heavy, lidded pan on the stovetop. Serve with mashed potatoes and gravy.

Sage-walnut turkey pan meatloaf. Make a meatloaf mixture out of a pound of ground turkey, 1 beaten egg, 1/2 cup bread crumbs, 1/2 to 1 cup sage-walnut pesto, and some sautéed-and-cooled chopped shallots and mushrooms, plus salt, pepper, and a jot or two of Worcestershire sauce. Shape into big oval hamburgers about 1 inch thick and pan-fry in olive oil about 6 minutes per side, set aside and keep warm. Then, melt a few tablespoons of butter in the pan drippings, and make a roux with a few tablespoons flour. Add about 2 cups of chicken stock and whisk to make a gravy, and season it with poultry seasoning, salt, and pepper. Pour over the patties. Again, mashed potatoes are a good accompaniment.

Sage-walnut turkey meatballs. Make like the pan meatloaf above, only shape into flattened meatballs. Sauté until done. Use in pita sandwiches or tortilla wraps, with mayo, lettuce, fresh tomatoes, sliced onion. Or, go all “Thanksgiving” with it and fill the sandwich with some leftover dressing, cranberries, and cooked sweet potatoes. Or, dip into plain yogurt as an appetizer or light lunch.

Use your imagination—poultry always goes well with sage, but I’ll bet this would be great mixed with sweet potatoes or winter squash, stuffed into large pasta shells or ravioli, and served with a brown butter sauce. I think it would be a great addition to a bread- or cornbread-based stuffing recipe—use it like you would dried sage, only expect it to taste much fresher and stronger, with a slight crunch from the nuts.

I’m sure you can think of more ideas!

The Amazing Zip-Bag Trick

Busy, Eating Out of the Freezer

Everyone else in the world has this weekend off, but I’m working. So I don’t have a lot of time for cooking, much less blogging. And the reason I’m working this weekend is so I can have money. Until there’s more money, I don’t particularly feel like going to the grocery store—and who has time for that, anyway. So thankfully we have the freezer to fall back on.




Preserving the Pesto

Part of my annual end-of-the-garden ritual is harvesting my beautiful, lovely herbs, particularly the basil, which always seems to me like tomatoes, they love the hot weather so much.

I have dried my basil in the past, but I’ve found I don’t tend to use a lot of dried basil. I don’t like using many dried herbs, in general. However, if I make pesto, I use it. And whatever it gets used on turns into something, well, a few notches above a cheese sandwich and a bowl of chicken noodle soup.


My Zip-Bag Idea

First, though, I want to share this with you. Sue thinks it’s a pretty doggone smart idea, and she keeps saying I should blog on it.

So! If you make up a bunch of pesto, how do you store it? Well, Martha S. and others say to pat it into ice cube trays, freeze it, and pop the pesto-cubes into zip bags.

But there are problems with this: First, maybe you don’t need exactly one ice-cube-sized quantity of pesto, and to get more or less pesto from a frozen “pesto cube” would be kind of difficult. Second, a cube takes a while to defrost, requiring advance planning. And who does that? And third, if you put the cubes into a plastic bag, it allows air in the bag to touch the various surfaces of the cubes, making for more freezer burn.

I have a better idea!




Spoon pesto into freezer-style zip bags, get rid of the air bubbles, lay it flat, carefully press out any remaining air, and seal it. Freeze it flat—like on a cookie sheet. The result should be a layer of frozen pesto less than a half inch thick. The flattened bags store extremely well in your crowded freezer, and when it’s time to cook, it’s easy to break off however much pesto you need. Because the pesto’s all stuck against the plastic, freezer burn is minimized.

I’ll bet you didn’t know I was this brilliant, did you!




Super-Easy Pesto Mini Pizzas

So with me being so busy forever tapping on my computer, I depend on my frozen supply of goodies. Yesterday, I made us super-easy, awesome pizzas. It was the highlight of my day. You can make these in the toaster oven, in fact, so it only takes a few minutes to prepare.

