Pesto

Yesterday I had the girls pick all the leaves off our four basil plants.  We're ready to shut the garden down for the winter, and I wanted to make pesto for freezing before that happens.

Basil plants picked clean (plus a lot of weeds)

I gave about half the leaves to mom.  With what I had left I was able to make four batches of pesto using the recipe from Simply in Season.  I subbed walnuts for pine nuts (poor man's pesto!) and chicken stock for half the olive oil (to keep the calorie count down).  I was licking the spoon between batches, and it's good stuff!  This year I decided to freeze it in muffin tins, figuring that one puck will do for each meal we need pesto for.  The recipe says it makes about 1 cup, so each puck is probably about 1/3 cup of pesto.

Ready for freezing

Found the following sign outside the playroom the other evening:

Unfortunately, I haven't seen this "baskit" shop be open yet!  Will update if it ever opens.