The Dinner Files

Yeah, I still have walnuts about. Five pounds is a lot of walnuts!

I’ve tried making winter pestos in the past – and I’ve tried them with walnuts. I’ve never been thrilled with the results. I realize not the error of my ways, though. I kept turning to arugula as my green, as my winter “basil.” I kept things a bit more simple and used flat-leaf parsley instead.

Score.

It will be delicious for the coming winter months – and its simplicity can serve as a perfect tonic to the insanity of the Thanksgiving feast you may have enjoyed.

Parsley walnut pesto

Parsley stays nice and green, no there is no need to blanch it.  Toss it with hot pasta or just smear it onto toast. It keeps well in the fridge for a few days and in the freezer for, I’m guessing, several months without trouble. If you plan to freeze it, I’d hold off on adding the cheese until you’re ready to use it.

1 1/2 cups walnuts

2 – 3 cloves garlic

Leaves from 2 bunches flat-leaf parsley

1/2 cup walnut oil

1 – 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice or cider vinegar

1/2 cup freshly grated aged pecorino cheese, plus more for serving

Salt to taste

In a large frying pan over medium high heat, toast walnuts, shaking the pan frequently until walnuts start to smell toasty good and take on a bit of color, 3 to 5 minutes. Take care not to let them darken too much in the pan – they will continue to toast up when you take them off the heat. Transfer to a plate or cutting board and let cool.

In a food processor or blender, pulse garlic until minced – scraping the sides down as needed. Add parsley leaves and pulse until reduced a bit. Add oil and lemon juice and whirl until fairly smooth.

Add walnuts and pulse until as smooth as you like (I prefer to have some chunks of walnut in there). Add cheese and pulse to combine. Taste and add salt as you like.

It may not be as green as real pesto – the kind made with basil and pine nuts and so forth – but it is awfully green, all the same. Toss it with hot pasta, as is the way with pesto, or use as a sauce on grilled chicken or fish (it is completely and utterly yummers on grilled salmon), or use as a dressing on a pasta salad. I have done all of these to great satisfaction.

In the interest of full disclosure, I got the idea for this “pesto” at an event hosted by the Walnut Board. Yes, things like that go down.*  The walnut people’s people’s assistants invite people like little old me to come up to Napa and eat walnut-laden foods and listen to all-walnut talks and be generally wined and dined and walnuted and put up in places that iron the sheets, all in the fervent hope that we will write something about walnuts. Funny thing is, I like walnuts a lot and am fully aware of how chock-full of omega-3s they are. The other funny thing is that the best recipe I took away from the whole thing was “zucchini mint pesto” but made with way less mint than used here and, obviously, with walnuts. As I was eating it I thought the heretical thought, “this is good, but it would be way better with pistachios.”

And so it is.

Zucchini mint pesto

By the way, this pesto oxidizes (turns brown) just like the real thing, so cover it with olive oil or cover with plastic wrap by pressing the wrap directly onto the surface of the sauce.

2 medium zucchini

10 – 12 sprigs of mint

1 small clove garlic

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup shelled pistachios

1/3 cup grated Parmesan or Pecorino

Chop zucchini and put in a blender or food processor. Pick leaves off the sprigs of mint and add them to the zucchini, tearing any larger leaves into smaller pieces if you’re so inclined.

Chop the garlic and throw it in along with the oil and salt. Whirl until a more or less smooth paste forms – this will take a minute or two of running the blender, so be a bit patient.

Add the pistachios and cheese and whirl until smooth again, another minute or two. Taste and add more salt to taste, if you like. Use fairly quickly or cover (plastic wrap or waxed paper or parchment paper pressed to the surface). You can keep it at room temperature for a bit while you prepare the rest of the food or chill up to two days.

I realize, I really and truly do, that most of you are not going to make your own potato gnocchi. I can see that it seems daunting. It seems messy. It seems like a lot of work. I suppose it is all of those things, in a way. But it’s all relative, isn’t it? The daunting, the messy, the time-consuming – these are the kitchen projects I like the best. And, as my dad once said, “The homemade kind is always better.”

