Follow us all summer long as we explore the bounty of our region’s farms.
by MOLLY MCGINN
If you really want the best, freshest basil, grow your own. It’s one of the easiest herbs to grow from seed and you can plant it almost anytime in the summer.
Many basil lovers already have bunches growing in their home gardens. But if you’re a locavore newcomer, or simply new to the garden game, you can always learn a thing or two from the Edible Schoolyard. And, we have a few quick garden tips to help you get going.
Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen’s Pesto Sauce
3 ½ oz fresh basil leaves
¾ cup extra virgin olive oil
2 ½ tsp minced garlic
1/3 cup grated Reggiano Parmesan cheese
½ tsp fresh lemon juice
Pick basil leaves from stems and place in a blender. Add oil and garlic; blend well. While continuing to blend, add cheese and lemon juice. Blend until no lumps are present. Makes – 1 1/3 cups.
Simple materials to grow your own basil from seed
Lucky 32’s new gardner tips
Materials
Basil seeds (we picked up this pack from 5th Season Garden Co. on Battleground Ave.)
One bottom plate of a terra cotta pot, small or large
Fresh soil
Water
Sunlight
Procedures
Remove the top of the terra cotta pot. You just want to use the bottom plate for this starter garden. Fill the terra cotta pot with soil. Sprinkle in the basil seeds and cover with a little dirt. Water gently. Set in the sun.
Tips: You don’t want to the sprouts to grow too close together, so I spread them apart, take some out and replant them around my house. Pinch the flowers off the leaf. You don’t want basil seeds, you only want the leaves to grow.
Follow us all summer long as we explore the bounty of our region’s farms.
“I just love the way they celebrate vegetables in the south,” says Alice Waters, who helped start the Edible Schoolyard program in Greensboro in 2010 — the only affiliate program to the Berkley, CA campus in the nation.
“But instead of a ‘meat and three’ it should be a ‘meat and 10.’ ”
She was referring to the south’s historic “meat and three” menu style, used here at Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen. It’s a soul-food approach, offering a long list of vegetables for side dishes, and the promise of “glorious vittles served with the utmost informality,” as defined by food writers Jane and Michael Stern.
What Alice is saying is that we need to eat more vegetables.
In the summer, basil is a prolific green. Synonymous with summer pesto. Despite basil’s abundance in the summer garden, this member of the mint family is rarely used fresh in most kitchens, which is an insult to its fine cross between licorice and clover flavor.
It’s most often over-done, over-used, too dry and in a jar on the spice rack. As a culture we’ve lost a touch with fresh herbs, and we substitute for dry herbs because we do weekly grocery shopping instead of daily shopping.
Basil, parsley, and mint could easily be added to the list of offerings to the “meat and three menu,” to up our vegetable wattage to 10. With fresh herbs on the list, we could up it to 20.
There’s a way to change that.
“I believe that our children are influenced by more than the homes they grow up in. If we want to change something — like our child’s diet — we need to have more conversations with schools and the people who feed children,” one of our chefs said.
The sign in the garden says, “We let our plants ‘go to seed’ so we can collect and replant.
That’s also why, when possible, we get basil, kale, spinach — whatever grows in abundance — from the Edible Schoolyard in Greensboro.
The garden and exhibit has a school outreach program and buses kids in from outer areas to learn how to play in the dirt again.
“The Edible Schoolyard receives over 100,000 visitors per year,” said Justin Leonard, Garden Manager at the Edible Schoolyard. “We focus on the seed to table cycle (planning, planting, caring for, harvesting, cooking, eating, cleaning up, composting) as a tool for food empowerment. Children are involved in every aspect of the garden and we try to have lots of items that they can eat out of hand.”
The thing with basil, is that when you plant it, you don’t really know how much you’re going to get. There’s often a surplus.
The sign in the garden says, “We let our plants ‘go to seed’ so we can collect and replant.
Use more basil
Pick up a brown paper sack full of fresh, locally grown vegetables on the Farmer’s Cart and use a little fresh basil in your home kitchen.
Caring for basil Selected from Food Lover’s Companion, p. 47
Choose evenly colored leaves with no sign of wilting.
Refrigerate fresh basil, wrapped in barely damp paper towels and then in a plastic bag for up to 4 days.
Or store a bunch of basil, stems down, in a glass of water with a plastic bag over the leaves (refrigerate in this manner for up to a week, change the water every 2 days).
To preserve and dry fresh basil, wash and dry the leaves, and place layers of leaves, then coarse salt, in a container that can be tightly sealed.
Alternatively, finely chop the clean basil and combine with olive oil and water. Freeze in tiny portions to flavor sauces, salad dressings, etc.
Suggestions
If your kids eat salad, toss a little fresh basil in with the greens.
Add it uncooked to your roasted squash, tomatoes.
Add fresh basil to a cheese pizza. Fresh mozzarella, fresh tomato sauce, and basil, that’s it. If your kids love tomatoes, then basil is going to give them a little zing.
One age-appropriate note: Basil is a stronger herb, more appropriate for children who enjoy a stronger taste, so don’t be discouraged if the younger ones don’t take to it. They’ll grow into it.
COMING UP:
Friday, we’ll post Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen’s Pesto Sauce and Chicken Tomato Basil
Soup recipes.
