Early Harvest: Pesto Farm 3000 is a Go

Seriously, pesto is my favorite. That's the reason why I have so many basil plants, which all seem to be thriving, yay!

About a month ago, I propagated a couple cuttings from my original basil plant. They sat in a glass of water for a week, seemingly doing nothing, until one day: BAM, roots. Awesome! In the interest of science, I took another cutting from the same plant, didn't wait for it to grow roots, and stuck it in the same soil. It seemed very unhappy at first, but now look at it! Seems to be doing fine.

I read that it's good to keep your herbs on their toes by getting rid of flowers (check!) and also to knock them down to size frequently. In my (admittedly limited) experience, basil doesn't store in the fridge as well as, say, rosemary or thyme, so I have to use it right away. So, I needed to get rid of the huge, huge bowl of basil that I'd liberated from its home. Pesto time!

I didn't have any nuts, of any kind. I only had basil; cheap, grated parmasan cheese; olive oil; and garlic. The internets say it's possible, though, to make nutless pesto, so I was on my way.

Here's what I did:

Filled my 10-cup food processor about 3/4 full with loose basil leaves
Chopped up three, maybe four (sorry, don't know!) cloves of garlic
Added about 1/2-3/4 cup of parm cheese
Started the food processor
Realized at this point that my pesto needed some bulk, so looked at the rest of the herbs that I'd just harvested, and decided on adding a few leaves of sage
Added olive oil until the stuff in the processor had a pesto-like consistency
Rejoiced!

I'm patting myself so hard on my head right now, you guys, you just don't know, because the sage turned out to be really cool in the pesto. However, it still didn't go very far. I got about two, small jars out of all of this, and it's air-sensitive, so I topped each of the jars with some olive oil to keep it from turning brownish (ugh, didn't notice it did that before with store-bought stuff.) No worries, though, because it's not lasting long.

The first thing I did was make pesto mayonnaise to go with fries (Sean made dinner). I didn't take a picture of this, but I'm guessing you could imagine it looked like mayo with some green stuff in it. The ingredients were:

1 tbsp-ish of pesto
2 tbsp-ish of mayo

It was awesome because it was basically a little ramekin filled with fat and herbs. You can't go wrong.

Next thing I tried was pasta.

1/2 bag linguini, cooked
1 6 oz strip steak, sliced and cooked to medium well, unfortunately, because the steak was really thin.
2 tbsp pesto
A few grape tomatoes (from my garden!!!!), quartered and sauteed in butter
Random herbs (from my garden!!!!), I think thyme, rosemary, and parsley
Alfredo sauce, because screw it, we're already full of carbs and fat anyway.

Cook the linguini, cook the grape tomatoes and steak, when it's all done throw it together with the pasta and the sauces. It looked like this. I was pleased.

And my favorite thing: pizzas with pesto. You need:

Round pita bread
Pesto
Pizza toppings (I did pepperoni, tomatoes (from the garden!!!) and immature purple bell peppers (they keep rotting on the vine so I pick them young)
Mozzarella cheese (or whatever you like)

Heat the oven to, like 425, or whatever. Take your pitas, spread pesto on, add cheese and toppings. Put in the oven until the cheese is bubbly and the peppers and tomatoes look a little wilted. Then shove unceremoniously into your face because it was really damn good.

In fact, I might have one after I add more wood chips to the smoker.

So, that's what I've been doing with my pesto farm. It is fun and rewarding!

Early harvest: using cilantro in Mu Ping

I haven't been out for Thai food in probably eight or nine years, since before I started to like curry (o blessed day) and ordered dishes that were basically bland, less greasy Chinese food. No matter how spicy the cooks would make it, I just never got into it. I will eat pretty much anything before I go for Thai food. The only thing I actively like about Thai food is how the dishes look in the Thai language, which is super pretty. เห็น? มันงดงาม (Translation: See? It's gorgeous) I guess if I were starving, I could choke some back, but I wouldn't get excited about it. This is one of my only culinary aversions.

