Thursday, January 24, 2008
warm basil oil
A good year for writing so far...firstly I had a feature article published in The Dominion newspaper about vegetable gardening, with my own photographs illustrating it. That was an enormous thrill. And the other day I received news that I’ve had a poem accepted for a book edited by Emma Neale - a themed anthology about parenting called ‘Swings and Roundabouts’. Again, very exciting for me because I admire and respect Emma Neale’s writing so much.
Now if I could just keep the momentum going and have two successes a month for the whole year...hee...anyway, I hope it isn’t a fluke!
I wrote in the article about how much I love vegetable gardens in the summer - where so much is going on and there is always something to pick.
Lately I’ve been picking a bunch of basil, covering it in olive oil in an air-tight jar and leaving it on a sunny windowsill for the afternoon. By dinner time the oil is steeped in basil. I use the oily leaves in my dinner that evening*, and then put the flavoured oil into a dark cupboard to for another day. The basil oil is absolutely lovely poured over some spaghetti noodles with lots of pepper and Parmesan - and some fresh basil leaves for colour. Yum.
Part of the joy of it is just looking at the jar of jade green goodness while in the kitchen - to me it’s very pretty.
(*if you leave the leaves in the oil for more than about eight hours, they’ll go black and icky - so don’t forget to fish them out and eat them!)
