I have the perfect recipe for pesto. It came, quite insistently, from my friend Don. We were friends for 29 years: two generations of journalists working for The Associated Press in Washington.

After a chance collaboration when the Soviets shot down a civilian Korean airliner in 1983, Don pretty much adopted me as the newbie in the office. Boy, was I fortunate. I was a wide-eyed 26-year-old and he knew everything about Washington, having covered Congress, politics, investigations and eventually diplomacy.

But forget about work – we became fast friends and bonded over lunches that lasted until last spring. Family, politics, hiking, theater, music, diplomacy, food, travel, more politics, you name it, we talked about it. Gardening was one mutual passion. And it didn’t matter how many basil plants I grew, Don had Better, Bigger, Newer. It became a running joke, was Napolitano basil better than Genovese? I’d throw in Thai basil just to get him rolling on a tantrum. Or there was the year I advocated for baby basil, to his scorn. His passion was epic, no matter the topic.

Since he can no longer reprimand me, I offer up my version of:

Don’s Perfect Pesto

Basil leaves, lightly packed, to fill the container of a small food processor

1 tsp kosher salt

2-3 garlic cloves

(Whirl these 3 ingredients to grind them)

Add 2 Tablespoons of pine nuts, 2-3 Tablespoons of parmesan cheese, and enough olive oil to moisten. Pulse for 5-10 seconds at a time, and add enough olive oil to make a loose paste, then pulse to the consistency you like.  You can freeze at this point and it will keep for many months.

Our ongoing debate: Don added a Tablespoon of butter to his pesto; I insisted it was extraneous.

For this season, Don, I will cede to you.

Editor’s note: Donald M. Rothberg died last week after a brief illness.

Sandy Johnson is a journalist and a gardener, equally passionate about both. She lives in Alexandria, VA.  Visit her on her blog, Grassroots & Gardening.

by Martina White

This weekend I went to the DC State Fair, which was appropriately urban, as state fairs go.  Oh, there were farm animals and funnel cakes, candy apples and canning demonstrations.  But this being DC (not even technically a state), there were also artisanal teas, a trapeze artist, gourmet food trucks, and green initiatives galore, but not a corn dog in sight.

Natonne Kemp passing out information at the DC State Fair 

The DC State Fair is in its third year and growing.  So for now it partners with other festivals.  This year it was part of the Barracks Row Fall Festival, with a series of judging and demonstration booths within the larger fair.  When I stopped by, they were very seriously judging pies, cupcakes and honey, with contests for the funkiest-looking vegetable and various types of pickles coming up.  Their mission is to showcase the home-grown talents of the DC community.   And judging by all the contest entries they received and the interest in the demo booth, I have no doubt we’ll be seeing the fair for years to come.   The blue ribbon pie?  Emily Dalphy’s fig grape orange cognac pie.  Nice!

Judging local honey at the DC State Fair

Beekeeping demonstration

Also at the festival was scratchDC with a cool new business concept.  They put together and deliver a bundle of locally sourced ingredients along with a recipe for you to cook a full meal for two at home.  What a great solution for busy Washingtonians who don’t have time to plan a healthy meal or shop at the farmer’s market, but who still want to eat that way.

Ryan of scratchDC

Having grown up on Long Island, with fair memories revolving around tilt-a-whirls and ring tosses, and now having been to an urban state fair, I’ve got a hankering for a good old traditional country fair.  Bring on the fried twinkies and prized hogs…I’m looking forward to next year’s Montgomery Fair.

Martina White of Reston, Va., is a nonprofit fundraiser by day and avid farmer’s market enthusiast on the weekend.  She blogs with her friend Amanda West about her passion for supporting local farmers as a way to preserve the small farm way of life just beyond our fine city at agrowingseason.wordpress.com.

I’m still getting a bag of tomatoes every week in my CSA.  Now, this may be heresy, but I have tomato fatigue.  I’ve canned them, I’ve turned them into spaghetti sauce, I’ve made caprese salads, and I’ve tossed them into sandwiches, omelets, and whatever else I’m cooking.  I know, I know, I’ll miss them when they’re gone…but what am I supposed to do with them while they’re still here?

Jam and salsa do not a week’s lunches make, so I searched for a heartier recipe, and found myself intrigued by the idea of roasting tomatoes.  When I found a recipe for roast tomato and garlic soup, I knew I had found a winner.  And it is easy!  If you have an hour to hang out and wait for the vegetables to roast, putting this together could not be simpler.  Bonus, for those of you with dietary restrictions:  this is the best vegan meal I have ever cooked.