For the base, I use good-quality pitas that I get from the international grocery—the kind you often get when you order a gyro sandwich. Not the “pocket” kind—the kind that’s kind of fluffy. You can also buy naans that are essentially the same, just usually oval. We get flatbreads in abundance and keep them in the freezer, too. Here are a few brands we like: Kontos and Kronos. (Kontos, you’ll notice, offers a multigrain flatbread! And yes, it tastes good!)

So, break off a piece of pesto, let it thaw, and spread it on the frozen pita as the sauce. Then, the toppings are up to you. Hunt in the freezer and the fridge; poke around in the pantry. Yesterday, I used our last piece of awesome Schubert’s kielbasa (also frozen), which I sliced thin and precooked on the stove while the pesto thawed.




A tilapia fillet is good, too (precook, of course, and coarsely crumble it).

Then some feta, or mozzarella, and whatever else seems good, such as chopped kalamata olives or slices of grape tomatoes, or whatever. Chopped bell peppers? The red or yellow ones are especially pretty.

I think sardines would be good, too, though I haven’t tried it yet. Sardines are making a comeback, you know—Omega-3’s and all.

Anyway, I gotta get back to work. But one more thing.


Use This Trick on Other Stuff

My zip-bag trick also works well with other goos and sauces. When I open a can of chipotles in adobo sauce, I rarely use the whole thing at once (who does?)—a little of that goes a long way! So I dump the rest into a freezer zip bag (breaking up the larger pieces for uniformity’s sake) and freeze it flat, to use up at my leisure—a teaspoon into some mayo for easy chipotle mayo for your sandwiches; or mix a dab into some plain hummus so it’s not so plain anymore; spike up the vegan posole . . . you know.




An abundance of late-summer tomatoes from the garden? Clean, chop, put into the zip bags, and freeze them flat, just like the others—great for stews, curries, and sauces.

When I process a mess of concord grapes, I do extra and freeze enough for a pie. This is a great way to preserve them.

You can also keep fresh grated ginger this way. (I told you the magic trick for that earlier—remember when we made that cantaloupe sorbet? Ah, summertime.)

Okay—I really have to get back to work now.

—Later!

Sorry, No Pictures of This Morning’s Omelette

Hey, we finally got to sleep late this morning, and that’s saying something about this past week, considering we’re both freelancers!

I’ve recently learned how to make a “real” omelette, a rich, smooth, French one, just like “Julia” made. In fact, the whole thing is thanks to Julia Child, who explains basic omelette making in a three-DVD set of The French Chef with Julia Child, available from PBS.

It’s truly remarkable how a talented and enthusiastic teacher can turn something notoriously difficult into a fun adventure, and seemingly simple. We all know that one of Julia Child’s great strengths as a cooking educator was her relaxed attitude toward, well, failure. You can always salvage the dish, or try it again. And you can always learn from your mistakes.

Anyway, in the third DVD of this set is “The Omelette Show,” wherein Child demonstrates (repeatedly, and with variations) how to make twenty-second omelettes. This is real cooking instruction.

The ingredients are ridiculously simple: three eggs, a tablespoon of butter, a teaspoon of water, and salt and pepper. The skillet you use is important, as is high heat. A spatula should be on hand, though you might not need it, and the plates should be prewarmed.

If you’re using fillings that need to be cooked (mushrooms, bacon, ham, vegetables, etc.), then you need to have cooked them ahead.

It literally only takes about 20 seconds. Incredible.

I won’t go into how I used to make omelettes. I used to try to fold them over with the spatula, but with Child’s traditional, plenty-of-butter technique, you can actually create the whole omelette without using a spatula at all. After the initial set of about four or five seconds, you just shake the pan—circular motions, then jerking it to get it to start flipping.

If you want the full instructions, you need to see the DVD—the lessons in “The Omelette Show” by itself are well worth the price of the DVD, but there are seventeen more episodes in the set that are just as worthy.

So this morning I chopped up some fruit—strawberries, and orange, a kiwi—and warmed up some slices of good French bread. (Yes, you can reclaim bread that isn’t perfectly fresh by wrapping it in foil and heating it in an oven or toaster oven.)

And we’re still working on our Starbuck’s special holiday blend, which is so good. Why isn’t it available all year long?

