Sauerkraut, Pesto

     As promised in my last blog entry, here is the description of today's activities of making sauerkraut from our red and green cabbages, and pesto from our greenhouse grown basil.
     I picked 11 cabbages this morning, 5 red and 6 green.  Red cabbages were the Primero variety from Territorial Seeds, and the green were both Derby Day and Blue Lagoon varieties.  Here they are in their natural habitat before picking.

I stripped off the outer leaves, killed all the slugs I found hiding in the leaves, and added the outer leaves to the compost pile.
Here are the 11 cabbages selected for the sauerkraut.

Next, we cut up the cabbages, washed them, cored them, and put them through the slicing attachment on our Oster kitchen center.

We added pickling salt to the packed down mixture which we pack into a food grade tub which has been scalded, and covered the coming sauerkraut with cheesecloth and a plate.  It then gets weighed down with a jug of water, and covered.  It begins to ferment, bubbles away, and in a few weeks we will have a lovely and yummy sauerkraut which we will water bath can and put away for winter.

That completed the process for the sauerkraut.  Next up was making Pesto.  We grow the basil for pesto in our greenhouse on heat mats since basil requires more heat than we have available out of doors.  This year I grew two types of basil, the large leaved Genovese, and the small leaved Spicy Globe basil.  Today was the second time I have picked this basil, and it grew amazingly well after I had cut it back the first time.  We will see if it grows back a third time.
     The process for pesto is interesting.  It can be done with a mortar and pestle (we have a pair made of marble), but today since I was doing a large quantity, I opted to use a food processing attachment to the kitchen center.  I decided to use the Alice Waters recipe for pesto from the Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza & Calzone cookbook.  You basically blend a large quantity of basil with garlic, salt, peppercorns, olive oil, toasted pine nuts, and grated parmesan cheese.  This makes a paste which I freeze in an ice cube tray, and will later package using our vacuum sealing Foodsaver for the winter.  Here are some photos of the process.

This week I will be focusing on house maintenance, painting trim, restaining decks, and that kind of stuff.  I'll give you updates if it seems interesting.