Creamy Pesto Sauce (Oil Free and Vegan!)

Perhaps my best discovery in this CSA adventure so far has been pesto.  It never occurred to me in my pre-CSA days to make pesto out of anything but basil.  Actually, it never even occurred to me to make my own pesto at all (versus getting it from a jar or, worse, a “packet”).

But, since starting the CSA, I learned, quickly -- and to my repeated joy -- that any dark, leafy green mixed with water, olive oil, Parmesan cheese, lemon juice, and nuts will make a stellar pesto.  See, for example, my recipes here, here, and here.

But, in keeping with my overall healthy eating plan, I usually try to avoid using too much oil.  The amount of oil going into my pesto recipes was, admittedly, outrageous (a cup or more!).  So, I decided to see how pesto would taste with no oil at all. 

As it turns out: Still delicious.

Here was my recipe, which made use of all the dark, leafy greens I received in my most recent CSA delivery.

Water

½ pound of whole-wheat pasta

1 cup raw, unsalted cashews

1 bunch beet greens, stems removed

1 bunch radish greens, stems removed

1 bunch carrot greens, stems removed

Juice of 1 lemon

2 cloves garlic, chopped

1 bulb of a spring onion, chopped

First, soak the cashews in water, as if making a cashew cream sauce.  Set aside.  [Soaking at least an hour is recommended to get the creamiest texture; if you don’t have a Vitamix or a bullet-style blender, it could take far longer than an hour (perhaps even overnight) to get the cashews soft enough to “cream.”] 

Start a pot of water boiling for the pasta.

Blend the beet greens, radish greens, and carrot greens together with enough water to allow them to blend.  The beet and radish greens may get closer to a puree, but the carrot greens will lend some chunkiness.  Squeeze the juice of one lemon over the blended greens.  Remove the blended greens from the blender, placing them in a strainer over a bowl for a few minutes to strain out the excess water (I wouldn’t press the greens; the raw greens could get “bruised”).  Set aside.

[The water that comes out is essentially green juice.  You could drink it, if you’re so inclined.  I tasted it and was not so inclined, despite liking green juice generally.  I think it was the salty beet greens that turned me off.]

Blend the cashews with water until they reach a creamy consistency.  Set aside.

Place some water in a skillet and cook the garlic and the onion.  When the onion is starting to turn translucent, add the cashew cream.  Allow to heat through.  Add the blended greens.  Stir to combine thoroughly and allow to heat through.

Serve the pesto over the whole-wheat pasta.  I topped mine with cracked black pepper and a pinch of salt (like cashew cream sauce generally, I find it does need a pinch of salt).

The bottom line: Pesto doesn’t have to use oil.  This creamy version gets all its fat from a whole food (cashews) and is just as delicious as every other pesto I’ve made!

Garlic Scape Pesto

I'm learning that making a fresh pesto is as easy as blending up whatever greens and garlic you may have on hand with some lemon, nuts, olive oil, and water.  No special measurements needed.

For this pesto, I used some lovely garlic scapes from my CSA in place of mature garlic.  [Garlic scapes, I learned, are the "thinnings" from the garden.  To grow garlic (or anything else, really) you plant a bunch of seeds, and then pick some of the shoots to thin them out as they grow.]

For the greens, I used kale and beet greens.  My bullet-style blender is small, so I blended the greens and garlic with the lemon, oil, and water, and put the results in a bowl.  Then I blended the walnuts with some oil and water and mixed the result into the same bowl.  It made for an artsy and unusual pesto presentation that tasted just the same as regular pesto when spooned over whole-wheat pasta.

Beet Crostini

A recipe that uses the whole plant and feeds the whole family!  A winner!

1 baguette, sliced
1 beet, including leaves and stems
1 cup of part-skim ricotta cheese

For this simple recipe, I toasted slices of baguette in the oven (425 degrees for 5 minutes).

While the slices of bread were toasting, I diced a cooked beet, raw beet greens, and raw beet stems into tiny pieces.

When the bread had toasted up to a nice, golden brown, I spread cool, part-skim ricotta cheese on it and then topped it with the diced beets, beet greens, and beet stems.

The result was a salty/sweet, crunchy/smooth, warm/cold treat that was a study in opposites and, therefore, a perfect snack no matter what you might be craving.

My daughters loved this.  My three-year-old enjoyed using a butter knife for the cheese and assembling all the ingredients on the toast.  My one-year-old liked eating the bread and beets as finger food, and then had a blast smearing the cheese around with a spoon.

For my part, I found that I could pretend that I was eating an appetizer at a fancy restaurant.  That's pretty impressive, considering I was sitting in my kitchen with two kids who were turning their hands bath-worthy purple with beet juice while I ate it.

Beet and Feta Salad

The Cheesecake Factory has a lovely “Beets with Goat Cheese” salad that, in addition to beets and goat cheese, includes apples, arugula, and pecans.  That salad -- which I have had on many occasions -- was the inspiration for this dish.

I cooked the three beets I received from my CSA by placing them in a baking dish with about 1 inch of water, covering the dish with tin foil, and then putting it in the oven at 400 degrees for one hour.  After removing the beets from the oven and letting them cool, the peels slipped right off and the beets were ready to dice into a salad.  I used only one beet for this recipe, and put the other two in the ‘fridge for another use.

1 beet, cooked, peel removed, diced

Greens from one beet, removed from stem and chopped

3 large leaves of kale, removed from stem and chopped

3 leaves of romaine, chopped

1 green apple, diced

1 small handful of raw almonds

1/4 cup crumbled feta cheese

olive oil, balsamic vinegar, cracked black pepper, to taste

Arrange everything on a plate.  Drizzle with olive oil, balasmic vinegar, and cracked black pepper.  Enjoy!