You have to have everything else in your meal done and ready to serve, first, because the omelettes only take twenty seconds and should be eaten immediately, so there you go.

The omelettes du jour were omelettes aux fines herbes, which means they’re made with chopped fresh herbs. I grabbed a mélange from my nascent spring herb garden—some cilantro, dill, parsley, oregano, and garlic chives—and chopped them fine. I added them to the egg mixture, so they were incorporated into the eggs. Adding them this way warms the herbs just enough to infuse the eggs with their flavor, but not so much they become discolored or lose their fresh, exciting taste.

Then, just before the final fold onto the plate, I sprinkled some crumbled feta cheese into them.

It was all very decadent, with the butter and all, and with more real butter for the warm bread, but then we’ve been eating relatively austere oat bran muffins for breakfast all week long.

And no, there are no photographs of our breakfast this morning, because you just don’t mess around taking pictures when a fresh, hot, creamy, fresh-herb-and-feta omelette is steaming on the plate before you. You just eat it.

Beatrice Stephens and Her Mint Recipes

Recently I purchased a copy of an old, used cookbook. Remember how I was crowing on and on about the Good Housekeeping Cook Book of 1949? Well, soon after writing that earlier post, I found a copy of the first edition of that book, copyright 1933, and the nice people at Eureka! Books in Mount Vernon, Maine (selling via Alibris), sent it to me without delay. (And yes, they were indeed nice!)

As soon as the package arrived, I grabbed it and an O’Doull’s, carried them out to the backyard, and plopped down in one of our big Adirondack chairs to give my lovely new/old book a nice once-over.

And if you’ve had much experience looking at used cookbooks, you know that they often include bonus treasuries of handwritten recipes and notes by the previous owner. And my copy of the 1933 Good Housekeeping Cook Book is no exception! What a treat!

First off, in the front endpapers is the name of the cookbook’s first owner:

Beatrice E. P. Stephens
21 Academy St.
Auburn, Maine

February 12, 1934
2 years to G.H.

Yeah . . . I Google-mapped the street address, and according to the “street view,” it looks like Beatrice’s house is no longer standing (unless they’ve renumbered the addresses on that block). There is a convenience store on the corner, and next to that is a large patch of big trees, including some Norway spruces among some deciduous species, and a place in the sidewalk curb where a walkway to a house must have been. The “academy” is apparently still there, down the street, but I guess her home is gone.

Shoot. Sometimes, a little Internet sleuthing yields some intriguing information, but no, I wasn’t able to find anything on Beatrice herself. And I have no idea if “Stephens” would have been a maiden or married name, of course, either. So who knows.

I did find one possibly interesting link, where a guy named David Stephens claimed to be abducted by aliens in 1975 near Oxford, Maine. His hypnosis sessions wherein he described the incident were witnessed by his father and mother, Gene and Beatrice. How about that! Wonder if it’s the same people. Oxford isn’t very far away from Auburn—ten miles, maybe.

However, David was twenty-two at the time of his abduction, meaning that Beatrice would have given birth to him ca. 1953, and if our Beatrice was starting to get Good Housekeeping in about 1932, that’s a long time between young adulthood and having a kid. Oh well. Probably different people.

Anyway, the Beatrice Stephens who owned this cookbook left several Depression-era recipes of her own in her clean, cursive fountain pen and in pencil, including: French Dressing; Sour Cream Dressing (“on a cucumber & scallion salad!”); Fish Chowder; outlines for four different salads; a list of spices to use when boiling smoked shoulder or ham; a list of sandwich fillings; and a recipe for donuts.

But she must have loved mint the best, because she wrote down several recipes for mint sauce, mint vinegar, mint punch, etc. I transcribe these for you now.

(I wonder: If you were to go to the location of 21 Academy Street in Auburn, Maine, and look around in that overgrown, foresty patch of land, do you suppose you would find a nice patch of spearmint persisting after all these years? I wonder.)

Mint Punch
Crush 12 sprigs fresh mint
add: 1 c. sugar
---- 6 oranges
---- 3 lemons, & stir well
Set 2 hours, pour over ice in bowl. Add 2 qts. ginger ale.

