Pesto!

Remember how I mentioned the garden’s abundance of basil? We finally got to enjoy this bounty last Thursday evening. In place of the normal garden meeting, members of the Hereford garden community opted to get together and make pesto. Shockingly easy and delicious, I would recommend pesto-making to anyone who has enough basil to pull it off. And you need A LOT of basil. The recipe we used called for a cup and a half tightly packed basil leaves…doesn’t sound like much right? Well, you’d be surprised just how much basil one can pack into a cup measurement.

We started off the evening with some of Elaine’s phenomenal homemade bread, then headed down to the garden with baskets to collect basil. Though nothing else is really producing, we are blessed to have a ridiculous amount of basil. We liberally broke entire stems off of several of our greener looking bushes (some have yellowed since flowering), and grabbed some parsley to add a little interest to our basil concoction. Then we headed back up to the kitchen for the fun (and rather messy) part.

Pesto is really easy to make. All you do is throw all the ingredients into the food processor and blend it well. Here’s the recipe we used:

1 ½ cup washed, drained basil leaves, tightly packed
4 tbsp grated parmesan cheese
¼ cup olive oil
3 garlic cloves
a handful of pine nuts
about 1 tsp salt

We added the pesto to some bow-tie pasta and served it with more bread and fruit salad for dessert. Our epic fruit salad proudly boasted cantaloupe and watermelon from the garden! And both fruits actually had flavor!

All in all, it was a delicious dinner and a great way to spend an evening.

Elizabeth