Delicious Tomato Pesto Pie

Our tomatoes are just starting to come in. We had some end-rot early on, but now that seems to have gone away. It has been one hot summer, and I think we were a little inconsistent with the watering. Lately I've been feeding the tomatoes and up until now we have been watering twice a day.

Along with my tomatoes, I've planted plenty of basil. I made some basil pesto the other day with our own garlic and then I found this recipe for Tomato Basil Pesto Pie. Perfect!

All you need are ingredients to make a simple crust (flour, butter, baking powder, milk and salt), parmesan cheese (which you can put in the crust as well!), ingredients for basil pesto (more parmesan cheese, basil, garlic, pinenuts or almonds, olive oil) and then you add sliced tomatoes and mozzarella cheese, and more parmesan cheese. I used some plum tomatoes and some others Genovese tomatoes that happened to be ready. The crust calls for milk and since I only drink fat free milk, I added some greek yogurt to my crust. Yum, yum, yum. I had some for dinner last night. I am having it for lunch today and hopefully I will have some for dinner as well.

The crust is perfect for soaking up the pesto and tomato juice and the cheese....oh this is so, incredibly good! You have to try it! It bakes in the oven for 40 minutes, and prep time was for me about 30 minutes. I hope you like it as much as I did! :-)

Here's the recipe for Farmgirl's Savory Plum Tomato and Basil Pesto Pie.
Finny over at Finny Knits has a version adding sausage for you meat lovers.
She also has a nifty page describing what she makes from her farmshare box. Cool way to categorize her recipes.

Cheesy Yumminess.

I'm getting hungry just looking at these pictures. Is it lunch-time yet?

Visitors!

My blog-friend, the author of YD's A Little Bit of Everything Place and her husband Mike stopped by on their way back from Florida. She is every bit as lovely, friendly and generous as her blog. And her husband is the perfect match!
I will say that I was a little bit nervous about meeting someone I really didn't know, but it turned out we knew a lot about each other already....and we have so many good and joyous things in common, that it was like we were never strangers. Our shared love of our dogs, cooking, blogging, our husbands ... as well as both of us being foreigners to the US. Of course those countries are as far apart as can be (she is from Malaysia and I'm from Sweden!).

We ended up in the kitchen, all of us including Kane, and made some excellent homemade pizzas. Homemade pizza dough recipe from Farmgirl Fare and a somewhat BBQ chicken pizza loosely based on Pioneerwoman's recipe. It was great fun, and I'm so appreciative of having friends that pitch in for dinner. Mike was an excellent pizzamaker, and showed us some of his professional(!) tips for yummy pizzas, and Sean even brought out the coveted roasted green chiles from New Mexico. Not everyone gets to share in his New Mexico roasted green chile stash!

For dessert I had made Pioneer Woman's best chocolate sheet cake ever, cut it in 4 pieces slathered raspberry/blueberry/strawberry jam in between 4 of the layers, stacked them with strawberries in between, added some whipped cream and our awesome local strawberries. YUM!

Kane was played with, loved on and petted. He was a very good boy and sent some treats back to his friends Samantha and June.

Now Sean and I have to plan a trip up to see them! Maybe in the fall, who knows?
Thank you for the flower, YD! Hope you all had a safe trip home!

Being productive

It's peach time in South Carolina!

We had a wonderfully productive weekend. Both of us took Friday off and used it as our regular Saturday - relaxing, some yardwork, catching up etc. So when Saturday and Sunday actually came along, we got lots done. Here's a rundown:

1. Went for a hike with Kane at Crowder's Mountain State Park

2. Picked the first tomatoes in the garden. Yes, that is a penny - aren't the maters cute???? :-) These are sweet currant tomatoes that I grew from seed with seeds from Seed Savers Exchange.

3. Picked the first cucumbers. Yum!

4. Sean made a giant teabag from jute and suede cord to make manure tea for the garden. Here he is sewing it together. Sean actually once took first place in craftsman skills at his local 4H by sewing a dress for one of his sisters! :-)

5. Shopped at the local farmstand and got fresh blueberries, rhubarb (not local!), white corn and strawberries.

Blueberry Breakfast Bars

6. Made these Blueberry Breakfast Bars with the fresh local blueberries. This photo was taken 5 minutes after it came out of the oven. Haha. Just kidding. But we're chowing it down pretty quickly! If you like bluberries, please, please try this Foodie Farmgirl recipe. You won't be sorry!

