Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here!
Show of hands: who has recently made a summer road trip, or is planning to soon? We have just returned from a 16-day, 4000-mile odyssey, which included stops in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Texas and New Mexico. Most of our stops were to see family, including all four parental units, which was awesome, but we’re very glad to be home now. I’ll be sharing some of the food I cooked on the way and a couple of terrific menu items we encountered in a future post.
I don’t know about you, but by the time we finish one of our marathon road trips, I simply can’t WAIT to get back into the kitchen to start cooking again. Much as we try (and we were REALLY good on this trip), it’s almost impossible to get around eating some fast food along the way. Late in our trip, on a very lonely stretch of road through Nevada and just into California, there was no way to avoid eating at McDonald’s for one meal, and at what I can only describe as a very expensive McDonald’s for dinner. The real McDonald’s was way better, by the way. Since I almost never eat fast food these days, I mostly kind of enjoy indulging in it every once in a while. But for whatever reason, whether it be that it’s been so long since my body dealt with it or that my taste buds have changed, I really didn’t feel well the after eating all that bad stuff that day, and it made me all the more ready to get home!
And now, I’m enjoying getting back to sharing things I’m cooking up in my California kitchen right now–food-of-the-moment from the freshest, seasonal ingredients I can get my hands on.
Right now, sweet basil is at its peak and will be for another couple of months, so it’s great time to whip up a big batch of pesto to put away in the deep freeze for use in those cold, winter months when nothing will do but a tasty burst of summer sunshine!
At its heart, California Cuisine is doing as little as you can to the freshest ingredients so those bright, fresh flavors can shine though. This is also a super-healthy way of eating. The more you do to fresh produce, the more it can affect the nutritional benefits of the ingredient.
For example, a serving of sweet basil has all this goodness in it:
30% recommended daily allowance of vitamin A, 20% of vitamin C, a whopping 350% of vitamin K, 43% of copper, 50% of manganese and 18% of iron. Now–a “serving” of sweet basil is about 100grams. Since you’d likely only eat about a tenth of that in one sitting, the numbers don’t look nearly as impressive, except for the vitamin K, of which you’d still get a good 30-35% of your rda. Vitamin K is important in blood clotting and bone strength. Basil is also rich in antioxidants such as lutein, zeaxanthin, beta-carotene and beta-cryptoxanthin and essential oils like eugenol, linalool and citronellol, all of which help to regulate blood pressure and blood sugar and to reduce inflammation. In theory, I guess it could be classified as a “superfood,” except that it’s mainly used in small amounts as a flavoring additive.
So, even though you would never eat that much in one sitting, you still get the picture–it’s really good for you.
In order to get the most benefit from these nutrients, basil is best eaten raw, or added at the very end of cooking, as heat destroys the delicate essential oils and antioxidants.
My recipe for pesto takes full advantage of those fresh flavors and because I don’t blanch my sweet basil leaves like many recipes have you do, the nutrients are preserved and the flavors remain fresh and true, even after freezing them. As a side note–I’ve read that a lot cooks will blanch their sweet basil leaves to avoid having them turning brown. I’ve never had this happen. I use a food processor to prep the sauce, and even after freezing, my pesto stays nice and bright green. And remember that heat (even a quick blanch in hot water) can affect the ephemeral nutrients in sweet basil. Less really is more here.
Join me later in the week when I share more pesto recipes!
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
p.s. Check out my new feature: What’s For Dinner Tonight in Keri’s California Kitchen–today, I’m featuring a birthday celebration dinner easy to cook up on a weeknight, but delicious enough for a serious celebration! You can either click on it above, or click the link in the sidebar of the homepage.
