le basil

 after planting basil this summer and using it in only a handful of recipes, ben and i had an abundance of basil on our hands. i decided it was time to make pesto!

here's our basil plant. remarkably i took this picture AFTER picking the leaves that i used in the pesto. as you can see, there's still a lot remaining.

 here are the leaves, washed and ready for the processor.

and here are all of the ingredients in our chopper: basil, olive oil, parmesan cheese, pine nuts, and garlic. actually, that's not parmesan cheese. we didn't have any in the house, but we did have some leftover bravo farms cheese from the other night so we used that instead.

pulse pulse pulse -- here's our pesto!

we froze it in an ice cube tray so now we just take out a cube as we need it.

and we did it JUST in time. two nights ago we had a frost and our basil plant is looking sad. hopefully we'll be able to revive it for more batches of pesto in the future!