Kids Make Bread Crumb Pesto

Kids love to work with kitchen gadgets. They will fight for a turn on the salad spinner. They can hardly wait to get their hands on a vegetable peeler. Teaching my "food appreciation" classes at a private elementary school here in the District of Columbia, I've found that if you can put even the simplest kitchen tool in a child's hands, you have her complete attention.


There were even "ooohs" and "ahhhs" when I pulled out my mortar and pestle yesterday. "I remember when we used that last year!" Well, I guess we did use the mortar and pestle last year.

In my second lesson on seasonal fruits and vegetables, I wanted the kids to sample some extremely fresh, ripe heirloom tomatoes from the farmers market. And what better way to enjoy them than with some fresh mozzarella cheese and a pesto sauce made with basil picked from the garden (my garden, that is).


First, a matter of etymology. Anyone know where the word "pesto" comes from? In Italian, the verb pestare means "to crush" or "to step on." Hence the root of the word pestle, as in mortar and pestle. (This is how I work language into my cooking lessons. There are also plenty of opportunities for math, chemistry, biology...)


The classic pesto recipe calls for the inclusion of some kind of nut, such as pine nuts or walnuts. But there are such issues with nut allergies in a school setting that I've eliminated nuts of any kind from our lessons. I could not imagine what we might use as a substitute. Then it occurred to me that bread crumbs might approximate the crushed pine nuts. So I brought along a bag of fresh bread crumbs that I made ahead from a rustic loaf.


Before we begin the lesson, we usually sit in a circle in the multi-purpose room and chat. Cook anything good lately? I might ask. There was quite a lot to discuss about tomatoes, it turns out. Anyone care to guess where tomatoes come from? Most of the students guessed Italy or somewhere in Europe. In fact, not a single one had a clue that tomatoes have made a big round trip in our culinary tradition, originating in Central America and Mexico, traveling to Europe with the Spanish explorers and languishing for the longest time because people assumed they were poisonous, since tomatoes are a member of the deadly nightshade family.



Can you imagine spaghetti without tomato sauce?

Well, in fact, these kids can. They love pasta with cheese.

How about pizza without tomatoes?

Once again, they voted for pizza with cheese only, or "white" pizza.

How about gazpacho without tomatoes?

I think I had them there. Before tomatoes, gazpacho was about stale bread--the soup was made with bread and vinegar. Now people can hardly imagine it without tomatoes and tons of other vegetables.

Finally it's lesson time. After a good hand-washing, we meet at the demonstration table where I crack open a clove of garlic, smashing it on a cutting board with the palm of my hand. That always gets the kids' attention. We place the clove in the mortar with a big pinch of kosher salt to draw the juices out. Then everyone gets to come around the table and take a turn smashing the garlic with the pestle until what he have is a garlic paste.


Next I give each of the kids a stem off a basil plant so they can remove the leaves. We start adding leaves to the mortar, now with a dribble of extra-virgin olive oil. Again the kids take turns smashing and grinding. We add more leaves and continue working with the pestle.

At this point, my assistant, T., takes a chunk of Parmesan cheese and a grater to one end of the table and the kids take turns grating cheese. By they time they're finished with that, we've worked all of the basil leaves into our mix as well as a handful of bread crumbs. Toss in some cheese, some more olive oil. Soon we have a delicious looking pesto. The kids are anxious to try it.

They are a bit nonplussed by my selection of tomatoes. They don't know quite what to make of orange tomatoes, green striped tomatoes, tomatoes that are purple and almost black.

"Don't worry," I tell them. "They all taste like tomatoes. They're just different colors. Aren't they cool looking?"

"I don't think I want to eat the tomatoes. Can I go to the playground now?"

Nobody goes to the playground just yet. First we slice the tomatoes into wedges. They are extremely ripe and juicy. The aroma permeates the room. Then, while T. plates the tomatoes with the mozzarella cheese and the pesto, we retire to our spot in the multi-purpose room for a story.

I try to incorporated a picture-book story into all my cooking lessons. If I'm lucky at the library, the story links to the theme of whatever we are cooking. It's not always easy. Today I have a book called The Talking Vegetables, an African tale about a spider who's too lazy to help plant the village garden, but later wants to eat all the fresh vegetables. The vegetables chase the spider out of the garden and he has to settle for a dinner of plain rice.

By now, T. has assembled some gorgeous plates. There's plenty of observing and critiquing from the kids. Some pick up their plates for a closer inspection. They just pick at the tomatoes, or eat only the cheese, pushing the tomatoes and pesto off to the side. But most of the kids dig right in.

"It's spicy!" but in a good way, they say. A few ask for seconds. No, they beg for seconds. One little girl actually licks her plate clean.

Overall, I think tomatoes and pesto was a hit.

Yesterday's Breakfast

Sliced Brandywine tomatoes from the garden with pesto sauce and fresh mozzarella cheese.

Preparation time: About three minutes.

Shopping: none

Tomato production in the garden is in full force. What happens to all the tomatoes? Mostly, we just eat them. Fresh. Any way we can. It's almost an axiom of seasonal foods that when the food is in season, you just keep eating it until the season is over. I never get tired of juicy, ripe tomatoes. I can't imagine getting tired of tomatoes. And I don't cook with these tomatoes. They are too good. Any way sliced, sauced, seasoned with a little salt, a little extra-virgin olive oil, maybe a cheese of some kind and some basil leaf and you have a meal.

The pesto and the mozzarella cheese were already in the fridge, just waiting for some tomatoes to come along.

Tomatoes make a great sandwich, breakfast, lunch or dinner. And they are extremely good for you. Tomatoes are full of lycopenes, the agent that makes them red. Studies have shown that tomatoes, and the lycopenes they contain, help ward off a variety of cancers, especially lung and prostate cancer.