Ingredients:

• 3-4 lbs roma tomatoes, washed and quartered
• 1 large sweet onion, halved and sliced
• 1-2 bell peppers, halved and sliced
• 1 large garlic bulb, prepared for roasting
• Olive oil
• 1 can coconut milk
• 3 c. vegetable broth
• 2 Tbs. tomato paste
• 2 tsp. garam masala
• 2 bay leaves
• Salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Preheat the oven to 400F and line baking sheets with tin foil.  Chop tomatoes, onions, and peppers, drizzle lightly with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and arrange on baking sheets.  (You’ll want the tomatoes separate from the onions and peppers, which will cook more quickly.)  Prepare the garlic for roasting by peeling off all outside skin, then chopping off the top to expose garlic cloves.  Place on aluminum foil and drizzle with a little olive oil, then wrap up the whole bulb and place it on one of the baking sheets.

Roast the vegetables.  Check on the onions/peppers after 30 minutes, and remove them when starting to black around the edges.  Check the tomatoes and garlic at 45 minutes; roasting may take up to an hour.  Times may vary according to your oven.

Once roasted, add tomatoes, onions, and peppers into a large pot.  Light the burner and add the garam masala, allowing it to toast a little in the oil from the vegetables, about a minute.  Remove the roasted garlic from the skin and add.  Add the coconut milk, tomato paste, broth, and bay leaves; stir well.

Bring to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes.  Leave as is or blend for desired texture.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

Now, I’m not actually sure what roast tomatoes are supposed to look like – mine got pretty brown before they cooked down, and there may have been a little incident with my smoke detector going off during the roasting.  (See photo:  did I do this right?)  I didn’t have garam masala, actually, but approximated something like it with cumin, cinnamon, ginger, and cayenne pepper.  But either this recipe is foolproof or there is just something about roasting vegetables that makes them delicious…because this soup is amazing.  It’s a perfect way to eat the end of summer’s vegetables when the weather feels like fall!

Amy Saltzman is an avid gardener and cook in DC.  She is a member of the Lancaster County Farm Fresh and North Mountain Pastures CSAs.

I came home from vacation recently to discover that my jalapeno pepper plant had gone into overdrive.  My garden struggled through the summer, but seems to have taken nicely to slightly cooler weather.  After foisting peppers off on every friend I have, I decided I had to figure out a way to deal with the harvest en masse.  I considered making salsa or a batch of pepper jelly, but, bolstered by my previous canning success, I decided to try pickling.

It’s true, I may have been influenced by a favorite tongue twister. Peter Piper, I am not, but I did make pickled peppers!  There are lots of pickle recipes floating around the internet, but, for this first attempt, I picked the easiest one I could find, called “Unfancy Pickled Jalapeno Peppers.”  I like hot peppers as an ingredient, but not necessarily on their own, so I wanted a recipe that would preserve them without adding other flavors.  I made a few modifications to the recipe, sterilizing the jars first and reducing the processing time to get a crisper pickle.

Recipe:

~1 pound of jalapeno peppers, sliced into coins
2 cups white vinegar
2 cups filtered water
2 tablespoons pickling salt

Method:

Sterilize jars by boiling for 10 minutes.  Cut peppers into coins.  (You’ll want to use rubber gloves or be very careful about not touching your face after your finish this step – the oil from the peppers will be on your hands.)  Prepare brine and bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer.  Pack sterile jars with peppers. Pour hot brine over top. Wipe rims, apply lids and bands. Process in a boiling water canner for 5 minutes. Store in cool, dark place for up to a year.

About a week elapsed between the time I decided to make pickles and the time I did it, because I had difficulty finding pickling salt in the District of Columbia.  (Pickling salt has very small grains and is just straight salt – no iodine, no anti-caking additives.)  A consultation with my mother suggested that yes, pickling salt was necessary for optimal results, so I kept searching.  Fortunately, a camping trip in Maryland took me past a rural-enough Wal-Mart that carried it, and I now have a 4 lb. box.  (You’ll note that this recipe takes 2 tablespoons.  Feel free to let me know if you need to borrow some.)

Pickles need to age, so I haven’t actually tasted these peppers yet.  But does anyone know how long do they need to age?  I still have fresh peppers, so I’ll plan to break into these in a month or so.  In the meantime, I’m enjoying the pretty red and green jars!

Amy Saltzman is an avid gardener and cook in DC.  She is a member of the Lancaster County Farm Fresh and North Mountain Pastures CSAs.

