basil | Our Austintatious Life

We have a mint plant that is very generous with its leaves. Meaning, we can’t use it fast enough. We also have a basil plant we got from Trader Joe’s which needed to be cut back a bit. So, I started looking for new ideas of uses for them. It just so happened that we also bought a large salmon steak earlier in the week. After searching the internet for inspiration, I settled on this simple recipe.

Ingredients

1 piece of salmon (or steelhead trout)
1/2 cup fresh mint leaves
1/2 cup fresh basil leaves
4 cloves of garlic, chopped
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 lemon juiced
1/2 lemon zest
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

Directions

Make your pesto by chopping your mint and basil leaves and put into a food processor. Add the chopped garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, lemon zest, salt and pepper. Mix all ingredients together until you have a pesto consistency.

Salmon coated with basil and mint pesto

Coat your salmon with the pesto and let sit for at least 20 minutes in the refrigerator.

Heat your grill to high heat.

Place the salmon on a cedar plank or a grill plate. We don’t have any cedar planks so we just lightly sprayed non-stick oil on a grill plate and put the salmon on the plate in the center of the grill. Cook the salmon for 20 minutes over medium-high heat.

After a few minutes, our grill started to flare up, which is common for our grill. To resolve this, I turned off the heat directly under the salmon and then turned on the outer burners to high. Our grill cooks very hot so this was more than enough heat for our salmon.

We didn’t use all the pesto on the salmon and had some leftover. We used it to coat some zucchini noodles as a side dish. We also served it with some lentils. It was a great, easy dinner.

Here is our strip of mozzarella with the ingredients on it. The back row is the left over tomato and basil.

This salad is so simple, it almost seems foolish to write a post about it. However, with really good fresh ingredients, this salad is so awesome that it needs to be shared. I had never made this salad until last week. We went to the farmers market and bought some heirloom tomatoes that needed a dish that would showcase these beautiful tomatoes. We have basil growing on the back deck so all we needed was some mozzarella. We went to the store and picked up a package of Belgioioso Unwrap & Roll Mozzarella Cheese.

This haul from our farmer’s market was wonderful. It was our first time at this particular farmer’s market and they had a great selection.

The Unwrap & Roll is a long strip of mozzarella that you unroll and then fill in with you ingredients. When you’re done, you just roll it up, slice it and serve. We used one large heirloom tomato for two people and served it as a side dish next to grilled chicken.

Ingredients

1 or 2 Fresh tomatoes
1 handfull of fresh basil
1 package of Unwrap & Roll mozzarella (or two balls of fresh mozzarella)
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
salt & pepper to taste
Here is our roll before we sliced it.

Directions

Clean and dry your basil.
Slice your tomato into thick slices
Unroll the strip of mozzarella onto a clean, dry cutting board
Cut the strip in half, so you have 2 strips, each about 10 inches long. We only used one strip and one tomato. So, if you have more people to feed, count on one tomato for each 10 inch strip.
The strip is about 6 inches wide by 10 inches long. We fit in two rows of three slices of tomatoes.
Place the basil on top of the tomatoes, just scattered around.
Sprinkle on salt and pepper to taste
Roll up the strip and it’s ready to slice and serve. We put ours in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes but you could leave it at room temperature.
Slice the roll into little medallions. We cut our strips about 1 1/2 inch wide.
Here is a close up of our roll.
Layer the slices on a dish then drizzle with the olive oil and balsamic vinegar. We used a white balsamic vinegar, but that was mainly for cosmetics to keep it nice and fresh looking.