About a month ago, I propagated a couple cuttings from my original basil plant. They sat in a glass of water for a week, seemingly doing nothing, until one day: BAM, roots. Awesome! In the interest of science, I took another cutting from the same plant, didn't wait for it to grow roots, and stuck it in the same soil. It seemed very unhappy at first, but now look at it! Seems to be doing fine.
I read that it's good to keep your herbs on their toes by getting rid of flowers (check!) and also to knock them down to size frequently. In my (admittedly limited) experience, basil doesn't store in the fridge as well as, say, rosemary or thyme, so I have to use it right away. So, I needed to get rid of the huge, huge bowl of basil that I'd liberated from its home. Pesto time!
I didn't have any nuts, of any kind. I only had basil; cheap, grated parmasan cheese; olive oil; and garlic. The internets say it's possible, though, to make nutless pesto, so I was on my way.
Here's what I did:
Filled my 10-cup food processor about 3/4 full with loose basil leaves
Chopped up three, maybe four (sorry, don't know!) cloves of garlic
Added about 1/2-3/4 cup of parm cheese
Started the food processor
Realized at this point that my pesto needed some bulk, so looked at the rest of the herbs that I'd just harvested, and decided on adding a few leaves of sage
Added olive oil until the stuff in the processor had a pesto-like consistency
Rejoiced!
I'm patting myself so hard on my head right now, you guys, you just don't know, because the sage turned out to be really cool in the pesto. However, it still didn't go very far. I got about two, small jars out of all of this, and it's air-sensitive, so I topped each of the jars with some olive oil to keep it from turning brownish (ugh, didn't notice it did that before with store-bought stuff.) No worries, though, because it's not lasting long.
The first thing I did was make pesto mayonnaise to go with fries (Sean made dinner). I didn't take a picture of this, but I'm guessing you could imagine it looked like mayo with some green stuff in it. The ingredients were:
1 tbsp-ish of pesto
2 tbsp-ish of mayo
It was awesome because it was basically a little ramekin filled with fat and herbs. You can't go wrong.
Next thing I tried was pasta.
1/2 bag linguini, cooked
1 6 oz strip steak, sliced and cooked to medium well, unfortunately, because the steak was really thin.
2 tbsp pesto
A few grape tomatoes (from my garden!!!!), quartered and sauteed in butter
Random herbs (from my garden!!!!), I think thyme, rosemary, and parsley
Alfredo sauce, because screw it, we're already full of carbs and fat anyway.
Cook the linguini, cook the grape tomatoes and steak, when it's all done throw it together with the pasta and the sauces. It looked like this. I was pleased.
And my favorite thing: pizzas with pesto. You need:
Round pita bread
Pesto
Pizza toppings (I did pepperoni, tomatoes (from the garden!!!) and immature purple bell peppers (they keep rotting on the vine so I pick them young)
Mozzarella cheese (or whatever you like)
Heat the oven to, like 425, or whatever. Take your pitas, spread pesto on, add cheese and toppings. Put in the oven until the cheese is bubbly and the peppers and tomatoes look a little wilted. Then shove unceremoniously into your face because it was really damn good.
In fact, I might have one after I add more wood chips to the smoker.
So, that's what I've been doing with my pesto farm. It is fun and rewarding!