Lycopenes are best absorbed with a little fat, so don't be shy with the olive oil.

Above all, eat more tomatoes.

Wild Pesto That Saved the Day

The chickweed pesto was a sensation at yesterday's schoolyard greening lunch.

So imagine my chagrin when, after getting up at the crack of dawn to make a last-minute vinaigrette for one of my pasta salads, and after pulling platters to display the lunch on, and after hauling all this equipment plus a cooler full of food to the National Arboretum ( to say nothing of getting my wife out of bed so she could drive me there so she could have the car for the day)--imagine my dismay when I finally arrived at the Washington Youth Garden at 8:30 in the AM to find that I had forgotten to pack the ckickweed pesto.

I just stared into that cooler. And stared. And stared...

It was one of those Can-We-Just-Have-One-Do-Over moments...

Jenny, the garden manager, soon to be moving to Brooklyn to manage a garden there, was particularly distraught. She had been so looking forward to that pesto. I thought she was going to make me run home--literally, on foot-- and fetch it. Then one of our organizers volunteered to drive the several miles back to my house in the District of Columbia to collect the AWOL container of pesto.

Yet, when I called home to alert my wife to all this, she saved the day by agreeing to deliver the pesto after dropping our daughter off at ballet, which happens to be not so far from the arboretum.

Whew...

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this was Day 2 of the annual Schoolyard Greening teacher's clinic wherein we subject the teachers to approximately four hours of hands-on instruction in seed planting and transplanting, cultivating and educating with herbs, composting and vermiculture and--for my part--maintaining the garden (e.g. preventing or getting rid of weeds in an organic fashion).

This being my first year as an instructor, I was relying on the kindness of these teachers to tolerate my fumblings and just let me get through it.

I did think it was highly appropriate (brilliant, even) that our pesto featured chickweed, otherwise a noxious garden intruder. To illustrate the point, I found plenty of chickweed frolicking over the Youth Garden grounds while I was giving my little clinic in weed maintenance. There were a few gasps when I demonstrated that there are more than one way to deal with weeds, and plucked a few of the more succulent chickweed stems and ate them au naturel.

Otherwise, there were cheers all around for the food. The curry-roasted cauliflower and the collard-goat cheese frittata were completely devoured. Many came back for seconds on the "Caesar" salad with fresh garden lettuce and homemade croutons. I simply made too much of the pasta salad duo: penne with grilled chicken, artichoke and chickweed pesto, whole wheat rotini with spring vegetables and lemon vinaigrette.

In fact, there were several requests for the chickweed pesto recipe. We'll just have to do this again next year. Maybe we can even work a few more weeds into the menu.

Triumph of the Chickweed

Chickweed, or stellaria media, normally is the bane of the vegetable garden. It grows in great creeping matts, insinuating itself into the beds, twining itself around the plants we are trying to grow for food.

This time of year, chickweed is just beginning to bloom and form seeds here in the District of Columbia. So by all means, get rid of it wherever you find it, right?

Well, not so fast. Yes, we are pulling it up everywhere we see it, or cutting it down with the mower. We definitely do not want it going to seed. But did you know that chickweed is edible?

Chickweed is high in vitamin C, also in magnesium, potassium and calcium. It's sold in tablet form as an herbal supplement. But that is hardly my point. What I'm trying to get at is, although I would not go around harvesting chickweed to serve for dinner, I am using great gobs of it for the lunch I am preparing for approximately 30 people attending Day 2 of our D.C. Schoolyard Greening teacher's clinic, taking place today at the Washington Youth Garden.

That's right, I am serving a weed for lunch.

I recently acquired a copy of The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, by Sandor Ellix Katz. He's the fellow that wrote the book about wild fermentation that I am so often quoting when making sauerkraut. The more recent volume is about various food movements, such as the raw milk movement, community supported agriculture, seed saving, to name a few.

Around page 34, Katz pauses to compose an ode to chickweed, which he apparently devours by the fistful when he's out in the garden. Sounds a bit primitive, I agree. But he also gives a perfectly reasonable recipe for turning said weed into a pesto.

So I thought, why not?

I gathered up a bag full of chickweed from the garden, making my vegetable beds very happy. I washed it a couple of times, picking out stray bits of this and that. I then committed a horrible sin: I ran several cups full of chickweed through the food processor.

Sorry, but I was in a hurry. I violated all my personal rules about making sauces and pestos in an actual mortar and pesto. So sue me.

I removed the chickweed and dropped about five cloves of garlic into the processor. Then perhaps 1 1/2 cups of walnuts. Then back in went the chickweed and maybe 1/2 cup of extra-virgin olive oil drizzled in while the machine was running. Then I added, oh, about 1 cup of grated Parmesan cheese and whipped that in. And maybe 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

So it has all the look and feel of a real pesto, this chickweed concoction. My wife wasn't so very enthusiastic about it. But for me it truely is a revelation.

But wait--we're not done. I had a container of Latin crema, or sour cream, in the fridge, so I added that, maybe 1/2 cup. Now the pesto rose to glorious heights. I will be mixing it with a pasta salad of penne, grilled chicken, red onion, artichoke hearts and capers.

Sounds pretty delicious and springlike, no?

The rest of the menu cosists of:

A whole wheat fussili pasta salad primavera with asparagus, carrots, peas and baby lettuces out of our garden.

A "Caesar" salad of lettuces that overwintered in the garden, with homemade croutons.

Frittata with collards and kale harvested from the garden, along with goat cheese and garlic chives.

We had originally hoped to make this meal around locally grown produce. Then we decided it was too early in the year to find local produce. But lookey here: Half of this meal is made with ingredients out of my own garden.

Who knew?