by Mary | Aug 6, 2008 | recipe
Some of you have requested my pesto recipe, so I thought I would oblige during this season of abundant basil. This recipe originally came from my mother-in-law, Mary Ann, although I’ve changed it up enough to consider it mine. I will give you the main ingredients first and then tell you possible alternatives.
I have two pots of basil on my back deck. I buy starter plants around Memorial Day and by Labor Day or a little after, I typically have at least 15 batches of frozen pesto stored in my freezer to get us through the long winter months. (That’s in additional to the weekly pesto pasta we eat all through the summer.) There is nothing like the taste of homemade pesto in the middle of an upstate New York winter. Grow some basil. Buy some basil. Savor the taste of summer any time of year.
1 cup of basil leaves, tightly packed
1/4 cup of fresh Italian parsley, stems removed
1/2 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1/2 cup grated Parmesan (split in two 1/4 cup batches)
1/3 cup pine nuts (pignolis)
1 tsp. salt
Extra pine nuts for toasting/topping pasta (optional)
Put all of the “dry” ingredients — EXCEPT THE CHEESE — into a food processor. Turn the motor on and drizzle the olive oil in slowly until it’s well blended. This is going to be enough pesto sauce for two pounds of pasta, so, unless you’re having company (or have a really big appetite), you’re going to want to freeze at least half of this.
NOW, if you are going to eat one batch right away, mix 1/4 cup of Parmesan cheese in with it and you’re good to go. Toss a pound of pasta into boiling salted water, take it off when it’s al dente, mix it with the pesto sauce, and top it with some toasted pine nuts, if you’re using them. (Be careful when toasting pine nuts, which you can do in a dry saute pan or in an oven on a cookie sheet. They can go from untoasted to blackened very quickly. I tend to burn at least one batch before I get it right. Every single time I do it. Drives Dennis crazy.)
IF you are going to freeze a batch, DO NOT mix the cheese into that batch. It doesn’t taste as good when it defrosts if the cheese was frozen first. Instead, freeze the cheeseless sauce (I use the smallest of the Glad reusable containers for one batch); some people use ice cube trays so they can defrost in even smaller increments. Add the 1/4 cup of cheese later when you defrost it.
Alternatives: OK, I am not one to stick to a recipe, any recipe. In fact, I’m not happy unless I’m changing a recipe. My problem is that I usually can’t remember what I did when I’ve done something especially good. But there are few options when making this pesto. Here they are…
Sometimes I add the fresh parsley, and sometimes, if I have lots of basil and zero parsley, I go with straight basil. I often use Romano instead of Parmesan cheese because that’s what I usually have in my fridge. And sometimes — and the purists out there might want to cover their ears for this — I use walnuts or even sunflower seeds instead of the incredibly expensive pignolis. Now, I don’t do that often and usually I label it so I know to serve it to my own clan and not company, but, really, you can’t tell the difference. At least I can’t.
Serve with additional grated cheese and a nice side salad. Mangia!
by Mary | Aug 5, 2008 | Uncategorized
So I’ve decided that today is going to be Stream of Consciousness Tuesday. I’m just going to ramble aimlessly until I say everything I have to say. Feel free to do the same in the comments.
Last night, after Chiara and Olivia were already in their princess nightgowns, Noah mentioned that we have not yet been to Tastee Freez this summer, an oversight for which there is simply no excuse. Tastee Freez is our local soft-serve ice cream shop that heralds the arrival of spring each year when it opens March 21 or thereabouts. At first we said that it was too late to go out and get ice cream, but our hearts weren’t in it. I think Dennis and I both knew that we should take them, although we tortured them a bit by saying that it was too bad the girls got into their pjs so early or we would have gone.
So we packed them into the van, princess nightgowns flapping in the breeze, and it immediately brought back memories of my own childhood. I can remember piling into the back of our red pinto with my brother and sister, all of us in our pajamas, to make the pilgrimage to the nearby Dairy Queen. We would lay down in the back of the Pinto (back before seat belts were required and before anyone realized that Pintos were rolling time bombs), and we would look up at the night sky, watching the stars. Back when I was a kid, there were no hot fudge sundaes on the menu — at least not on my father’s version of the menu. It was a cone, a small cone. I don’t even remember if sprinkles were allowed. But we splurged last night and let Noah and Olivia get hot fudge sundaes, complete with cherries on top. Chiara, still content with the basics, settled on a mini cup of plain vanilla. Our lives are so busy and so harried that we really don’t do the small but spontaneous things that make memories. I know that one day our kids will remember going to the Tastee Freez in their pajamas when they should have been in bed. It doesn’t get any better than that.