Beet and Beet-Green Borscht

My has husband been a total sport about eating my vegan lentil, spinach, and wild rice soup.  But I think he's craving meat.  And, to be honest, I am, too.

I recently lost about 40 pounds, thanks to tough workouts from P90X and strict adherence to a high-protein, low carb, low fat diet.  I ate A LOT of egg whites, chicken breast, and pork tenderloin.  A lot of broccoli and spinach.  But pretty much no potatoes or other starches, and virtually no bread, rice, or pasta.

I'm a little nervous that carb-heavy seasonal foods (potatoes, etc.) are going to make me fat.  But I'm trusting that the home-cooked bounty of the earth will not fail me.  And, in fairness, despite a marked uptick in my consumption of carbs, my weight has not changed an ounce in the many weeks I've now been working on the locavore thing.

Nevertheless, I'm feeling the need for some protein to go with my lovely veggies.  The last timeI had beets in the house, my husband requested borscht.  So, with the "no feedlot" stew beef I found in the 'fridge (hubby is good at keeping it stocked with some kind of meat, in the hopes I'll eventually cook it), I decided to try the traditional Russian soup.

The recipe I loosely followed is one I found at Simply Recipes.  I wasn't up for all the fancy meat-shank cooking in the original recipe, so I just browned the stew meat in a pot with the onions and then threw everything else (up to beet greens and stems) in with it to cook.  [The original recipe called for cabbage, which I had forgotten to buy.  But the beet greens and stems looked like good roughage, so I chopped them up and threw them in, too].

5 cups low-sodium vegetable broth
3 cups water
1 pound stew beef
1 large onion, peeled, chopped
8 large beets, peeled, chopped
4 carrots, peeled, chopped
4 small blue and red potatoes, peeled, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
2 cups beet greens and stems, chopped
3/4 cup chopped fresh dill
3 Tbsp red wine vinegar
1 cup fat-free Greek yogurt
Pepper to taste

Spoon into bowls and serve each with a splash of red wine vinegar, and scoop of yogurt, and fresh dill sprinkled over top.

It was delicious, filling, and so veggie and protein packed, I'm convinced it'll actually do good things for my figure!

Sodium in Beet Greens?!

While I was eating my lunch (beet greens and brown rice) at the office today, I decided to look up the nutritional profile of beet greens. I had never actually eaten them before, so I was unfamiliar. It turns out that they’re nutritional powerhouses, with tons of vitamins and minerals, plenty of fiber, and lots of protein (similar to kale and other greens).

But they’re also surprisingly high in sodium. Who knew?!

One cup of cooked beet greens has about 347 mg of sodium, or 14 percent of the recommended daily allowance. When compared to canned soup and other sodium-laced processed foods, the amount of sodium in beet greens is nothing.

But I was nonetheless surprised!

My new CSA

On Saturday, our family paid a visit to Practically Organic, a Community-Sponsored Agriculture (CSA) farm that is only four miles from our house.

I loved pulling up to see a true family farm, a beautifully-kept house surrounded by rows of vegetables, free-range chickens, and houses for bees. While I talked with Shawn Sizer, the farmer, my toddler fed the bunnies with Mary Ann, Shawn’s wife, and pet the miniature rescued horses in the pasture. We walked the fields and Shawn pulled some gorgeous veggies for us, including beautiful candy-striped beets, which I had never seen before. It was an absolutely idyllic experience.

[My toddler, who learned to garden with me last summer, wasn’t shy about taking a turn pulling up the crops. I had to stop her and apologize more than once! I guess it’s a good thing that she already knows the simple joy of pulling fresh food from the ground.]

When we got home, I was so excited to cook my very first CSA vegetables.

I promptly washed and chopped everything. My plan was to roast the veggies (beets, carrots, and parsnips) and to cook the beet greens (I wasn’t sure the other greens were edible, based on some quick web research).

I coated the root veggies in olive oil, then sprinkled them with dried thyme and cracked black pepper. I popped them in the oven to roast and...

...That was the last time they looked so good. On my very first CSA cooking experience, I completely burnt the veggies. I was devastated! I had this beautiful, free bounty from a sustainable, local farm and I absolutely destroyed it. I tried to eat the results anyway, but there was no denying that my amazing veggies had turned into little more than charcoal puffs.

Clearly, CSA Virgin has a lot to learn.

Thankfully, my beet greens turned out wonderfully. I cooked them the only way I know how to cook bitter greens: I put a little bit of olive oil in a pan and browned some garlic and diced onions. When they were almost done, I added the greens, along with red pepper flakes and cracked black pepper. Then I stirred it up until the greens wilted. Voila, a lovely side dish!

I ended up packing it for lunch at work and re-heating it with some brown rice. It was absolutely delicious. The heat of the red pepper flakes balanced the bitterness of the greens. And I got an unexpected surprise: The gorgeous red “beet” color in the leaves bled into the onions, turning them a pretty pinkish purple!

I wish I hadn’t burnt all the lovely roots from the CSA, but the trip to the farm was still a success. I got something good to eat, showed my daughter where food comes from (ahem, where food SHOULD come from), and convinced my husband that we should lay out a substantial amount of our money on the CSA.

We filled out the paperwork and wrote our check as soon as we got home. In 2012, we’ll be sharing in Practically Organic’s vegetables, herbs, and special hot peppers!