Tuesday, May 29, 2012

LOTS of Basil!

I know my basil plants haven't looked huge and out of hand in pictures, but trust me, they were......were being the operative word here.

I've used basil in tomato sauce and in a few other dishes, but I needed something that would use a lot of basil all at once. So yesterday evening, I got busy looking up pesto recipes. It was pretty straightforward. Every recipe I looked at was pretty similar: lots of basil, olive oil, garlic, parmesan cheese, pine nuts, maybe some salt and pepper or other optional ingredients. Research done, I pulled out my food processor and got to work.

Here is a picture of one of the basil plants. The other was fairly similar in size. Obviously, it was starting to bolt.

I got my kitchen scissors to work and soon had a sink full on basil!

This picture was actually taken after I was about half way through the process (and thought to myself "Hey! You really should be taking pictures of this for your blog!!"...Oops...). There was twice this much when I started.

I decided to forgo the pine nuts in my pesto (the idea of eating something that smells like Pine-sol really just doesn't do it for me), but at the end, I really didn't miss them. I used all the basil leaves, olive oil, garlic, parmesan, and a little bit of salt and pepper. As the world's worst recipe writer, I didn't measure anything. Oh well. It's pretty easy to adjust the flavors so you get exactly what you want. I tasted it a couple times through the process to make sure everything was right. This is what I ended up with. Yes, a sink full of basil really does condense itself down to a small-ish tupperware container!

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