What does any of this have to do with the recent death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian novelist who spent years in the Soviet gulag and then years in exile because he wrote about it? Absolutely nothing. It’s just that Solzhenitsyn, surprisingly enough, also brings back lots of good memories for me, of the college variety. When I read “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” for my Russian lit seminar at Pace University, it was the beginning of my love affair with Russian novelists. I still rank Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” as one of my all-time favorite novels, if not my most favorite, and I was quite the fan of Dostoyevsky after reading “Notes from Underground.” Don’t you wish you had the time to read that kind of stuff again? I couldn’t even get through the New York Times obit on Solzhenitsyn no less the Gulag Archipelago. Here’s a quote from the Times obit that will make you want to know more about Solzhenitsyn if you don’t already know about him:
“At Ekibastuz, any writing would be seized as contraband. So he devised a method that enabled him to retain even long sections of prose. After seeing Lithuanian Catholic prisoners fashion rosaries out of beads made from chewed bread, he asked them to make a similar chain for him, but with more beads. In his hands, each bead came to represent a passage that he would repeat to himself until he could say it without hesitation. Only then would he move on to the next bead. He later wrote that by the end of his prison term, he had committed to memory 12,000 lines in this way.”
And I can’t even memorize my own recipe for pesto sauce! Clearly I’ve lost quite a bit of gray matter since those Russian lit days.
Talking about all this Russian stuff makes me think of propaganda, which leads us to our last topic of the day: the Disney film Wall-E, which was very cute in a carbon foot print sort of way. This was Chiara’s very first movie in a theater. She was so adorable when she sat down in the aisle seat and asked if Wall-E would be coming past her chair. Clearly I should have explained the whole movie experience before we arrived at the theater.
I rarely go the movies, alone or with children, so this was a very big deal. It was actually part of a barter agreement. If Noah and Olivia could watch Chiara for me in the morning while I wrote a piece that is due this week, I would take them to the movies in the afternoon. After a bumpy start — about five minutes into their assignment — they managed to get on track and stay there. So we went over to the Spectrum, which is a small independent theater in Albany that I find much less intimidating than the super theaters at our local malls. Of course, I should have realized that if the Spectrum was playing a children’s movie it had to include a certain type of message.
Now I don’t want to hear from all the Wall-E fans (are there any Wall-E fans among the two of you who read this blog) about how I’m being unfair. Wall-E was cute. Eve was cute. But come on, it was a little much, don’t you think, what with all the allusions to Wal-Mart and fat Americans and lame presidents. Talk about hitting us over the heads. Fortunately, when I asked the kids if they got the message of the film, Noah simply said, “Don’t pollute.” No harm done, I guess, although, as Dennis pointed out when I explained the premise of the film, I’m sure Disney can find a way to get around their newfound disdain for gross overconsumption if it’s for, say, a lovable Wall-E doll or watch or lunch box. Somehow I have a feeling Disney owns quite a large chunk of America’s landfills, if we want to start pointing green fingers.
Chiara did great for the first hour of the film, sitting there in her little booster seat that I brought along. There were only two other people in the theater (see why I love the Spectrum), so it was a very relaxing little experiment, which she passed with flying colors. By the last 30 minutes, she was on my lap and fading fast but that wasn’t because she was being difficult. It was because she was overtired and because, quite frankly, I don’t think she could take any more messages — subliminal or overt — about saving the earth. I could have sworn I heard her cursing Al Gore under her breath at one point.
So there you have it folks. Stream of Consciousness Tuesday. Any rambling thoughts you’d like to share? Fire away.
by Mary | Aug 4, 2008 | Uncategorized
Chiara has a new way of asking for things these days. When she comes into the kitchen, she’ll say, “I want too much orange juice.” If you ask her how much milk she wants, she says, “Too much.” Imagine how useful this could be in our adult lives. It gives new meaning to the phrase, “Say when.”