7. Felt very sad at the news of my friend's 6 month old puppy drowning in a freak accident. Little Davey Crockett will be missed. I will miss your snapping kisses and your boundless energy. We love you lots, J. Sometimes, life just doesn't seem fair. Love with all you have.

8. Went to Greensboro to meet my dog training girls for an obedience training session which was great. More on that in my other blog. Here is Bronco and Jackie working on the jumps.

9. Sean weed-whacked the entire garden. Love you, honey!

10. Sean installed a drip-irrigation system in the veggie garden. The tomatoes love you, honey!

11. Celebrated my neighbor Gaye's birthday with a giant bouquet of kitchen garden herbs, coneflowers and black-eyed Susans. Happy double nickel, neighbor!

12. Almost finished cleaning the green bedroom! Yeay - I can see the floor!

13. Canned peaches. (9pm on Sunday night....). I used TennZen's recipe and canning instructions over here. She has excellent recommendations for safe canning practices which can also be found here. She has also written this post on various unsafe methods (which I have in several of my (recently published) cookbooks.

Sean made me a funnel! Nice...

14. Blogged about it.

I hope you all had wonderful either productive or relaxing weekends, or perhaps they were one and the same. Despite the productiveness, my thoughts are with everyone that lost someone this weekend, which seems to be many, both public figures and friends. May everyone eventually find some peace after all this sadness.

Happy Midsommar!

It may not have escaped your notice that I grew up outside the boundaries of the US of A. :-)
I was born and raised in Sweden, and came over here when I was 18 years old with my family. Yup, I'm Swedish through and through - here legally though, no worries.

Many Swedes favorite holiday is Midsommar, or Midsummer. It is a celebration of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and traditionally a large maypole is raised, decorated with birch-branches and flower wreaths. People wear traditional folk costumes and there is good food, plenty to drink and lots of good cheer. Midsummer used to be the time when people thought magic was at it's strongest and so it was a good time to perform rituals. One such ritual was for young girls to pick seven different kinds of wildflowers, place them under their pillow before going to sleep and they were then supposed to dream about the future husband. I'm all set in that area, so no sleeping on wildflowers for me anymore. :-)

The Spread.

The traditional food is the freshest, first harvest from the garden: new potatoes, fresh strawberries and the like. My mom and I like to put on a very Swedish menu so this year we made gravlax (marinated salmon) with dill-mustard sauce, new potatoes out of our garden, some fresh bread and a yummy cake with strawberries and our own blueberries. My grandmother also serves "kassler" or Canadian bacon sliced thick with a pineapple-mayo-peas and whipped cream kind of sauce. Sounds weird but it's delicious. We also had some home-made bread and some cucumbers.

Here is the recipe for Swedish Gravlax:

For 1 kilo of gravlax (2.2 pounds, for 6-8 people)

I freeze my salmon before marinating it to make sure it is safe, and then I take it out of the freezer so that it is just about defrosted when I add the marinade.

Marinade:
4 tbsp sugar
4 tbsp salt
2 white pepper corns - smashed
lots of chopped dill (1-2 cups)

Leave the skin on the salmon. Cut out or pull out all large bones. Cut the salmon in half on the short end.
Rub the sugar,salt and pepper mix on the meat side, pat it into the fish (don't wipe off) and put 2 pieces meaty side together with the chopped dill in between.
Put the thick side against the thin side of each half.
Put all of this into double plastic bags and put in the fridge for 1-2 days. Turn the bags about once a day.
Once done - scrape away the spice mix and throw away the salt fluids.
Cut in thin, thin strips and eat with gravlaxsas. (see recipe below)
You can freeze gravlax, or you can put it on the grill and quick-grill it for a more finished flavor.
I prefer mine raw!
It will keep in the fridge for 3-4 days!

