Early Harvest: Pesto Farm 3000 is a Go

Seriously, pesto is my favorite. That's the reason why I have so many basil plants, which all seem to be thriving, yay!

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!

Early harvest: things to do with dill

Since it's a rainy Saturday (in June! Boo!) and I don't feel like showering and getting ready now, only to get wet when grilling in a couple hours, I have nothing to do but clean my house paint my nails watch TV update my nascent site that I hope not to abandon in two weeks, I mean it!

My breakfast this morning ruled. I'm not usually a breakfast person because I sleep until the last possible second during the week, and the morning is a mad dash to get to work on time. However, I gave blood yesterday (no, I will not stop talking about it) and the lady said to not skip meals. However, she also said that I should be fine to drink alcohol after 4 hours (at 10:00 a.m.??), and since I almost passed out last night after one Guinness, maybe I should take her recommendations with a grain of salt?

Anyway, I decided to hook myself up with an omelette with tomato, parmesan cheese, parsley, and dill.

For the uninitiated (which is me), dill can be kind of daunting. This year, my dill is going crazy, and I keep trying to find stuff to do with it. I mean, it's good on salmon...and...um...Google? Care to help me out here?

Here we go! Neat!

I am going to try this summer to always keep tzatziki sauce in my house, because it's awesome. Found my amazing recipe here. This uses a lot of dill, and mint and parsley, which I also have in the garden. Also, did you know that dill is in ranch dressing? I did not.

I think that dill really, really sings with eggs. I've started to use it in my deviled eggs, and this morning in my awesome omelette.

So, here's Sara's Blood-Loss Breakfast:

2 eggs
A little milk
Salt or salt-like seasoning to taste (We use Chef's Secret and have for years, it rules)
A little butter for the pan
A small tomato, diced
Some parmesan cheese
Some fresh mozzarella, because why not?
Lots of cracked black pepper
Lots of parsley
Lots of dill
Sriracha
Toast and black coffee, on the side

Start by cooking the chopped up tomato in butter. I should have cooked it longer, but I didn't. It was still fine. It's butter and tomatoes, come on.

Add the eggs and cook for a minute, add the mozzarella and cook until melted. Another thing I would have done differently was to omit the milk since fresh mozzarella is so melty anyway. Cook until the eggs are to your liking. I like mine super dry and overcooked. I know this is wrong, and I don't care.

When it's done, dump it on a plate, and cover the eggs in the herbs and sriracha. Add the toast to the plate in a manner that looks unnervingly like a face. Shovel into your mouth because nobody is watching anyway, who cares if you eat the eggs with your hands, you pig.

So, that's that. Hopefully, by feeding myself and drinking quart after quart of water during the day, I'll be able to have more than one freaking beer tonight.