Mint Punch #2
4 Tbspn. fresh mint, chopped
2 " sugar syrup
2 " lemon juice
1 " orange juice, and set 2 hrs.
Strain; add 1 qt. ginger ale.

Mint Punch #3
Boil together for 8 min.
1/2 c. water, 1/2 c. sugar. Cool.
Mix 1 c. fresh mint, cho.—
juice of 2 lemons
-------- 3 oranges
1 pt. pineapple juice
1 qt. weak tea
1/2 t. to 1 c. bo. water (add water to make 1 qt.)
Stand cold place 4 hours or overnight.
Strain—add 2 qts. ginger ale
Makes about 1 gallon.

Mint Sauce #1
Chop 1/4 c. mint leaves & add to 1/2 c. hot vinegar with a little (1 T) sugar.

Mint Sauce #2
1 c. currant jelly, 2 t. mint, finely chopped, 1 t. grated orange rind. Break jelly with fork. Lamb.

Green Mint Vinegar
Bring to boil 1 qt. pure cider vinegar.
Add 1 c. gran. sugar &
1 pt. of spearmint leaves & young tips
Stir & crush
boil a few minutes.
Strain & bottle hot in glass jars.
For Iced Tea & Fruit Punches, basis for Mint Sauce, sparingly in lettuce & cress salads.

Minted Iced Tea
1 1/2 t. tea for ea. c. freshly boiling water.
Steep 5 min.—add a few crushed mint leaves.
Strain cool & chill in ref.
Cracked ice—lemon slice & mint sprig.

So this seemed a fitting post for today, since they’re predicting our weather will soon become more seasonal (which is to say, roastingly, braisingly hot), and mint has the marvelous property of making your mouth feel cool.

Also, mint has long been used as a mild remedy for digestive upsets, and since my dad is recovering from an acute and completely uncalled-for compulsory gastroenterology seminar this week, I’m prescribing mint tea for his tummy.

(One final note, an interesting connection: Beatrice Stephens acquired her cookbook in 1934, the year my dad was born. That summer was one of the hottest on record in North America. No wonder Beatrice was scribbling down recipes for mint tea and mint punch!)

Akajiso: Red Shiso

Red shiso, Perilla frutescens, is a relative newcomer to my herb garden, though I can’t recall where I got my first little plant of it.

It’s pretty amazing—it’s in the mint family, but has a much more subtle flavor than most in the genus Mentha. This red variety looks a lot like a coleus. Some people liken it to basil, mint, fennel, cinnamon, anise, licorice.

Sue and I both think that our plants taste something like rose.

My favorite thing to do with them is slice them into thin ribbons, or chiffonade them, and then mix it into a fruit salad. Our shiso seems to go especially well with citrus fruits, or anything you might sprinkle a little rose water on.

Another thing to do is add the leaves among the other leaves in a green salad. The deep purple is a standout, and the flavor and texture add interest, too.

Of course, one entire reason for having an herb garden is so that you always have a nice source of lovely garnishes for whatever kind of plate you’re serving. A sprig or two of shiso adds a lot of nice color to a relish tray or cheese platter.

And the culture? Easy. In fact, these are somewhat weedy. Once the photoperiod starts decreasing, the plants begin to bloom and make tons of seeds. At this point, we have shiso coming up in our lawn next to the herb garden.

It’s no biggie, but it’s probably a good idea to think about how you might want to contain the plants so they don’t get out of hand next spring when all the seeds germinate. I suggest growing them in a clump somewhere where they can “have at it.” Treat it like mint, even though it doesn’t spread by runners, but by seeds.

If you can get your hands on some of this, I recommend trying it. I really appreciate my bunch, and I love the idea of a lovely plant that you can eat besides.

And I’m only just beginning to experiment with it; the Japanese and other Asian cultures have been cooking with it for ages, so I can take some real hints from them. For instance, the red variety, like I have, is used as a coloring agent for umeboshi (pickled plums) as well as for pickled ginger (which is why those ribbons of ginger are pink when it comes with your sushi). Or so I understand.