Making Homemade Pesto

This is how I know it's officially summer! Cleaning gallons of fresh basil. We have 5 types of basil growing in the garden this year: Napolitano, Genovese, Lettuce Leaf, Lemon, and Holy Basil.  We use all but the Lemon and Holy (they are more for teas) in our pesto. Picking the leaves off the stems, triple washing and spinning in the salad spinner, and cleaning the garlic cloves is the most time-consuming part of the pesto-making process.

I'm not much of a recipe girl.  When Loren asked me how much olive oil I put in the pesto, my response was "three glugs". However, for the sake of the blog, I did actually measure out the ingredients and came up with a recipe:

Fresh Vegan Pesto

4+ cups of fresh basil

1/3 cup olive oil (you know, 3 glugs!)

3 TBs lemon juice

1 cup raw unsalted cashews

5 cloves garlic

1 TSP salt

1 TSP black pepper

1 TBs parsley*

1 TBs oregano*

1 TBs thyme*

1 TBs sage*

1 TBs Italian seasoning

*I use fresh or dried depending on what I have growing

Put everything in a food processor (we have a 9-cup processor) and blend for 2 minutes or more stopping to scrape down the sides at least once.

After about 2 minutes of processing time in our food processor...

We put the finished product in a quart-size freezer bag, squeeze out all the air, smush it flat and stack them up in the freezer.