Pickles and Pesto

Pesto

A few months back I helped my friend Terry Kessinger put on a rehearsal dinner for her son.  One of her appetizers was a Caprese salad skewer (cherry tomatoes & mozzarella chunks drizzled with pesto).  She used her home-made pesto for the skewers and it was delicious!  With my garden exploding with basil I thought it would be fun to try to make it myself.  

She graciously gave me her recipe - thank you Terry!

Fresh picked basil from the garden 

Ingredients

2 cups fresh basil

1 cup walnuts or pine nuts (I chose walnuts)

4 large cloves of garlic chopped

1 cup olive oil

1 cup grated parmesan cheese

1/4 cup grated romano cheese

Step 1: Combine basil, nuts, and garlic in food processor and blend.  Slowly add the olive oil. Add a heavy pinch of salt and liberal amount of ground black pepper.

Step 2: grate the cheeses and add.

So simple!  

(I ran out of olive oil on the second batch and used coconut oil...we shall see how it turns out)

Stored the pesto in a small container to enjoy now and put the rest in a Ziplock freezer back to enjoy later.

I make such a mess!

Pickles

After the pesto turned out so well I didn't want to stop!  So I borrowed a recipe from my good friend Amy Knight's blog "A Blossoming Life" for refrigerator pickles. Since cucumbers are not very acidic you need a pressure cooker to can them.  Since I don't have that yet, I needed a method that would preserve the insane amount of cucumbers that are coming out of my garden!

Ingredients:

Pickling cucumbers

6 gloves crushed garlic

1/2 chopped onion

Fresh dill

About 1 tsp each of: Mustard seed, black peppercorn, red pepper flakes, and chili powder

2 cups white vinegar

1/4 cup canning/pickling salt

1.5 quarts of water

Step 1: Combine salt, vinegar and water and bring to a boil

Step 2. Combine spices, onion, dill and garlic and split evenly between 4 jars

Step 3: Cut cucumbers and place in jars

Step 4: Pour boiling salt/vinegar water over the cucumbers and seal.

Step 5: Let the jars sit on the counter for 3 days and every once in awhile shake them up. 

Put in the refrigerator - should last up to 5 months!

Up next....Brewing kambucha at home :-)