Product Review: President's Choice Pesto Basil Sauce

I love basil pesto! So when I saw President's Choice Basil Pesto Sauce in a 270 mL jar for only $2.99 next to Classico's Basil Pesto Sauce which is only 218 mL for $4.19, I just had to do a taste test.

There will never be anything as good as homemade basil pesto:


Look at that colour!!! 

I make it when I come across some fresh basil on sale. I even grow my own basil but let's be honest, I need my own field of this herb to make it as often I want to eat it. Jarred sauces will never be as vibrant green and luscious as homemade because they will oxidize over time. Still...


Linguini and homemade chicken bites with basil pesto sauce

... even Classico's Basil Pesto Sauce is much more vibrant than President's Choice Basil Pesto Sauce. Another thing I really love about Classico is their ingredient list always seems to be much more natural than other companies' ingredients lists. When I look at the PC Basil Pesto's list of ingredients I am unsure of what is really in there.

Still, this sauce is flavourful. It is very strong and not for the sensitive palette but perfect for me. It is over-seasoned though, a little too salty which is a shame. I will probably keep this on hand for a quick pasta lunch for myself but not something I would make for a regular dinner for my husband and I.

Considering the price, the quantity and quality of this product, I give this product three out of five wooden spoons.

For the love of jam: a tutorial on how to make and jar your own jam

First, I apologize for the length of this post but it was unavoidable. I tried to divide this into two posts but then the story would be broken up. I just could not do that. My health is really suffering right now and it may be a while before I have many stories to share. So please, enjoy silly tutorial of a foodie making real jarred jam for the first time in her life.



I had a lot of peaches that were not super ripe so I decided to make jam with them. You can find the Canadian Living's recipe for Peach Jam I used here. You need to make little Xs on the bottom of the peaches with a knife, blanch them in boiling water for just 30 seconds and them put them in a ice bath (see above) to let them cool off. The skins should just slip off and it they do not, put them back in the hot water for a while and try again.



The recipe calls for six cups of sliced peaches, I think I had just enough.



Mash the peaches and add lemon juice.



Add 1/4 cup of sugar and pectin to the peaches. Stir to combine and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Add remaining sugar (see above), return to a boil and boil hard for 1 minute, stirring the jam.



Remove from heat and skim off foam.



This is the hard part. At the same time I needed to prepare the jars for canning. I brought the water in a giant canning kettle to a boil and then added jars that had been cleaned and inspected for cracks and imperfections. I submerged the jars, covered and let boil for ten minutes.



While the water boiled away I warmed up the lids in a separate pot. According to the experts, Bernardin says that people used to boil these lids but it is actually safer just to heat them up. You can watch the video with all the information about canning here.



With jar lifter, carefully remove the jars out of the water and tilt until jars are empty.



Ladle in jam and make sure to use a clean canning funnel to help get the jam into the jar with minimal mess.



Using a measuring tool from the Bernardin Home Canning Starter Kit, make sure the jam comes up 1/4" from the top. Apparently this tool is also a bubble remover but I do not remember that from the video!



Carefully wipe off the top of the jar without touching it to make sure the lid properly adheres to the jar.



Using the magnetic wand, place one of the lids on top of the jar. Add the top ring and screw on securely but not super tight.



Submerge into the boiling water. This is where I ran into problems. I forgot that the water must be an inch above the top of the lid and this is a HUGE jar. I had to add more water to the canning kettle which would take forever to come up to a boil. At this point I was so exhausted, I thought I was going to cry. Then my lower back started to scream. Crap! I was so close!!!



Finally the water came to a soft boil and I successfully submerged the jar of peach jam into the water, covered the pot and let boil for ten minutes. Then I removed the lid and let stand for five minutes. I removed from the water, placed on a towel in my counter and let sit for 24 hours. When I pressed down on the lid, it did not bounce back so I knew I had a good seal.


Thanks go out to Bernardin and Loblaw's Grown Close to Home program for making this post possible with their generosity and sending me the Home Canning Starter Kit

Sadly by the time this process was done lower back pain was out of control. I went downstairs and watched hours and hours of Ghost Hunters in the fetal position. I realized too late that I should be using tiny decorative jam jars instead of big pickling jars. If I had done so, the process would have been a lot faster. Getting that much water to a boil took forever and my body could not handle it.

Spending time in the kitchen is how I cope with my life here. With back pain, a shoulder injury and the excruciating heat wave we have been experiencing, I have had to shut down my kitchen for a while. As a result, life is much harder for me to handle. Being still here, in pain, is beyond frustrating. Thankfully I still do have posts in my pocket to share for a while. I just hope that I start feeling better soon so the stories can continue.

My version of Panini Toscano & Fox Hill Cheese Shop

Last week I posted about the award-winning grilled cheese sandwich that Chef Michael Howell made at the Grate Canadian Grilled Cheese Cook-Off. I just had to try my hand at making my own version of Panini Toscano and lucky me, I even got out to Fox Hill Cheese House whose cheese was used in this award-winning sandwich. You can find the original recipe here.



Fox Hill Cheese House is located on Church Street in Port Williams, Nova Scotia, and makes over 20 different cheeses using milk from their own Holstein cows.



The article said that the award-winning sandwich used Gouda yet the recipe calls for Havarti. At the cheese shop you can taste test all sorts of cheeses. (I recommend finishing with the curry, it is so strong that after you taste it everything will taste like curry.) As great as Gouda is, I went with my all-time favourite melting cheese... Havarti.



While you are at Fox Hill Cheese House make sure to pick up some gelato, you won't be sorry!


Click here for recipe

Back at home I began with the aioli which is just a fancy way of saying flavoured mayonnaise. I had picked up Hellmann's Olive Oil Mayonnaise and added the juice and zest from half a lemon to a 1/4 cup of mayonnaise and grated in one clove of garlic.