At the corner of Ocean and Arizona streets, as waves from the Pacific crashed to the shore below us, my sister Sara and I turned to our left. We stopped dead in our tracks and fell uncharacteristically silent. Behold, the magnificence of the Santa Monica Farmers Market.

We slowly walked its length, our heads swiveling left, then right, agog at the rainbow-colored bounty. Neither of us had ever seen a farmers market of such breadth and depth. And she’s seen a lot of farm-fresh food, having adopted California as her home two decades ago. My own neighborhood farmers market, in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria, Va., suddenly seemed … inadequate.

A bit of history. The Santa Monica Farmers Market was established in 1981 and now boasts 700 vendors, all certified as California growers. Their booths sprawl across a dozen city blocks. The market draws local chefs as well as hungry visitors like us, sampling a little of this, a little of that.

Avocados grown in nearby Morro Bay. Pistachios from just up the road, flavored with lemon chives or habaneros. Almonds with a hint of orange rind or rosemary. A cornucopia of peppers, from serranos to pablanos and hatch.

Asian pears, bosc pears, seckel pears. Dates still on the stem – I didn’t even know they grow in clusters, like brussel sprouts (also available, of course). A dozen types of peaches. Apples too. Mounds of squash blossoms. Fresh-picked pomegranates, $1 each.  Three kinds of juicy clementines, each with a distinctive flavor. Melons, dragon fruit (!), giant grapefruit, oh my.

We bought bags full of food, and feasted for lunch. You leave this market inspired, whether you’re a restaurant chef or an amateur.

We had briefly cruised the small Sunday market for some fruit to nosh during our visit, and our son told us then: Wait, the Wednesday market is world-renowned, for good reason. He’s a smart kid, that one.

Sandy Johnson is a journalist and a gardener, equally passionate about both. She lives in Alexandria, VA.  Visit her on her blog, Grassroots & Gardening.

Oh, the Great Outdoors.

Something about being outside makes me… hungry. And I think I’m not alone, seeing as our party of a dozen folks and a baby had exchanged almost 50 emails Re: “What shall we eat?” before we embarked on our trip to Shenandoah National Park this past weekend. As much as food makes me happy, having a food plan makes me even happier. I like to know what I will eat ahead of time, especially if my living circumstances for the weekend mimic that of a homeless person: sleeping outside, under a tarp (OK, a really nice tent owned by our really nice friends who shared… OK, OK, we also had an air mattress). I’ve told my husband before that this is why I never jumped at his last-minute, let’s-jump-in-the-car-and-camp-somewhere suggestions. I knew from the first organization email with this group of folks — who I think cleaned out a recent REI sale will all the camping goodies they own — that this was going to be a good, well-fed trip.

Much of the group had been camping to almost the same spot a few weeks before, so they knew the lay of the land, what was cooking feasible and what was not. We didn’t want anyone to be a slave to the stove, cooking meals for everyone else, or to spend all our time cooking. The plan was to do dinner on your own Friday night but leave room for S’mores (with dark chocolate… you’ll never go back) and to keep breakfasts easy. Until my dear hungry husband sent an email suggesting hardier breakfast foods, to which the group sweetly responded “I’ll bring the sausage” and “I’ll bring the bacon” and “I’ll bring the propane-fueled stove top.”

And so the big eating started at sunup Saturday, snacking on the first batch of pumpkin bread from my farmers market baker on the way to brush my teeth (you have to eat something first, you know). I came back to a big ole pot of fresh-brewed, propane-fueled coffee (these people know how to camp), complete with real half-and-half and sugar. And then came the bacon. Dear Gina took on bacon-making like a champ that morning, until the amount of grease in the pan was so much that it deep-fried final batches.

Gina, bacon champion, had also brought some homemade muffins, crusted with a cinnamon topping, that were tough to stop eating. And then there were the “pancake-wrapped” sausages that could be skewered and cooked over the morning fire. I didn’t really want to know what they were made of, but they had been requested by name by the boys — and, eh, we were camping.

After I had stuffed myself on hardboiled eggs, bready confections and bacon, I was ready for some physical activity — or a nap. Thankfully we had a hardy hike planned for the day! Which meant I could earn more food-eating by that afternoon! Or before! (Too much excitement).

My favorite part of the hike was seeing our pups in doggie heaven. Our 9-month-old Ariel (a boxer-shepherd-hound mix of some sort) has the energy of hummingbird on cocaine, so we loaded her up with the cutest little doggie hiking backpack, leant to us by our neighbors, and filled it with water bottles. Didn’t seem to faze her.

