Back in Beantown - recipe time.

In honor of Beantown, and my successful standby-on-a-full-flight journey home, I thought I'd post a quick recipe.

Yes, I did go straight to the garden as soon as I got home, but I'm too zonked right now to consider writing anything that requires serious thought or explanation. So on to the beans.

For this recipe, you need:

1. Beans (duh) -- like pole beans, snap peas, any sort of longish, skinnyish beans. I used these (blue coco snap beans from my garden). You'll need a bundle that would fit comfortably in both hands, but you can always use more if you want.

2. Eggs (3-4), hardboiled

3. Red-skinned or some other smallish potato (about 4-5 medium or 8-10 small), cut into chunks.

4. Can of anchovy fillets in olive oil, 5. a can of tuna, and 6. beans of some sort (such as cannellini or garbanzo). I used a can, but you can always boil your own.
7. Shallots or mild onion - or just an onion - sliced thinly. I used the runt onions from my garden that I failed to plant correctly (so they didn't actually grow very much). Lesson learned.8. Olive oil, apple cider vinegar, salt and pepper, fresh lemon juice (1/2 lemon is sufficient, but more is nice)

9. Pitted olives of some sort, chopped up. My favorite are the olive-cured black ones, but Kalamata olives work great, too.

The very best way I've found to prepare hard-boiled eggs is to place them in an empty pot and add cold water until it covers the eggs by about an inch. Once it boils, cover and remove from heat for about 15 minutes. Then place them in cold water until they're cool enough to peel. This way you avoid dropping eggs into boiling water, burning yourself, and accidentally making egg drop soup. If you already know this marvelous kitchen tip, please excuse my ignorance, and send me another tip I should know, but don't.

Boil the potatoes that you've chopped up until they are cooked through, but still firm. Once cooked, drain and place in cold water to stop the cooking. Don't over-cook them or they will become mush. Part of the appeal of this salad is the firmness of the potato flesh contrasted with the creamy saltiness of the sauce.

Quarter the hard-boiled eggs, and add them to the drained and cool potatoes.And for the beans: you boil them, but only a little. Remove the strings/ends if necessary (the older, tougher beans may need this) and prepare a pot of boiling water. If you have purple beans, prepare to be really impressed. Invite a kid to the stove, invoke your best Abracadabra! and blow their little mind.

Watch:Then this:. . . and 30 seconds later, this:I could do this all day. Purple, green. Purple, green. purplegreenpurplegreenpurplegreeeee....
Don't get too mesmerized, or you'll overcook the poor dears. Drain when tender, and plunge into cold water to stop the cooking. When cool, drain and add to the rest of the stuff. Add the beans, olives and onions, too. Don't bother mixing yet, or you'll unnecessarily traumatize the potatoes.

(PATOP - People Against Traumatization Of Potatoes)

Then you make the tuna sauce (don't get scared off by this one):

Put the drained tuna and anchovies into a food processor/blender. Add a little olive oil (couple tablespoons) and some vinegar (1/3 cup or so), lemon juice and some pepper. You can toss in some garden herbs if you have them available (basil, parsley and a touch of cilantro work well). And blend the heck out of it until it's smooth and creamy.
Taste it. You may need to add more vinegar, lemon juice or perhaps salt, but this will be fairly salty.

Pour it all over everything else:

Stir up, and enjoy the heck out of it! (And tell me what you think.)

Pesto presto

(Mom, this one's for you...but if you have tons of basil and like pesto, it's for you, too.)

What happens if you are stranded at home with this:

and this:


and maybe this?


Well, I was (except for the stranded part). And I made this:


I think it's the best pesto recipe ever, and it's so easy. There's a secret to the recipe, though -- anchovies. Believe it or no, and you'd never guess it by the taste of the finished pesto, but the anchovies lend a rich saltiness that works so well with the Parmesan.

I harvested the tops off my basil plants. As long as you cut just above a leaf node, the plant recovers just fine. In fact, I think mine have benefited from frequent cutting. They just keep producing and have not yet tried to go to seed. This is what the plants looked like after I chopped off the tops. Oh, and use a very sharp knife so you don't crush the stems.


And this is how much basil I used in this batch:

If you can't grow your own (this year, that is. No excuse for next!!), buy a bunch fresh. It should be cheap this time of year, especially at farmers markets, and very especially at the end of the day, when they're trying to unload it all.

Next, ask someone really nicely to peel you a boatload of garlic. I think I used about a cup of peeled cloves. I like to use this much garlic because it makes up a large portion of the body of the pesto. One of the reasons I do this is to cut some of the fatty richness (and guilt) of traditional pesto without compromising flavor. But using this much garlic fresh would remove the enamel from your teeth and burn the hairs from your friends' noses.

So the trick is to mellow it a tad by frying it in olive oil (which you need anyway for the pesto).

And here's where the secret weapon comes in: lots of anchovies packed in olive oil. Dump about 4 cans into a frying pan, (I say 4 because that's how much I used in this batch, but you can scale down) and add some extra olive oil (about 1/4 or 1/3 cup).

Then chop up the garlic just a little (not tiny pieces or they'll burn) and add it to the oil and anchovies.

Sautee over medium heat until the garlic is just golden.

I let it get a little more brown before I removed it from the heat.

The trick here is to just take the edge and zing off the fresh garlic, but not to caramelize it so it gets sweet.

Wash and pick the leaves of the basil, stick them in a blender and pour the hot oil/garlic/anchovy mix over it. This will wilt the leaves and make the whole mess fit better in your blender.


Blend it up a little. Then add a bunch of pine nuts (walnuts work too, but the flavor they lend is harsher. Still good, though).
And then about that much Parmesan cheese. The stuff in the green can works just fine, so don't waste your money. Good basil and garlic is more important.

Now you blend for real. You may need to add a tad more olive oil and perhaps a (as in, one) tablespoon of water to get things moving. Beware to not make your pesto a liquid, though. It should be very thick. And I don't recommend stirring the green guck with a wooden spoon while it's blending. The spoons tend to not recover well from brushes with whirling steel blades.

Blend it until it's super smooth, put in jars and freeze. The pesto is absolutely not shelf stable, so you have to either eat it, freeze it, or refrigerate it and use it soon. The reason you see so much (crappy) pesto in jars in the supermarket is because they've done something to the contents to make it stable, such as acidifying it. Check it out next time you're at the store. You'll probably see citric acid listed in the ingredients. This ruins the pesto and makes it taste sour and tangy in a bad way.

But nevermind all that bad news. The good news is that you have just made swoon-worthy pesto that would make the Godfather cry.

It's so easy being green.