Growing your own food contributes to your own creativity in the kitchen. The kitchen is akin to the blank canvas, the ingredients akin to the colours, paint, and pencils. Your artwork will resemble thus your ingredients.

Growing your own food will obviously give you access to different shades and paints that the normal person does not have access to. Take for example amaranth leaves and spekboom. The normal person relying on the shop will not have access to these ingredients because they are not commercially available.

But if you grow your own food, you will have access to all of these wonderful extra flavours, textures, and nutrients!

I love to just be as creative as I can with textures and flavours. Working in the garden this morning, I smelled the lemon basil when I walked past it. I immediately got the craving for a pasta with tomato and basil, and lemon basil of course. I thought for a while and then the recipe just jumped into my mind: spekboom leaves, amaranth leaves, and lemon basil.

Without further ado, please follow along with the photographs to see how I make this dish and read some of my tips as I explain my process.

Ingredients/Recipe

For this simple dish, you will need the following:

• spekboom leaves,
• amaranth leaves,
• lemon basil,
• common basil,
• onion,
• garlic,
• garlic chives,
• tomatoes,
• bacon,
• pasta,
• pasta water,
• olive oil, and
• hard cheese.

Method and Some Tips

As all recipes start, begin by chopping up everything while the pasta water comes up to temperature.

I began by “flavouring” the oil I used by giving the bacon a head start. This will make the oil you use a little bit smoky and add more bacon flavour.

Give the bacon a couple of seconds head start and then add all of the other ingredients, except the lemon basil, common basil and spekboom leaves. Keep them separate and do not add them at this stage.

Ideally, you want the tomato and onion to have a little char on them. Given that my pan was a little crowded, this did not happen. I think I made way too much food for just me!

When the pasta is done, add the pasta with some pasta water to the ingredients you just cooked. Add some heat again and add more pasta water until a thick sauce develops. This sauce is just pasta water and oil. No cheese or any other “binding agents” are added. If you did everything right, your sauce will be smooth and thick but not too heavy or rich (such as a cream/egg based sauce).

Only then add the lemon basil, common basil, and spekboom leaves when the heat is off. I actually wanted to add the garlic at this stage as well! But I forgot. I somewhere read that if you only add basil and garlic at the end of tomato sauces, their flavour shines through on a more balanced way. Cook them too long and their flavour disappears, add them when your plate, and their flavour becomes too strong. Adding them right after you turned off the heat is the best for that balanced garlic and basil flavour.

Another tip is to shred/tear the leaves with your fingers rather than cut them with a knife (as the photograph above shows). I also read somewhere long ago that when you cut basil leaves they are not as flavourful as when you rip them apart. That is why a mortar-and-pestle basil pesto is way better than one made in a blender (in my opinion). Unfortunately, as you can see below, by tearing the leaves and not using them directly they turn blackish.

I added the shredded leaves at this stage only after turning off the heat.

And there you have it! This is not the most beautiful plating, but it was just a quick lunch. I did not have too much time to think about plating.

The flavour combination just worked so well for me. By using parmesan shavings rather than grated adds a lot of different flavours because not every bite contains cheese. The crisp and fresh burst of flavour from the spekboom pair so well with the rather bitter taste of the amaranth. The tomato and lemon basil pairs so well.

I hope that this post kind of inspires you to grow your own food! It is really I think a home cook’s dream to have fresh ingredients at her fingertips! I know I love every moment of it.

The recipe is an amalgamation of all the pasta dishes I have had throughout the years with my own spin on it. The musings are also my own. The photographs were taken with my iPhone. Happy cooking and stay well.