Since I got to spend several weekends in a row at home with no visitors to entertain, I’ve been going to the farmer’s market for fresh produce most Saturdays. I’m always astonished by how cheap it is - I usually spend less than $15 and get as much as I can carry.

Then I come home and use my produce to cook things I’ve always wanted to make from scratch but not been willing to spend enough money at the grocery store to buy the ingredients. (At least, that’s what I’ve been doing so far.)

The first few weeks, I turned my haul into Italian food. Everything was good, but definitely a learning experience.

First I made pesto with green beans and potatoes, according to this recipe from Radagast. It was very tasty and it smelled so good while I was making it. I have improvements in mind for next time, though. It wasn’t quite as strongly-flavored as I would like. I think this is partly because my one bunch of basil didn’t quite make three cups, so I’ll use more next time. I’ll also add an extra clove of garlic and salt it before it gets to the table.

I might not make pesto again until I get a food processor, though. I used a blender and it didn’t work that well - the very bottom ingredients got whirred to a paste, and the top 90% didn’t move at all. I tried pushing them down, but I wasn’t very coordinated and I ended up destroying my wooden spoon. (I picked all the wood shards out before continuing.) So I would not recommend using a blender.

Next I made the classic tomato sauce from Joy of Cooking. It was definitely tasty, though I think I was a little short on tomatoes. Also, I am pretty sure I got the wrong kind of tomatoes - they were juicier and not quite as red inside as romas, so the sauce was an interesting pinky-orange color and kind of thin. (This would probably also have been helped by adding tomato paste, which was optional.) But the peeling process worked exactly as the cookbook said, which was reassuring. I’ll make it again with roma tomatoes and some tomato paste.

The final Italian-food experiment was making Marcella Hazan’s tomato-butter sauce with fresh tomatoes (I got romas this time). I’d made it several times before with canned tomatoes and really liked it, and I figured this could only be better. Unfortunately I got a little impatient that it wasn’t thickening up (fresh tomatoes are way juicier than canned!) and decided to add tomato paste. I don’t know if I added too much or it was just low-quality tomato paste, but it kind of overwhelmed the other flavors. Don’t get me wrong, it was still good. I might try this with fresh tomatoes again and cook it for longer, but I might just stick to high-quality canned tomatoes and call it good. Besides, if I’m going to go through all the work of peeling tomatoes, I might as well use them in a more labor-intensive recipe.

Last week was supposed to be Thai food, but we lost power and my Thai basil, eggplant, and green beans all went bad in the fridge. Also I’m having trouble tracking down all the right ingredients; I need to find an Asian grocery. I miss living in Northern Virginia where there was a whole aisle in the Giant full of packages I couldn’t read.

Update: In addition to a food processor and a new wooden spoon, I also really want a kitchen scale. While it was fun trying to figure out how many pounds of tomatoes I had by submerging one in a measuring cup full of water, seeing how much water it displaced, and assuming that its density was similar to that of water (the tomatoes were sold by the box not by the pound), I would prefer not to have to do that every time. Also, that method doesn’t so much work for dry ingredients.

Posted by Amanda in Food |