Why are you doing this recipe?
We are growing an herb garden not only to save costs on buying the herbs, but also in order to try to live more sustainably by having a plant that we grew ourselves and can continue to grow and be harvested multiple times without a dramatic effect on the environment. By actually using what we grow we are saving resources, instead of growing a plant we can't eat any part of, and just having it exist instead of help us to have more sustainable foods without destroying the earth. Though is does not seem that a classroom full of kids can make a difference, but every little part helps, and it can really add up if we take with us the work we did here throughout our lives and grow plants that we can eat. The two essential questions in our project were, "Why don’t people live more sustainably?" and "How can I convince them to do so?" I think that it relates to the first one with the fact of how hard it was to grow our herbs. Ours specifically got attacked by bugs in the ground, which ended up killing one of our herbs plants, and made it harder during the cooking stage, by limiting our resources. It was a difficult process and could be hard to remember to take care of them on a regular basis.
How did you make it?
First of all I got the recipe I used here. (http://www.cooks.com/rec/doc/
When harvesting I didn't want to take very much, but thought I might need a bit while cooking. I was cutting off only outlying leaves and trying not to cut off groupings of leaves or ones that were smaller, and instead got a few larger leaves. I spread out the area in which I was harvesting, due to many conflicting reports about where to cut off the leaves, and instead focused on which ones seemed fully grown and healthy.
The recipe I used was fairly simple. All you need was a stick of butter, basil, carrots, and syrup. Starting out I had to chop up tons of carrots in order to fill the bottom of a small sauce pan, instead of using full sized carrots, I ended up using baby carrots and filling it up until it seemed the correct amount of carrots for the recipe. I then had to fill up the pan with just enough water to cover the carrots, and put it on the stove to boil for 10 minutes while preparing the other ingredients, making sure that the water wasn't boiling too hard.
(pics of process)
Gonna need to chop up a lot of carrots!
Starting to boil!
As for preparing the ingredients, I had to start off by measuring 3 table spoons of butter and cutting that off to put in. I then took the basil and layered it, tied it tight into a ball, and cut that into smaller pieces. Once the carrots were done boiling, I added the cut up basil, butter, and measured out two tablespoons of syrup and added those to it, stirred it in, and set it to boil for another 12 minutes, stirring it repeatedly throughout the duration.
Choppin up basil
With ingredients freshly added
mmmm sweet carrots
How did it go?
The recipe didn't turn out all that different from things I had tried before, but was still delicious. The only problem I can think of was maybe having too many carrots in there so that the ingredients didn't show as much taste. If I was to do this again I would probably have cooked the food the day before so the basil would be fresher, and possibly have used less carrots so you could taste the ingredients more. I'm not sure that this has completely swayed me to grow more food myself. It was a very difficult process with much luck involved and hard work and remembering. There are also so many things that can go wrong and just end up killing the plant and wasting your time, effort, and money. It does seem like quite a bit of effort to add a bit of extra flavor. There just seems to be too much that can mess it up, unless you do it larger scale, which I'm not sure if I would have the time to spare.
4 comments:
Nice. I really appreciate the honesty in your reflection. I've never heard of sweet carrots before, what type of syrup did you use?
Mapel! Pancake syrup is good!
the way you describe the process of your harvesting and how much you would think you need is very thorough , and the captions you put under your pictures are also helpful in following the process.
I really enjoyed reading the first part, you thoroughly went through why we are growing these plants. If I were not someone in the class, I would understand the reason behind this assignment.
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