I find it really cool how Chiara is clearly progressing to a new level of development. She’s starting to try out new language skills, new motor skills, new thinking skills. Just this weekend she started writing the letter “C for Chiara” and the number 1. She can also make an “O for Olivia.” It’s as if you can see the wheels spinning and the synapses firing in her little head. Truly amazing.
She is even growing by leaps and bounds on the bedtime prayer front. Now at night, instead of just running through our family blessing where we name all of our relatives and close friends, she wants “new prayers.” So far we’ve experimented with the basics: Hail Mary, Our Father, Angel of God. The first time I said the Our Father with her, we finished up and she looked at me and said, quite seriously, “That’s a good one.” Now she asks for what she calls “the Jesus one,” which is the Our Father. I find it really intriguing that she associates the Our Father with Jesus. How did that happen in her 3-year-old brain when I know I didn’t make that connection for her. Very, very cool in a spooky sort of way.
by Mary | Aug 1, 2008 | book review, Idiot's Guide
For months now I’ve been waiting with unbridled anticipation for the day when Catholic News Service (the wire service that feeds stories to every Catholic newspaper in the country) would run a review of my book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Catholic Catechism. Well, today was the day when it finally came across the wire, and, to be honest, all of my waiting and longing has turned into ranting and gnashing of teeth. The alleged “review” wasn’t a review at all. It was a short but nasty diatribe by an Ivory Tower theologian who made clear his disdain for the Idiot’s Guide genre and anyone who relies on such “simplistic” approaches to serious subjects.
It’s funny (in a sad and ironic sort of way), but when I first asked CNS to review my book, I told Dennis that the only way I saw it backfiring was if they gave the book to someone who didn’t like the Idiot’s Guide approach. And wouldn’t you know — Bingo! — my prediction came true.
Patrick Hayes, an assistant professor of theology at St. John’s University, railed against the title, the series, the mere suggestion that perhaps rank-and-file Catholics don’t find theological texts easy to read. It was a dismissive and mean-spirited little review and certainly not what I expected from Catholic News Service.
Nowhere did the review mention that my book has in imprimatur from the Bishop of Metuchen, or that I worked with a theological advisor from St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, or that it was glowingly endorsed by the Archbishop of Denver, all things that seem rather pertinent to me and I’m sure to other Catholics who might be interested in the book.
Here’s the review so you can read it for yourself. It was part of double review, but I’ll spare you the monotony and just give you the part about my book. He doesn’t get into full swing until the second paragraph:
“…One such offering is Mary DeTurris Poust’s contribution to the “Idiot’s Guide” series, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Catholic Catechism.” The guide offers an accurate, if simplistic, overview of the catechism. It contains a number of short synopses of topics such as the resurrection of the body, the benefits of baptism and the exercise of free will, among others — all with user-friendly language. Coupled with these treatments are little boxed “teachable moments” or quick definitions under the heading “church speak” that explain the why and the what of the church’s belief and practice.
“It is unfortunate the book is presented under such a deplorable title, as if people have to admit their ignorance to be guided to truths detailed in the catechism. In fact, I would say that all who search out those truths have brains that are fully switched on, even though they may not have facility in the technical points of doctrine.
“As a working theologian I am chagrined by the author’s approach to the catechism, which deliberately avoids “that long-winded, lingo-laden academic writing that can make anyone’s eyes glaze over.” I daresay that some of that can actually be useful, as the pope himself demonstrates. Memo to the publishing world: Catholics aren’t that callow. “
So what do you think of that? I’ve never considered myself a callow Catholic, but I do know that reading some parts of the full Catechism made my brain ache. Penguin/Alpha Books knew what they were doing when they specifically requested that a NON-theologian write the book on the Catechism, otherwise large portions would have been in Latin and Greek or its English equivalent and 1,000 pages long. Oh, wait, that’s the real Catechism, which is why I wrote a simplified guide to it! No matter what Mr. Hayes thinks, many people like to read about religion — or science, or finance, or nutrition — in informative, entertaining and, above all, understandable prose, and the success of the Idiot’s Guide series is proof of that.
I do take some small satisfaction in all of this knowing that, as a professor, Mr. Hayes will have to publish and publish some more. And, as the saying goes, what goes around comes around. I hope they give his next theological missive to a comic book author for review.