We were having some friends over and I was trying to keep things quite simple. It was just another couple and us – we were only hosting because we couldn’t find a sitter. (I have found that there are two types of people that work well as dinner party friends when you have a school-age kid – people with similar school-age kids and people without any children at all.) They insisted on bringing a starter and wine and dessert, claiming we always host because of the sitter issue. I didn’t even put up a fight but tried to figure out a meal that wouldn’t suck up my entire day but would also use some of the potatoes from our CSA that have piled up a bit in the fridge.

I was brainstorming with the family and Ernest suggested gnocchi. Daunting, messy, and time-consuming? Not really that much since I already had some pesto in the fridge I had made so all I had to do was make the dumplings – and I’ve done that before and, in the end, it doesn’t take that much time (fair warning: so says the person who loves to do things in the kitchen).

So I boiled a pound and a half of yukon gold potatoes, starting them in a pot of cold water, adding a tablespoon of salt once the water was boiling, and avoided pricking them to test for doneness too terribly much lest the potatoes get waterlogged.

I drained them, donned a latex glove to protect my hand from the heat as I scraped the skin off each hot potato.

They were then pushed through a ricer (my favorite way to mash potatoes thoroughly and completely) and mixed with one and a half cups of flour.

This dough, still warm from the boiled potatoes, feels a lot like playdough and is quite fun to work with. I divided it into four and rolled out each quarter into an inch-thick snake on a very well floured surface.

This potato dough snake was then cut into bite-size pieces (a table knife works fine and reminds me of pre-school).

So far so easy, right? Next, to make the dumplings gnocchi-shaped, I simply took each little knob of dough and ran in down the tines of a fork, pushing it with my thumb so it ends up with the tine marks on one side and the thumbprint on the other. It takes a few dumplings to get the hang of it, but once you’ve figured out the motion you can gnocchify an entire batch of dumplings in less than five minutes.

The gnocchi were then laid out on a very well floured tray, covered with a clean towel and sat, waiting patiently, for their big moment to arrive.

The stage was set: Two big pots of water brought to a boil. Serving platter in warm oven. Water salted. Pesto brought to room temperature. A bit of the pesto spread on the serving platter. Bite-size pieces of green bean thrown in the water and cooked a few minutes before being fished out with a slotted spoon and put on the serving platter.

Then the gnocchi were added – half to each pot of water (otherwise cook in two batches). They sank right to the bottom of the pot and got a swift yet decisive stir. After about a minute they floated to the top of the water as were allowed to cook for about 10 seconds while they floated and then, like the green beans before them, they were lifted out of the water and onto the serving platter. Once all the gnocchi were out, the pesto was added and everything tossed. The platter was brought – triumphant – to the table with parmesan and a grater for each person to top their own.

Has is becoming my habit, a recipe -style recipe for Potato Gnocchi is over at Local Foods. Oh, and there’s one there for Pesto, too.

We are all a bit stuffed up and achy around my house. The boys have been sick for awhile, but it just hit me yesterday. I may have come down last, but it looks like I’m coming down hardest. So when dinner time rolled around I headed down to the basement and my beloved deep freezer. After rooting around for a few minutes I pulled out a container of green garlic pesto I made the last time it was in season. We tossed it with some angel hair pasta, made a green salad (with classic vinaigrette, which can be made in about the time it takes to sort through bottled dressings in a fridge, pull one out, pour it, put the cap back on, and return the bottle to the fridge), and called it dinner. Not too shabby.

I was in a bit of a hurry because I was headed out — cold and all — to help a friend who has a prolific meyer lemon tree of her own turn some of her backyard fruit into marmalade.

Basil, green beans, and Yukon gold potaotes in the farm box on Wednesday led to a quick dinner of pesto genovese: make a bit of pesto (I did it in a mortar because, well, I felt like it), peel and cut 2 potatoes and put them in a large pot of cold water, bring water to a boil, while that happens trim green beans and snap or cut into bite-size lengths, add 1 Tbsp. salt to boiling water with potatoes in it and also add 1/2 lb. spaghetti, a few minutes later add the green beans, when everything is tender drain and toss with the pesto.

I’m sorry. Mea culpa. Please forgive me. I offer no inspiration today. No burst of culinary delight. I made pesto again. Yes, again. Tossed it with gemelli and cut green beans (that’s how lazy I was feeling–just boiled the pasta and beans together). Yes, you guessed correctly, beans and basil were in our farm box again–along with plums, peaches, melons, tomatoes, summer squash, carrots, garlic, onions, Armenian cucumbers, and more melons.

