self sufficient life

What to do with all that basil

Do you grow basil on your kitchen sill too? Those little pots of basil that you can buy in most supermarkets are great if you only need a few leaves in a salad or for decoration, but if you let them grow, they can give you a lifetime supply of basil.

Once the basil plants grow big enough, they will start flowering and the flowers will produce seeds. You can see the seeds when the plant drops its flowers. Each flower usually produces four seeds, with a few dozen flowers on each stem, you can easily harvest a hundred seeds from a single stem.

After planting seeds that I harvested from a plant last year, I have also tried to propagate the plants by taking cuttings. The cuttings where a great success and I soon had more basil than we could eat in salads. As the plants where already flowering, I had to use the leaves before drying the seeds. I decided to make some pesto and it was good!

Here’s how I made the pesto:

Ingredients:

• a few hands full of chopped basil leaves.
• A clove of garlic
• A handful of cashew nuts
• Extra-virgin olive oil
• A little lemon juice
• Some pepper and salt

Pound the garlic, cashew nuts and basil in a pestle and mortar or use a food processor. Real pesto is made with pine nuts, but cashew nuts are a lot cheaper alternative often used in the pesto you can buy in a glass jar from the supermarket. Add a little olive oil until you have a consistency you like and add pepper, salt and lemon juice to taste.

The pesto can be kept in the fridge for a few days or you can freeze it. I use this pesto to make sandwiches, just smear a nice thick layer of pesto onto a slice of bread and top with turkey or chicken breast and tomato slices.

If you want to use the pesto with pasta, you can add a few handfuls of grated parmesan cheese, just stir it into the pesto. When storing the pesto in the freezer you should omit the cheese as it doesn’t freeze to well. Just add the cheese after thawing the pesto for use. Enjoy!