What is Even Better than Pesto?

Basil, for me, is an almost perfect plant. It's ornamental.  It smells nice.  It comes in colors - green, purple, purple and green, variegated.  Some varieties have white flowers, some purple, and one, Cardinal, even has ornamental red blooms.  

Some varieties are tall and upright.  Some mound.  Many can be grown in containers.

It's a flavoring for tomatoes, and more.  It makes wonderful pesto.  And you can make something else with it, even better than pesto.

Go out to the store and price basil.  Yes, I'll wait.  At $3.00 for a small plant with a few leaves, like the local supermarket here in upstate New York sells, you will save yourself a lot of money if you have the room to grow a few plants.

Make yourself comfy, dear reader, while I show you some basil.

This is one of the two basils I have in a container.  Pesto Perpetuo - ornamental, and culinary, with a hint of lemon.  Yes, it's a variegated light green and white.  I've grown it for some four years now, and it has never disappointed.

Here's my other container basil - Thai basil, with its beautiful purple flowers.  It's wonderful for cooking.

Sweet basil.

Spicy globe basil, bordered by two of my purple basils.

And, now for the recipe you've been waiting for.  It's a French style pesto called pistou, and it is on a blog that I love for so many reasons I can't fit them into this post.

I hope she doesn't mind if I stea copy some of the ingredients to start you off.  If you want to know how much of each, the rest of the ingredients, and the instructions, you'll just have to visit Amy's blog.

•  garlic cloves
•  (packed) fresh basil leaves, shredded
•  salt
•  olive oil

 Doesn't that sound good?  Doesn't that make you want to grab your blender, and run to the garden? (And, about that "smell o'blog" blog plug in I keep threatening to invent...)

Because it doesn't have nuts in it, pistou is a bit more Weight Watchers friendly than "regular" pesto, too-for me and my spouse, a bonus. (we'll have to play with the recipe some though.)

So...ready to pistou?  I am!

Beautiful Basil

 It's the time we dread - saying goodbye to our gardens.

Yesterday, we finished preparing our community garden plots for the winter.  We probably won't get a killing frost until Thursday morning, but, per the rules of our garden, the last gardening day is October 27 (frost or not).  Some community gardens allow you to keep plants there all year round (for example, allowing you to grow perennials); ours doesn't.

Fences had to be taken down, sunflower stalks had to be stomped to the ground, and produce had to be picked.  Debris had to be put in dumpsters.

Today, its the turn of the small garden at our house. We have a garden in our front yard - mostly flowers but a couple of food plants (basil, a pepper.)

Our dahlias will need to be dug, but we will wait until after the killing frost.  We dug our glads up (more on that later in the week).

The focus today was on our basil.  We had both taken today off from our jobs for a trip that ended up not happening.  But instead, we lucked into what might be the warmest day of the rest of the year.

 In the front yard, we had our Italian basil.

In our back yard, Thai basil, which were volunteers from last year.  We've never had volunteer basil before and the several plants were a pleasant surprise.

I sat out in the back yard, in our 60 degree (and breezy) weather, stripping off the leaves. This was te view from my tiny porch.

The perfume of basil quickly filled the air, and, after I brought the leaves inside, the house.  (Where is that smell-o-blog plug in when you need it? )

Then, my spouse, the cook, took over.  While I wrote my blog post and took pictures, he got out the food processor, and blended the leaves with a little chicken stock, to a fine cut, not a puree.  This is an experiment - because of watching our weight, we didn't want to use oil.

Then, into the ice cube trays they went.

Spouse will use this for various purposes, including flavoring tomato sauce.  We don't do much with pesto, but I will wish I had fresh basil leaves for a nice tomato/fresh mozzarella salad.

I'll be dreaming of that salad until next summer.

How did you spend today? I hope it was a beautiful one for you, too.