* What did we come home to yesterday? No, not a used condom in our driveway. A used condom sitting on the ledge of our portico, as if a present, as if someone read this and hightailed it to my house with a hilarious offering. Wait, not hilarious. Gross. A gross offering.

“Mama, you make the best of these,” my son said, pointing at the superball-sized  potato on the end of his fork, “in the whole world!”

And he was eating them without the pesto.

But that’s what happens when you cover new yukon gold potatoes (relatively fresh from the earth, ranging in size from quarters to baseballs, with thin skins that rub off as you wash off the dirt) with cold water, bring them to a boil, add a mess of salt, and cook until the potatoes are oh-so-tender all the way through, drain them, and serve them hot. People tend to get excited.

I get excited about the whole pesto-on-potatoes scene I’ve been re-enacting around here this spring. And tonight I figured out why. It allows one to eat considerably more pesto than when the pesto gets tossed all evenly and reasonably with pasta. Much, much more. And, as I mentioned before, I’ve rediscovered pesto. There’s a reason everyone went so pesto-crazy in the 80s (that was the 80s, right?). The good stuff is insane. And this recipe is the good stuff, though I say it myself.

With the pestoed potatoes we had a salad made with dressing made with red wine vinegar I “made” myself. Yes, I poured leftover bits of red wine into a pitcher with a bit of vinegar mother a former co-worker gave me. It was all very taxing. The pouring and the waiting. Very taxing indeed. Worth it, though. I have my first batch sitting in bottles. Word on the street is as it sits it ages and as it ages it becomes even more delicious. We were pretty pleased with it last night, and I only filtered and bottled it the day before. I can’t wait. See? It is taxing.

I spent a fair amount of the afternoon doing this:

Then I had to rush off to my craft group, STITCH–brain child of the ever-fabulous Leigh Wells–because my friend had twins and those babies need booties! Who else is going to knit them? So I snarfed down a bowl of leftover soupe au pistou and called it a dinner to avoid making a dinner for myself of the snacks at Leigh’s. And then Suzanne (The Beholder) went and brought delicious cured meat. Some people cannot control themselves around chocolate; I am powerless in the face of fine coppa. Luckily it was on the other side of the coffee table from where I was sitting, but I still made a bit of a pig of myself with it. The comment “she’s got a triple” was exclaimed and I knew I had gone too far.

Speaking of STITCH, fellow STITCH-er Victoria is indisposed this week and asked me to guest blog for her. See what happens when I’m asked to comment on home decor over at sfgirlbybay. There’s a post yesterday and one coming up tomorrow.

Over on Local Foods I’ve called it “Summer Vegetable Pesto Soup,” but you and I know it’s really soupe au pistou, don’t we internets? It’s sort of the ultimate San Francisco summer dish, since it uses summer veggies but is, well, a soup and thus hearty and warming, in its way. I used chick peas instead of fresh shelling beans because I haven’t come across fresh shelling beans yet. I would get a bit put-out, but then I’d look like a brat. The rest of the country waits for corn and here I am demanding my shelling beans.

Oh, and now I’ve gone and reminded myself of my poor Midwestern brethren in Iowa with their sandbags and potentially failed crops. I am a brat. I take it all back. I’m grateful for my skinny zucchini and vine-ripened, non-salmonella-infected tomatoes, not to mention delicious green beans marinated in a red onion-y vinaigrette (recipe at Local Foods).

Plus, my son took this awesome picture of me tonight. His little hands can’t hold still long enough for an in-focus picture (focus is way too conventional for little mister “Look Mama, I took a picture of the floor!” anyway), but as age is setting in, I find I don’t find the gauzy-filter effect.

‘Fess up: Who else has the brightly striped lime green apron from Ikea?

“I love how you can just go in the kitchen and make dinner from whatever’s there!” exclaimed my pal Kate. I appreciated the compliment and enthusiasm, of course, but I must admit that it’s pretty easy to whip up some pesto genovese when there’s leftover pesto, cooked potatoes, and green beans in the fridge and a box of linguine in the cupboard.