Now you know I do not normally eat pork but I I have always wanted to try Prosciutto so I bought three very thin slices for 87 cents. My Superstore did not have ciabatta buns so I bought D'Italiano Tuscan Herb Focaccia Buns which look and taste nothing like real focaccia. In fact when you slice it open it is full of air pockets just like a ciabatta bun. My Superstore no longer carries fresh figs so I omitted that ingredient completely. I put the aioli on both sides of the bun, added some slices of fresh Havarti, a few pea sprouts and topped with the Prosciutto.



See the aioli oozing out the sides? I am very picky about using lemon juice but with the garlic, this aioli is quite delicious and I even used it on a smoke sandwich this week too. There was mention of roasted red peppers but from the recipe it appears to only be in the salad which I did not make, so it is off the grill we go!



I heated up and oiled my grill press, put the sandwich in and then pushed down as hard as I could. You could just use a frying pan if you do not have a grill pan or press. The end result? A very good sandwich! For someone who does not enjoy pork that is saying a lot!

I have been living on sandwiches this week. We are in our sixth day of a record-breaking heat wave and Hurricane Earl is on its way towards us in Nova Scotia tomorrow morning. I may end up eating sandwiches for more days to come if the power goes out. If you want to hear about the hurricane I will be blogging about it on my personal blog for as long as I have power.

To everyone on the east coast in both Canada and the U.S., stay safe!

Strawberry Rhubarb Breadmaker Jam

Click here for the recipe

Last week I could barely move my right arm because of a shoulder injury. I had these anemic California strawberries and limp rhubarb that just had to be used or I was going to have to compost them. That is when I remembered that you can make jam in the breadmaker! I figured all I had to do was throw everything into the loaf pan and turn it on and be done with it.



Nope! Turns out all jam recipes require a little elbow grease. Using my left arm I mashed half the strawberries with 1/3 cup of the sugar. Painful but doable. I had less rhubarb than I was supposed to and evened it out by adding more strawberries than the recipe called for.



This is why you need to mash them, the berries release all of this natural pectin.



I added the chopped rhubarb, the rest of the strawberries, brown sugar (fascinating!), a small box of pectin and the rest of the granulated sugar. I stirred it up and put it in the breadmaker loaf pan. Then I selected the "preserves" setting and hit the start button.



Around an hour and a half later, I had a fabulous dark, rich and stunning strawberry rhubarb jam. I was going to jar it and sterilized a jar but...



I did not have enough! In order to really preserve a jar of jam it has to come to the stop and my pickle jars were just too darn big!!!



I am officially getting closer to truly preserving food but am not quite there yet. I will divide the jam up into containers and freeze them so I will have this rich but summery jam during the dark heart of winter.


This jam was perfect on my Maritime Brown Bread

Rhubarb must be cooked and cooked well so the breadmaker was the perfect way to make this jam. The strawberries themselves did not have a ton of flavour but by cooking everything together slow and steady in the breadmaker, all their flavours were slowly melded. Rich, dark and luscious, I am absolutely thrilled that once again my breadmaker makes my life so much easier and so delicious.

Winner of "Substituting Ingredients" Giveaway is...

Noelle from An Opera Singer in the Kitchen!

"I love to sing opera and I love to cook. Join me as I experience a vegan and raw lifestyle."

Congratulations Noelle! Thank you so much for entering the contest and I will try and get the book to you soon. Make sure to check out Noelle's Ultra Fudgy Moist Brownies! Dang!

As a personal update, my shoulder is doing a bit better but there are two potential hurricanes coming my way. Earl is looking like it is really going to hit Nova Scotia hard but at least it is now down to a category 3. Regardless, it is time to fill the pantry and live on my pickled veggies, LOL.

Pickling Madness!

After I made my mom's sweet pickles I wondered what else I could pickle! Thanks to the Superstore's Grown Close to Home products, I had local beets and cauliflower I could preserve.



I doubled my mom's recipe and put in a large saucepan: two cups of water, two cups of sugar and two cups of natural vinegar with 1-2 tbsp of coarse pickling salt. I brought it to a boil and let it simmer for a few minutes until everything dissolved.

In another pot I bought some water to a boil and added half a head of chopped cauliflower and a handful of local pearl onions that had the bottom trimmed off it. I blanched them for five minutes and then drained them. I removed the top layer of skin from the pearl onions and then put everything in a tall jar with about three cloves of garlic. Then I poured in the hot brine.



I had these gorgeous local beets that I had roasted for this month's cooking club challenge at Food Network Canada that I did not want to go to waste. My mom said she does not pickle them with garlic but the does throw in caraway seeds which is exactly what I did. I had just enough brine to cover the beets. I let both jars cool off and then marinade in the fridge. Remember, these are not officially preserved jars so they must be refrigerated and eaten in the next little while. 



I was worried that five minutes of blanching would not be long enough to soften the vegetables but thanks to the hot brine the cauliflower and the pearl onions continued to slowly cook and ended up the perfect consistency. Thanks to the natural vinegar (I used President's Choice) these were actually very subtle in flavour and quite wonderful. It made the perfect summer salad.



Bright and beautiful, flavoured lightly by the caraway seeds, I loved these beets. Once again, by using natural vinegar the harsh abrasive flavour I usually associate with pickled beets was muted and I could enjoy their rich earthiness completely. My only regret? I wish I had made more!

The first major step to getting over my fear of pickling, preserving... is now over. I am so glad because the payoff is huge! I absolutely loved these pickled vegetable and can not wait to make more.

I loved all the pickle stories you shared yesterday! Thank you for that, I really enjoyed them. So my pickling friends, what is the weirdest thing you have had that has been pickled?