Borscht Baby!

A quick little entry on the joys of this summer treat!  If I had been introduced to this velvety smooth goodness as a youngster, My lifelong aversion to the dread beet may have been avoided!
The farm share has been giving us beets, and although I can tolerate and even enjoy them to some degree simmered forever in butter, they just never really excite me.  so when I had two week's worth staring me down, I decided to go with a nice cooling soup.
I searched through the internet sites I usually troll for recipes and settled on a Lithuanian style Borscht, pureed.
Here is what I used:
Around two pounds of beets, cleaned peeled and sliced.
1 large cucumber, peeled, split, seeded, and chopped.
4 Tbsp butter
4 Cups Non Fat milk
4 Tbsp Lemon juice
1/4 cup chopped onion
1/8 Cup minced fresh basil
3-4 Tbsp White Vinegar
Salt
Pepper
First I put the beets in a heavy saucepan and simmered them in butter with a little salt and pepper for like an hour.
Then I cooled the beets by immersing a bowl in a sink filled with ice water
While the beets were cooling I added the lemon juice to the skim milk to make a buttermilk substitute.  You could use yogurt, sour cream, or buttermilk... or even Kefir.  I actually can taste a bit of lemon in my finished soup and I like it, so, it's up to you how you go.
Then I put the beets in the processor, and added the cucumber, onion and basil (The original recipe called for dill, which I am not a big fan of, it also had no instructions for pureeing the soup.) and process till ...well... processed.
I transferred 1/2 the mix to a blender, added half the sour milk and started pureeing the soup and forcing through a mesh strainer till it reached the desired silky smooth texture.
I then refrigerated the soup overnight.  This is an important step.
The end result is a deliciously smooth, cooling treat, like a beet gaspacho. It is shown with a dollop of sour cream swirled in.  The lemon and basil accent the beets better than I expected.

Basil and More Basil

So our take from our organic farm share has been on the low side this year, based on a combination of an overly wet spring, compounded by volunteer and employee error resulting in entire lost crops.  However we HAVE been swimming in lettuce, getting plenty of summer squash and zucchini (watch for a post on zucchini pancakes, coming soon!), the corn and potatoes have started, and the tomatoes are just getting underway.  For the past few weeks, we have been getting large bunches of basil.  Far too much basil to use in one week of conventional basil usage, even if I had pesto every night!  SO!  How to preserve it, and how else to use it?  The pic above is the first way I came up with to use more, namely, fry the basil in canola oil and season it with salt and pepper.  above it has been paired with a fresh farm share beefsteak tomato, and some fresh mozzarella for a crispier version of a classic!  If you have a deep fryer, use it.  If not, heat 1/2" oil in a wok to almost smoking,  The basil should be dry. If washed first you must dry it with paper towels very well, or it WILL splash you will burning oil!  Add the DRY basil (Look, just make sure it's dry, aight?) in small handfuls to the oil, tossing quickly, and removing in under 30 seconds. NOTE:  Before you put your first handful of leaves in the almost-smoking-hot-oil, think about how you might get the leaves out of said almost-smoking-hot-oil.  Tongs will break the leaves.  You will need to scoop them out with a slotted spoon.  Drain excess oil.  DO NOT pat with paper towels or they will crumble. I actually lined my salad spinner basket with paper towels and spun the oil off of them, with some limited success.  They are a crispy and delicious treat, even if just munching!

An old Martha Stewart trick is to make Pesto and freeze it in portions for easy use later.  She used an ice cube tray.  Great idea but since I have an automatic ice maker, I have no ice cube trays.  So I simply found a good pesto recipe (one with nuts and lots of garlic and even walnuts!) whipped it up, and dropped tablespoon-fulls of it into a muffin pan, lined with plastic wrap.  I froze them on the pan, and then put the little pesto patties into a soup container to go back in the freezer.

finally (or, if truth be told, Firstly, since I actually did this a few weeks ago.)  I made a half pesto by processing the basil and adding some oil to make a basil paste which I use a spoonful at a time.  this has been turning darker, but still tastes great.