She still had the energy to steal food and sticks and otherwise pester poor Strider, a 5-year-old golden retriever who likes Ariel… in doses. Haha.

And we were off on an all-afternoon hike. We probably hadn’t gone a mile before I felt I had earned my way into my snack pack. I can’t resist my favorite trail mix from Trader Joe’s, the one with nuts, dried fruit and three kinds (!!) of chocolate kisses in butterscotch, white and dark chocolate. I’m blanking on the name and, sadly, just ran out in my cupboard. Needless to say, there was very little left by the end of the hike. We stopped to eat about an hour in (I, actually, had never stopped eating) and everyone pulled out peanut-butter-and-jelly and chicken-salad sandwiches. Carrots for the almost-2-year-old were mostly consumed by the dogs. Her grapes were mostly eaten by the rest of us.

A great way to make chicken salad when going out of town for the weekend: add in just about everything in your fridge. My husband was halfway through his sandwich when he noticed green beans were part of the crunch. Oh, and celery and some leftover dill rice from an Iranian restaurant and flax seeds and who knows what else. I thought it was good. No one got food poisoning, so that’s always a plus.

And the dogs were a picture of outdoorsy happiness…

Back to the food… which is what we were all thinking by the end of the hike. We got a good sweat going on the route back (after realizing we could have made a loop, and seen the bear that some other girls saw just up the trail). Soon after arriving to the campsite, just as us girls had made plans to go take our $1, 5-minute showers for the weekend, then came the rain. We had been warned by friends and phones before we lost reception that it was coming. I felt bad for heading to the showers as everyone rushed to cover food and chairs and dogs from the downpour (apparently our dog presented the only problem in this arena). But I thought it was a great time to get a warm shower!

The rain only lasted about 30 minutes and, still not knowing what time it was, we decided we were hungry again (found out later we started eating “dinner” at 3 or 4 and didn’t stop until 9 or 10… whoops!) The storied camping couple had purchased a value pack of grill-perfect meats from Omaha Meats, including brats and dogs. Those were good and they went fast. The girls also busted out homemade salsas and hummuses, veggies and dip and lots of chips. Also on the grill were some incredible jalapeño poppers, accompanied yet again by the sound of sizzling bacon. Basically the entire grill and table were covered with food. I had to make the fish packets, our contribution to dinner, on part of the bench. But they turned out great!

The fish packets ended up being a round-two dinner for folks, with a bit lighter feel. Super easy to make.

Fish Packets:

• Foil
• 2 lbs. white fish or salmon. I used frozen Alaskan cod so it could thaw in the freezer and be ready for Saturday.
• 3 or 4 colorful peppers and an onion, sliced in strips.
• Balsamic salad dressing mix, or Italian could work, if camping. When at home, I splash together oils, spices and real balsamic, but it’s a bit messy for the road.

Grab a footlong sheet of foil. Place a portion size of fish, peppers and the like in the center. Add “marinade” dressing and seal the foil (think “tuck, tuck, fold” more than crumple — anyone seen Multiplicity?). Let it sit for a few minutes while you make the others, putting them on the fire in shifts. Leave each packet on the fire for 8 to 10 minutes, until steamy when opened and fish flakes off with a fork.

The group was too full to finish the last fish packet, which became a running joke (“Fish packet! Get your fish packet!”)… but a few minutes later we were ready for dessert. Looking for an alternative to the copious amount of S’mores I had already consumed, Cherise and I experimented with chocolate, bananas and foil. It was a good decision.

That inspired a campfire experiment at Bananas Foster… also a very good thing. We passed that around and eventually mixed chocolate into the skillet, dipping graham crackers in for samples. Yeah buddy.

So, fellow food lovers, my suggestions for your next camping trip?

• Have a plan. Send a bajillion emails about it.
• Bring lots of coolers, lots of plates and use the bear locker to keep away unwanted guests. Get a leash and stake for your dog, especially if he/she is a begger/scavenger.
• Bring more food than you think you need. Have each family bring more than enough to feed themselves and you should be good. Ask about allergies and food preferences in some of those bajillion emails.
• Experiment! There is fire, there is chocolate and there are skewers… so play with your food!
• Don’t lick the hot-off-the-campfire metal skewer just to get that bit of ooey-gooey marshmallow center. IT IS NOT WORTH IT! And your friends will laugh at you.

What suggestions do you have? Any campfire recipes to share? Please do!

