Justice Pesto

I blame Heidi.

First she wondered if I had spent any time cruising Simple Mom.  Then she posted a picture of her award-winning jam.

In the last four weeks I have started moisturizing with coconut oil, cleansing with combinations of olive, almond and castor oils, exfoliating with lemons and sugar, masking in egg yolks and yogurt and washing all of us with Dr. Bronner's Castille Soap.  I figure I've cut our chemical lode in half and our cleaning/soaping/face restoration budget by two-thirds. My skin is happy, and now I have something to do with the egg yolks left-over from pavlova making.

However, getting in touch with my inner hippie (hippy? really? spelling is an odd game sometimes) did not stop at homemade deoderant (coconut oil, cornstarch and baking soda).  It moved into the kitchen.  First I tried home-made yogurt in the crockpot (going to try making vanilla next time and I'm accepting tips on how to make it thicker).  Next I started making granola.

And then I decided to make the pesto.

This year we planted five basil plants.  Our north-west bed just loves to grow tomatoes and basil and who am I to stop it? The field of green goodness looks quite You're Such A Good Gardner all summer and I do enjoy tossing some fresh basil onto pizzas and into dips now and again.  But come early September, that basil needs to be harvested and in my mind there is no higher purpose for basil than pesto.  So I grab the neighbour's food processor and a swack of pine nuts, my Costco-sized jar of minced garlic and a block of parmesan and I pesto.

Pestoing requires picking basil.  A lot of basil.  For the first 6 or 7 minutes of basil picking, I'm quite zen about the whole thing.  I delight in the sweet smell, the buzz of bees in the buds, the abundance of it all.  Somewhere around the 8 minutes mark, I consider complaining.  It's getting boring, and none of the leaves look good any more.  And is this basil kind of bitter? Quickly, I drag my broken mind back to the delight of toiling on my own land and try to focus on the softly bending tendrils of green. At minute 8 and a half, I'm back to wondering why our beds are so low, and how I'll ever get the green out from under my fingernails. Around minute 9, I remind myself that for so many, this is the work that feeds families and that it is honourable work and that I could busy my brain praying for the migrant farmers who suffer such terrible injustice picking the food I underpay for...  but then at minute 10, my prayer is cut-off by my own voice yelling at the boy, "For f*ck's sake!! Why would you throw dirt into my bowl of basil!!! I didn't want to have to wash and dry this!!"*

At minute 10 and a half, the husband suggests maybe I have enough basil.

In I go with my easily-16-cups of basil.  I whir, I grate, I salt, I season.... I gently spoon my vibrant green sauce into my boiled and readied jars.  All four of them.  All four half-pint jars. 

Yep - 4 cups of pesto.

Good people would share.  Actually, I did share one jar with the neighbour who shared her food processor. But the other three jars? In *my* freezer. For *my* chicken/halibut/noodles.

I'm not sure this is the outcome those wonderful SimpleMom people intend when they encourage us to live more simply.  I'm almost certain this wasn't what Heidi intended when she innocently photographed her raspberry jam.  But on the other hand, I do kind of like remembering every time we break into our $15 dollar jar of pesto, that nothing is as simple as I would like it to be and that we do really have an abundance of many things, not just basil, and that when the abundance is condensed, it may seem too small. 

But it's not. It's more than enough.  Again.


*I figure it's been growing in my organic garden all summer. I know it's not sprayed and washing and drying takes SOOOOooo long. Besides, it's just us eating it and I can assure you, we've eaten far worse than unwashed organic basil.