Friday evening the Paquettes hosted "cooking with herbs" to show various ways to use the herbs they provide. It was a small group, but we had a wonderful time touring the farm (including seeing their new pigs, "Oscar" and "Mayer"), watching the cooking demonstrations and munching on the variety of dishes they cooked up for us ahead of time.
I wish more people could have come, we learned a lot about what was going on in the farm, things they had tried in the past and things they were trying this year, pressing apple cider in the fall (I think it's nuts that we have to go all teh way to Door County to get unpasteurized cider- it almost always tastes better) a good deal about their bees and beekeeping, and oh yeah- food and cooking!
I've scanned the recipe handout, and it can be found here.
I had a little bit of everything they had to offer, everything was great, though for one of the salad dressings I don't think I gave it a good enough shake before I used it, since I ended up with a lot of lemon juice in my salad.
They showed us how to make sorrel pesto, which went nicely with the herbed bread and crackers they had. They used walnuts instead of pine nuts, which have dramatically increased in price over the last couple years. It made for a good pesto which I will be making with the rest of my sorrel leaves later today (though maybe I'll add some spinach instead of the parsley so I don't have to pick up the parsley). The strong flavor of straight sorrel was mellowed out nicely.
The parsley soup was good, though personally when I have soups with dairy I like them thicker. I plan to make this when we get parsley in, I think I will add a couple tablespoons of flour to thicken it up a bit, plus mince up or make the garlic into a paste instead of just discarding it when done.
With the salad dressings, I think I had the Lemon-Thyme Vinagrette on my 1st round of salad. It made for an excellent fresh dressing. It called for white balsamic vinegar, but they used regular and it worked well. I don't think anyone over here carries it, and even the foodie that I am, I don't recall ever hearing of it before. After a quick google search I found this website that says there is a little bit of difference but it's really an aesthetic thing (aka it looks better when adding to light-colored dishes). Since the vinigarette needs the "vinegar" taste to balance everything, I think a less-aged balsamic is best. The more a balsamic is aged the thicker and sweeter (and more expensive) it gets. I just re-sampled some of my good stuff, and I think if you actually get the bottles that use the grape leaf system to mark age, to not go above 3 leaves, 2 or less would probably be best.
The Lemon-Lavender Shortbread cookies were yummy, I might add a tad more lavendar but you have to be careful because too much lavendar makes it taste like you're eating the flower.
The Real Basil Cheesecake was awesome... but them I'm a pushover for cheesecake.
We also had herbed bread (just google reciped for "herb bread" or bread "fresh herb"). In the past I have used a Tablespoon or so of Penzy's Pizza Seasoning in my pizza dough or even regular bread- and make bread pizza out of it. I would recommend that anyone that makes their own bread to give different herbs a try, it also adds nice flavor to sandwich breads. If you want to try breadmaking a shot but don't want to have a big investment, hit the garage sales or Goodwill for a bread machine, you should be able to get something decent for $5. I found a BUNCH at Goodwill in good condition just after Christmas. Personally, my bread machine is really just a mixing machine. I only leave it to bake in the machine if I'm being really lazy. Taking it out and placing it in a regular loaf pan lets me get a normal-sized slice of bread- the machine loafs are a bit awkward on shape.
They also served up pizzas with two different pestos, I think at least one had lowfat yogurt instead of oil to cut down on calories. They didn't provide those recipes, I'll post on their Facebook Page to see if I can get it, and put up a copy here.
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