Whitney Pipkin is a journalist who fell for food and farms while covering agriculture in the Skagit Valley north of Seattle. She now writes about these topics and others as a freelance writer living in Alexandria, VA. See some of her thoughts on food at thinkabouteat.com. 

It was Monday night. We were recovering from a long Labor Day weekend that involved far too much consumption of free food and a little bit of manual labor. As much as I didn’t feel like cooking, I felt even less like going to the grocery store — again. I had just gone late Saturday night, covered in dirt from our neighbor’s deck-building project, and did NOT want to go again. But, with my stomach directing me through the aisles, I had somehow come home with mostly snacks and few full meals ready to be cooked a couple days later. Whoops! (To my credit, most of my meals hinge on visits to the farmers market, and we missed our Sunday stop last weekend).

I was perfectly satisfied with snacking on apples, cheese and popcorn for dinner — a family tradition that reminds me of girls’ nights with my mom and sister. That’s the problem, my husband reminds me, that’s a meal for girls. “Where’s the meat?” I can hear him saying before he says it. Sigh. So I looked in the fridge and found…

•  A portion and a half of shrimp.
• An onion. A half bag of mixed greens, on the way out.
• A half bunch of rainbow chard, also on its way out and desperately in need of being used.
• Some black olives. (My husband’s favorite! Sure to make up for any cooking blunders from here on out.)
• Some mozzarella cheese?
• One flour tortilla, one corn tortilla (seriously?).
• And a bunch of frozen fish and meat I had planned to thaw… whoops!

And just as depression began to set in, over my lack of cooking desire and resources — and let’s not even mention mise en place — I got a kick of inspiration. I hollered with my head still in the fridge, in my best Ted Allen voice, “it’s another episode of Chopped: at home edition!” I could feel my husband’s look of lowered expectations, thinking…

“Oh great, here she goes again making something out of nothing when here I thought I had an excuse to go to Chipotle.”

The poor man has come to realize I LOVE playing Chopped challenge in my kitchen, making something — heck an entire meal — out of the meager offerings of my ill-stocked fridge. It’s economical, for one (You know, the Food Network showChopped… please tell me you’ve seen it… that it’s your favorite brand of late-night television).

Think about how much money you save each day you procrastinate on that grocery trip and, instead, use those ingredients that have been staring you in the face all week. It’s a far better alternative to throwing away food. And it works those creative recesses of the mind that have been, well, out to recess while you’ve regurgitated cookbook recipes each night (not that that isn’t mind-sharpening in its own way).

Now I may have set you up with big expectations here, like I’m going to make shrimp-and-rainbow-chard crudités or something. Well, no. I still want to make dinner in 10 minutes flat. Again, have you seen Chopped? Go watch it right now.

And the secret ingredients are…

See what bad shape my chard was in? It needed to be used stat.

So I’m thinking pasta at first. Throw all this together with a little lemony-garlicky olive oil sauce? But the chard wouldn’t really work work with that (and I had just run out of orzo). And the chard was top priority to put to use, with its expiration fast approaching. Then I saw the black beans in the cabinet, and I had just refreshed the salsa stash…

“Taco salad?”

“Sure. Do we have tortilla chips?”

“Uhhh no,” seeing two tortillas in fridge. “But I can make some.”

“OK.”

And we’re off.

Love to use the colorful stems from the chard for extra crunch and pizzaz.

I sauté the onions, wilt the chard in a separate pan (not yet sure what I’m doing with that), add the shrimp and beans and spices and cheese and bam! (I also threw the tortillas in the oven to crisp and make them chip-like… but forgot about them for, oh, a couple hours, at which point they were frisbee-like science experiments in the art of charring). I ask my husband if he’d like his “taco salad” over cold greens or warm. Thankfully, he says the chard looks good — and it found its purpose for the evening. In the end it wasn’t really a taco salad, more of a stuff-on-top-of-cooked chard salad. We added salsa anyway.

Taste: pretty good. Presentation: not terrible. Use of ingredients: excellent. Maybe not Chopped challenge material, but these experiments save me time, money and satisfy the ever-hungry husband.

So, what are your whatever’s-in-my-fridge cooking stories? Successes?

Whitney Pipkin is a journalist who fell for food and farms while covering agriculture in the Skagit Valley north of Seattle. She now writes about these topics and others as a freelance writer living in Alexandria, VA. See some of her thoughts on food at thinkabouteat.com. 

A cluster of Juliets

I was drawn by her name. Juliet. A flirty name for a tomato, especially compared with he-man varietals like German Johnson or Beefmaster or Big Boy.

