Almost Two Quarts
October 7, 2025
So this is what became of the arm load of basil Jim brought in from the garden a couple days ago.
It generated 15 cups of packed basil leaves, enough for three batches of Ina Garten’s recipe.
The pesto making begins…
Her recipe is slightly different than pestos I’ve made in the past.. but not much. Hers has walnuts and pine nuts, and she adds a fair amount of salt and pepper. She also may use more garlic than most. I ended up not using as much oil as she called for.
But look at this!
I figure each of those is about 1/2 a cup. There are 14 of those, plus the nearly 1 cup of pesto I set aside for last night’s dinner. That’s two quarts.. which oughta last us the winter. Into the freezer these have gone. I left the parmesan out of the ones I’m freezing. I’m thinking about 2T of grated parm, added just before serving, will be about right.
That’s what we did last night and it was perfect! Here it is, pre-parm garnish.
Pesto Part 1
October 4, 2025
Today turned out to be the day…. time to pull up the summer’s basil and make some pesto! It was already too late for the sweetest, most tender basil, but any longer and we’d have run out the clock. Our plants (we have 8-10) were getting long in the tooth, long-flowered, their leaves well-munched… so it was kind of now or never.
Jim brought in a huge armload of long, leaf-ful stems. He gave them their first bath, which got most of the birch detritus, dust, and bug remnants off of them. Then we plucked….
Then the leaves got a second wash…
Then they were laid out to dry…
Not going to blanch them, though some do to preserve a bright green color.
Tomorrow, we’ll make the pesto.
Life of Wry 