Gravlax-sauce:

Almost one cup of chopped dill
1 tsp salt + 1 tbsp sugar
1/2 cup sweet swedish mustard (or 1-2 tsp dark french mustard, I've used Grey poupon in the past as well)
1 1/4 cups oil (canola)
Some ground white pepper
Some vinegar (optional)

Place half of the dill in the bottom of a round bowl
Add sugar and salt and rub it into the dill with a wooden spoon
Add mustard - mix well
Add the oil by dripping it into the mustard mix while CONSTANTLY stirring.
If you stop stirring, the sauce will not coagulate - it will separate.
You will end up with a nice thick, shiny sauce.
Add the rest of the dill and pepper to taste (1-2 turns), a splash of balsamic maybe

IF the sauce separates - add a few drops of lemon juice and stir again until it's mixed nicely.

My fabulous wine-glasses!

Did I perhaps say I wasn't going to eat cake until the wedding? Well, I obviously couldn't keep that promise with this guy/gal sitting in front of me....It has layers of strawberry mousse, blueberries, white chocolate mousse and strawberries. How can you go wrong?

Digging up new potatoes. Very fashionable outfit, ey? :-)

The happy farmers (it was a rough day at work for me, that's my excuse for looking horrible!)

Yeay - we have hot peppers (Wenk's yellow hot)! I can't wait to taste them!

We had a fabulous midsummer dinner, before I had to pack and go to Chicago on a businesstrip. It was a good trip but it's even better to be home. And there's still cake left!

Poetic about "saft"

Saft is the Swedish word for "juice". Back home we have many varieties of saft, such as orange, raspberry, strawberry, pear (my favorite!), cherry (so not my favorite!), black currant, red currant, lingonberry, blueberry, rowenberry and I'm sure many more.
Rowenberry saft is what my great grandmother, Ida, used to make. There are stories still being told about her in the old neighborhood about how she would cart a big ladder down to the playground and pick the rowenberries from the trees in order to make saft. What a sight that must have been!
My paternal grandmother, Lillemor, (hej farmor!) makes use of the red and black currant bushes that grow at their home. She sometimes even mixes in raspberries depending on what that particular year's crop was like.

Having a glass of saft in the summertime at my grandparents place is one of my favorite things. Not to mention the fun games you can play with saft, ice-cubes and straws. :-) All of us "kids" (me, my brother and cousins) would each get 2 straws, and then my grandfather said "Go!" (well actually he said "Nu!") and we all positioned our straws against the icecube and (for lack of better description) sucked until we had made it through the ice-cube to the other side. The winner had to bring up his straw with a dangling ice-cube to prove that he/she was first. Yes, we still compete whenever we have the chance to get together... Last summer I decided that it was high time that I learned to make it on my own.

My mom conventiently told me that she happened to have a never-used "Saft-Maja" that I could probably use. Well, turns out Saft-Maja is the Swedish brand name of a steamer.
Many minutes went into pondering what kind of Saft to make. In the end, it was easy. I forgot to mention rhubarb saft up top. Rhubarb is one of my favorite fruits (is it a fruit?). Too bad they don't grow very well down where I live, but once we get some better soil, we may try it anyway. The local farm stand down the road (the Bush n'Vine, yes, really, that is their name.....can you believe it? In SC nonetheless!!!!) is a Strawberry grower, 1 gallon buckets for very cheap. And very yummy. So I decided to make strawberry rhubarb saft. Strawberry Rhubarb pie is after all fiances favorite kind, and we do like to keep him happy.

The recipe I used:

1 litre strawberries
500 grams rhubarb - rinsed and cut into 1/2 inch pieces
4-6 dl of sugar (less if you are freezing the saft)

All of these are layered in the top part of the steamer while the water is boiling at the bottom. Here's a picture:


Then you take clean, sterilized bottles (I sterilize mine in the oven and boil the caps in water on the stove) and open the rubber hose to let the saft run out into your bottle. I read a good tip somewhere to place your bottle in a pitcher with a handle so that you don't have to burn your hands on the bottle or spill hot saft anywhere on you or anywhere in your kitchen. Quite handy!

Here are my finished bottles:

Aren't they pretty? All in a row....

I kept these in a cool spot and we finished them within 2 months. This year I will probably try to can them in hot boiling water to get them to last us longer.

Got a steamer? If you do, I'd love some more ideas on what to do with it!