In The Garden

As I predicted a few weeks ago, the lettuce has indeed come to a halt: too bitter, too burnt, too bolted. I have not yet dug up the planters, but the lettuce is over until I replant it in the fall. I did, reluctantly, buy some romaine at the store, but after days and days of eating fresh, picked-just-five-minutes-ago lettuce from the back patio, it is less than satisfying.

But that disappointment was offset by these:

Yes, the long winter wait is over and I am starting to pick fresh tomatoes again. They were a couple of weeks behind last year's first ones, but, oh, oh, oh. 

And I just picked and processed a lot of basil. A. Lot. I don't cook a lot with fresh basil, but I do make it into pesto, most of which goes into the freezer or to friends. The basil had gotten tall and thick, so Sunday morning I went out and started clipping. 20 minutes later, I had a sink full of basil:

That bumper crop led to several hours of cutting, chopping, grinding, and whatever else it took to bring it to pesto.

I do not use a pesto recipe. Ever. Some years ago, some food reporter for the New York Times went on a quest to find the area's best pesto, hearing rumors of it being at some diner, perhaps in the Hudson River Valley. The reporter indeed found the very best pesto (having sampled pesto far and wide) and talked with the pesto maker, the proprietor of said diner or restaurant. I don't remember the details other than this salient one: she did not use a recipe at all, but just threw in ingredients until it looked, smelled, and tasted right to her.

Dang! I read that and never looked back. 

My pesto is chopped basil, pressed garlic, parmesan cheese, olive oil, and chopped pecans. I do much of that work by hand using basic kitchen tools, including what a long ago car mechanic friend called a BFH. I use a home-sized BFH (shown below) to smack the garlic to break the husks. 

Warren and I have a very, very small food processor. We bought it many years ago, for (if memory serves me) $9.99. It maybe has a cup and a half capacity. Okay, maybe two cups, but I don't think so. We have used it (no exaggeration) hundreds of times: for salsa, for relish, for pesto, for grinding pecans or almonds for biscotti. It has a crack from top to bottom that does not leak, so we keep using it.  Let's just say we got our money's worth out of it.

When you have limited capacity in your food processor, it takes awhile to work your way through a sink's worth of basil. But slowly, throughout the morning and into the middle of the afternoon, the pesto accumulated and accumulated and accumulated.

By 3:00 p.m., the basil was all gone and I was left with this: 

It took another hour to clean the kitchen (and, in fact, the above photo was taken after I got the kitchen cleaned). 

One container immediately went next door to our good neighbors, Maura and Adam, who recently welcomed a new baby (and a little sister for their daughter) into the world. Distant as my sons' births are, I still remember the pleasure when someone showed up with food that I didn't have to prepare when I was a new parent. Another went to a young friend and her husband. The rest went into my freezer. 

There will be more basil and probably one more pesto day. (Yes, Tonya, I know you want some!) After that, I will let the basil go to flower, because I get such pleasure in watching the bees in it. 

Bees in the basil. I can't wait.