Slow heat to summer: Green Garlic Confit from Plum Granny Farm
LOCAVORE’S DELIGHT: The Series # 3.
Follow us all summer long as we explore the bounty of our region’s farms.
This weekend is the unofficial start of summer. We all want a table outside where we can spend hours talking with friends in the temperate weather, eating good food cooked in a cool oven for hours while we waited for the timer out-of-doors. Today, we shares a recipe for celebrating this spring’s slow rise to a hot summer: Green Garlic Confit.
Find some fine Green Garlic specimens on our Vegetable Stand outside Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen in Greensboro and Cary; picked fresh from Plum Granny Farm in Capella, NC.
Green Garlic
Confit Green Garlic
Known for its subtle, earthy flavor, smear this late-spring garlic bulb confit on freshly grilled or toasted bread. Save the confit oil and toss with salad, or use it as a dipping oil with bread.
1 lb garlic green bulbs, about 12 bulbs
1 8 x 8 inch loaf or banana bread pan
Lower grade olive oil, such as pomace oil
Clean the green garlic bulbs. Trim off the leafy green top (save for your chicken broth), and leave a 4-inch stem above the bulb. Peel off the garlic’s tough outer skin, much like you would peel off the papery layer from an onion or garlic bulb.
Place the the prepped green garlic tops in the loaf pan. Pour in pomace oil, or a lower quality olive oil, over the garlic bulbs, using just enough to cover the bulbs.
For a gas oven with a pilot light, set the pan in the oven to cook the garlic and bulbs for 4 hours, or overnight. For an electric oven, set the temperature to the lowest possible setting and set the pan in the oven. The confit process is about turning up the heat as slow as possible, up to 212 degrees Fahrenheit without going over 300 degrees Fahrenheit.
Let the bulbs cool to room temperature. Remove the garlic bulbs and place on a plate with fresh rosemary. Save the remaining oil and season with fresh salt and pepper to use as a bread dip.
Green Garlic
Green garlic is harvested before the head divides into cloves, and is usually the result of farmers thinning their crop by picking every other plant to allow the remaining garlic to expand into the vacated space (much like spring onions). This young plant has a milder taste than the mature garlic that is usually encountered. Green garlic is usually available at farmers markets or directly from farms growing garlic. The “season” for green garlic is usually brief, toward the end of spring.
Start with a pound of fresh Green Garlic from the Farmer’s Cart outside Lucky 32 Southern KitchenTry this: Cook Green Garlic bulbs over a gas stove. Place bulbs directly on the burner and gently char the greens.
A wild recipe: Ramps harvested by hand in the Appalachian Mountains for this month’s Chef’s Feature
LOCAVORE’S DELIGHT: The Series #2.
Follow us all summer long as we explore the bounty of our region’s farms.
It took 5 years, a 4-hour ride in a London taxi cab, and a tradition as old as the Appalachian Mountains to make this Pickled Ramp and Mushroom Relish. And it’s all for you this month at Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen in Greensboro.
The prized perishable in the relish is the wild ramp. The heirloom vegetable still grows in abundance in the wet hollows and ravines of the Appalachian Mountains.
Favored in high end restaurants for its scarcity and garlic-onion flavor, getting your hands on a batch of ramps either takes some extra scratch – up to $25 a pound – or a sense of adventure.
Ramps are slow to divide and propagate. Its life-cycle is 5 years from stem to seed, and because ramps prefer the steep mountain side near ravines, they can only be harvested by hand.
Good thing Lucky 32 has a taste for adventure. We were recently a special guest at Foggy Ridge Cider and hunted ramps with Diane Flynt, co-owner of the community-friendly cider farm. Read about the ramp adventure here.
Taste the adventure and the spring tonic known as the ramp in this Pickled Ramp and Mushroom Relish.Ask for the Chef’s Selection of Fresh Fish, a special item on the right side of the menu.
And to get the full adventure flavor, try our new New Jersey Cocktail, made with Foggy Ridge Hard Cider or their First Fruit Cider, now available by the glass, made from apples grown in close proximity to these wild ramps.
Pickled Ramp and Mushroom Relish
Pickled Ramps
1 cup red wine vinegar
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
1 tsp peppercorns
1 bay leaf
1 pound ramps, cleaned
1 tbsp sea salt
Wash the ramps under cool, running water. Drain the ramps well and place them in a mason jar. Combine the vinegar, salt, sugar, and water in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Add the bay leaf, and peppercorns. Pour the hot vinegar mixture over the ramps in the mason jar and let cool, sealing tight and transferring to the refrigerator.
Pickled Ramp and Mushroom Relish
Yield= 1 qt
2 pounds shiitake mushrooms, weighed with stems
2/3 cup canola oil, divided
2 tsp black pepper
1/3 cup tamari
½ pounds pickled ramps
1/3 cup pickling brine from ramps
Trim stems from mushrooms (and use when making stock). Julienne mushroom caps. In a large mixing bowl, combine 1/3 c oil with tamari and pepper; add mushrooms and mix well. Distribute mushrooms evenly on a baking sheet and cook in a 350 oven for 7-9 minutes, or until partially dried. Chop ramps finely (white and green parts); combine with mushrooms and remaining ingredients.