The bar that's close to my house has an international food day once a year. It's always quite an event. The bar patrons draw countries, or regions, out of a hat. In the past, I've drawn Mexico (yay!), the Middle East (woo!), India (hooray!!), and Northern Africa (hooray again!). Well, my streak had to end, and this year, I drew Southeast Asia.

Determined to make the best of this, I looked up Thai appetizers, and found something called Mu Ping, or Moo Ping, or หมูปิ้ง. It's marinated pork, grilled on sticks, and eaten in mass quantities. Apparently, it's a prolific street food in Bangkok. Sounds cool. I decided to give it a shot.

When I have a country or region I'm excited about, I will practice my dish until it's perfect (see: palak paneer, hummus, labneh, all of which I've pretty much mastered /brag). This time, I'm flying by the seat of my pants, a decision that I regret, because this shit is going to be awful.

Here's the recipe I'm using. I don't want to link to the site because I'm sure the author is lovely, and I'm sure if you like this stuff it's delicious, but I am totally badmouthing it because I'm immature and oyster sauce, eeeewwww. I'll provide a link to the site to whomever wants it. Really, just Google "mu ping" and it's the first option, so there. My comments are in italics.

4.5 lbs pork shoulder, cut against the grain into ¼- to ½-inch thick bite-sized pieces (First break from the recipe, but an unimportant one: I used about 2 lbs of country style ribs and 2 lbs of pork loin roast, but still it's fatty pork, whatever, it'll be fine)
4 tablespoons (30 g) finely-chopped cilantro roots or stems (Used stems because I don't want to screw up my plant, but this actually came from my garden)
7 large garlic cloves (30 g), peeled (Alright, got it, but 30g of garlic is like four big cloves, not seven)
1 tablespoon (8 g) white peppercorns (Whoops, forgot this stuff...uh...mixed peppercorns will work, right?)
132 g palm sugar, grated finely or melted in the microwave (More on this later, but this crap is my new nemesis)
3 tablespoons fish sauce (bleargh)
2 tablespoons thin/light soy sauce (Sure.)
2 tablespoons oyster sauce (retching sounds)
Approximately ¾ cup of coconut milk with which to brush the pork

Everything was going OK until I broke into the palm sugar, which is packaged like little hockey pucks, and would probably do as much damage to a face due to its rock-hard nature. Now, reading up on palm sugar, it's not *supposed* to be like that. It should crumble somewhat easily. If it doesn't, then it's poor-quality palm sugar, and that brand should never be purchased again. Roger that, but what the hell am I supposed to do now?

Being ever the resourceful broad, I googled "how to melt palm sugar". Put it in the microwave for 30 seconds with one tablespoon of water to each puck. It'll be fine, come apart, etc. No, it didn't. Combined with heat and water, palm sugar becomes super glue. I had a bunch of lumps of sugar swimming in a shallow pond of super-sticky, super-sweet goo. So, I made my next fatal mistake and decided to just take it the rest of the way in my beloved food processor. My poor Cuisenart groaned with strain and displeasure as the little rocks stuck themselves to the lid and wedged themselves in the corners of the bowl (well, not corners, are they corners? Where the bottom and the sides meet in the bowl? Whatever, we'll call them corners). I figured it would get better once I added more ingredients, so I did, fired it up again, and it's like that stuff did not want to dissolve. Palm sugar sucks.

Also, the more ingredients I threw into that bowl, the more I got grossed out. I realize I'm going to sound like a cultural imperialist here, but I don't know how anybody can eat something called "fish sauce" and not want to hurl. I like fish, and I like sauce, but put the two together and bleeaaaarrrrgh.

So, once I got this all together, I came to the conclusion that, for the first time, my international food day dish is going to be completely vile. It's been marinating for about an hour now, and I stand by this assessment. Maybe it will be less gross when it's cooked, but I do not want to touch that marinade with my hands. But, you know, it's about time. I haven't cooked something that I hated for a really long time. They can't all be winners.

I'll update after it's cooked. I'm hoping for the best, but expecting fish and oyster-flavored crap.

Update! I am removing the "gross" tag because this was not gross at all. In fact, once it's cooked (ugh, I know, have some patience), it's very not gross. Yay!