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Got a whole lot of basil?
We were gifted with a HUGE bunch of basil and wanted to make great use of it. In Episode 103 we not only give you three awesome Thermomix basil recipes, but also growing tips and a number of other uses!
Click on the play button at the top or download this in iTunes or on Stitcher Radio (and don’t forget to leave a review – it really makes our day!)
The recipes we chose this week are:
Recipe 1 – Hearty Vegetable Soup (from The 4 Blades)
This soup is really delicious! It’s like a thick and chunky canned vegetable soup, but sooo much more delicious. You wouldn’t even know that it has a pesto in it, but boy does the addition of pesto lead to an amazing burst of flavour. The pesto is dairy free and therefore a good option for the dairy free folks looking for a pesto. It was created for The Classics Issue of The 4 Blades Magazine.
Recipe 2 – Heirloom Tomato Tart (from Kitch’n Thyme)
This was Bec’s first time of making a tart and boy did she feel impressed with herself. This is a really great recipe. The tart dough is easy to work with and the end product has the most sensational flavours. It was very well received by our guests. If you want to give it as a meal, or freeze it, simply leave the tomatoes off the top. Here are a couple of tweaks that we made to this recipe:
- We used a round pie dish, as we didn’t have a rectangular tart tin.
- We used 200g plain flour instead of the spelt flour.
- We forgot to put the rolled out dough in the fridge before transferring to the oven. It still worked great!
- Recommendation: Start caramelising the onions when the dough is blind baking to save time.
- We used a handful of fresh basil in lieu of the chives.
- We used a balsamic reduction instead of balsamic vinegar + sugar (simply because we couldn’t find our balsamic vinegar!) You can make your own balsamic reduction using the recipe in the Make Your Own Subscriber Bonus, which you can also find on the Super Kitchen Machine website.
- We used beautiful fresh Roma tomatoes from the farmer’s market in lieu of heirloom tomatoes, simply due to availability.
Recipe 3 – Beef Basil (from Tenina)
This is an awesome recipe that uses a very cool technique to actually ‘stir-fry’ the beef in the Thermomix bowl. You preheat the Thermomix and then add oil, and then add your marinated beef. We absolutely LOVED this meal – it was devoured in no time! Because of the soy we couldn’t use the 3 Tbsp of oyster sauce, but we used an alternative of 2 Tbsp of “Mighty Mite” (GF version of Vegemite). We didn’t have 4 tsp chicken stock powder, so we used 2 tsp vegetable stock paste. The end product was slightly on the salty side, but this was simply due to our replacements, and boy oh boy was it tasty. You are going to love this dish. Our beef was so tender! We added a head of broccoli and cooked the beef and broccoli in two lots. Tenina uses capsicum and snow peas, which makes sense. Both ways work!
Here are some cool tips from this podcast…
- We love Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Companion!
- Grind up egg shells in your Thermomix (which helps to clean your Thermomix bowl) and put them around your basil seedlings to help prevent pests.
- Tomatoes and capsicum are good companion plants for basil.
- Remove the buds from the basil plants to make your basil plants more bushy rather than ‘leggy’.
- Looking for the gluten free crust that we were talking about? Check it out here.
Looking for some other Thermomix basil recipes? Why not try…
1. Basil Pesto Dip
2. Pesto Genovese Sauce
3. Green Eggs & Ham from The Breakfast Issue
4. A Caprese Salad
5. Spinach & Feta Grain Free Pancakes
Do you grow your own basil? Leave us a note in the comments below!
If you enjoyed this podcast, we’d be extremely grateful if you would take a second and leave us a review and rating over on iTunes. Once on that page, simply click on the “View in iTunes” button to leave your review — thanks very much!