I have lots of basil growing outside on the balcony, and I've done pretty little with it. I put it on pizza a few weeks ago, but that's it. Since I'm going on vacation tomorrow for a week, I wanted to use some of it up. Hopefully when I come back, there will be some new basil starting to grow in its place. I decided to make pesto using a combination of this recipe from 101 Cookbooks which my best friend Diane sent to me, and the recipe in one of my favorite cookbooks, The Art of Simple Food. The recipe from 101 Cookbooks calls for a method of chopping all the ingredients, unlike Simple Food, which has you use a mortar and pestle. Since I don't have that, I decided to use the chopping method with the Simple Food ingredient proportions.
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| I used half fresh grated Parmesan and half pre-grated |
When I was finished, I put the pesto into a clean ice cube tray to freeze, and I'll put the pesto cubes into freezer baggies later tonight. This was my first time making pesto, and while I really enjoyed it (it smells sooo delicious!), I wish I had a food processor! I think I would like it more chopped up than I got it even after lots and lots of chopping, and it would be neat to able to make larger batches to freeze and have throughout the winter.
2 comments:
I LOVE pesto. I would eat pesto on everything if I could. I always have to make it right before I go to bed, because it always tastes better after the garlic has had time to set (and if I make it earlier in the day, I will eat it all before it's set). Do you know how to harvest basil to encourage growth? I bought a plant at Kroger but of course killed the thing taking all the leaves off. I would love a how-to on growing basil.
I read that if you continue to harvest the leaves, it will grow new leaves all the way into the fall. If you're good about harvesting them, it should also not flower, because that means it's putting more energy into flowering than producing new leaves. As you can see, I didn't learn that until AFTER the flowers appeared. Oh well, it's a learning process :-)
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