I had grown tired of straight-up grape tomatoes and didn’t want a cherry (so 1980s) so I took a chance. And swooned for Juliet.

Is it a mini-Roma or a sturdy grape tomato? Or is it a Roma grape? It doesn’t matter, really, it was the hit of 2012 in our garden. It started bearing fruit in late June … and has never quit.

A little background. We have had an abnormally hot, abnormally dry year. Many of our tomatoes yielded abundant fruit early, and then pooped out. (In their defense, they are now forming new fruit as the temps cool and the sun remains strong.)

Ah, but the Juliet. She never let us down. This one plant has been a faithful mother to hundreds of small, sweet, sturdy tomatoes. By chance, we planted Juliet in the middle of our nine tomato plants, and her branches have vined their way through all of the other tomato supports and even into other plants. We find clusters of Juliets hidden in the thyme, in the rosemary, the peppers, the horseradish and squash. It’s like a treasure hunt.

As one of the tomato purveyors put it: “The wonderfully sweet fruit are crack resistant and remain in good condition on the vine longer than most cherry tomatoes. The fruit are as soft and juicy as cherry tomatoes, they hold up well in salads, even leftovers, and they have a longer shelf life so you can keep them on hand without picking every day. The vigorous vines set lots of fruit on long trusses and keep setting fruit throughout the summer. Quite heat tolerant. Vines are long and vigorous, so give the plant room to tumble over its cage. Tolerant to late blight. Resistant to early blight. One of the longest-lasting tomatoes in the garden.”

Bravo Juliet!  You rock! You can bet there will always be a Juliet in our garden.

Sandy Johnson is a journalist and a gardener, equally passionate about both. She lives in Alexandria, VA.  Visit her on her blog, Grassroots & Gardening

This week, I’m taking time off from writing about my CSA to write about my garden.  It’s not much – a raised bed made of a converted IKEA TV stand and several planters are all my tiny yard can fit.  It’s been a mixed harvest so far; my tomatoes have stubbornly refused to produce any fruit, and my peppers are just beginning earn their keep, but my basil:  it is awesome.  There’s only so much caprese salad one can eat, though, so I’ve been exploring ways of preserving basil.  Pesto is always a possibility, of course, and it seems there is a French way of preservation that involves layering basil leaves and kosher salt.  But in my research, I came across another intriguing idea: basil jelly.

Have I ever made jelly in my life?  Well, no, but there’s a first time for everything.  I couldn’t quite bring myself to choose a recipe that involved vinegar (really, in a jelly?), so I modified (slightly) a recipe I found for purple basil jelly.

Ingredients:

2 packed cups of fresh basil leaves

2 C. boiling water

1/4 C. bottled lime juice

4 C. sugar

3 oz. liquid pectin (Certo)

Method:

Wash basil leaves, drain, and place in a heat-proof glass bowl.  Pour boiling water over leaves and steep for 24 hours; refrigerate as infusion begins to cool.  Strain through fine sieve, reserving the liquid.  Note: some people seem to get a pretty green infusion, but mine turned brown – this will result in a honey-colored jelly.  Reportedly you can also add food coloring if you prefer it to be green, though I didn’t try.

Place jelly jars and lids in a stockpot deep enough to cover them with a few inches of water, bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer, keeping jars hot until ready to fill.

Make jelly: stir lime juice and sugar into infusion in a stainless steel pan.  Heat and bring to a full rolling boil.  Add liquid pectin and continue to boil for two minutes, skimming any foam that rises to the surface.  Remove from heat and work quickly to jar the jelly.

Ladle jelly into jars (it’s easiest to use a funnel) within about 1/4 inch of the top, clean the rim and threads, and place flat lid and ring on each jar before filling the next.  Screw band on tightly and let cool on a dish towel.  Jars should seal and lids should pop as they cool.

Despite my disappointment in the light brown (rather than green) color, I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of this first attempt at jelly-making.  The jelly itself is pretty sweet, but has a strong basil note.  I’m planning to use it on sandwiches, as a glaze or part of marinade, and perhaps on biscuits at brunch or crackers with cream cheese.  If I made it again, I might try to find a way to reduce the sugar, but I understand that fiddling with recipes that need to “set” may be dangerous.  Maybe I should have gone with the vinegar version, after all.  Are there any jelly-making connoisseurs out there who can offer me some tips?

Amy Saltzman is an avid gardener and cook in DC.  She is a member of the Lancaster County Farm Fresh and North Mountain Pastures CSAs.