As garden season nears an end in Brooklyn, Anthony and I are left with the decidedly pleasant task of disposing with our basil. 

Our basil did spectacularly well this year.  We started them from seeds in May, and in June they looked like this:

Today, each one of those stalks has turned into a bush like this:

Magic, right?

Therefore, it’s pesto time.  (You may or may not want to sing that in your head to the tune of Flight of the Conchord’s “It’s Business Time.”  Up to you.)

If you have a food processor, making pesto is as easy as throwing a few ingredients in and pressing a button.  You can also make pesto in a blender, kind of, but doing so will be a pain in the ass and probably shorten your blender’s life, as it did to one or two of mine. 

Seriously, though, if you’re into food, you should listen to Mark Bitman and get yourself a food processor.  It will make your life better.  You can find them used everywhere, though you should make sure to set it up and turn on a secondhand processor before buying to ensure that you have all the parts you need.

I break with tradition slightly in my pesto-making.  First, I use walnuts instead of pine nuts, because they’re much cheaper.  Second, I use less olive oil than most recipes call for.  Third, I add a little bit of lemon juice.  Crazypants, I know.

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Here’s how I make pesto.

Throw into a food processor all of the following:

• a few densely packed handfuls of basil leaves, washed well, since you’re not going to be cooking them.
•  1 to 3 cloves of peeled garlic, depending on how much you like garlic
• about half a cup of walnuts
• a quarter cup or so of parmesan cheese
• a quarter cup of olive oil
• the juice of half a lemon
• pinch of salt and pepper

Then turn on the food processor until the ingredients are broken down into pesto.

Note that these proportions are very rough.  Really, you should just start with conservative amounts of garlic, walnuts, parmesan cheese, olive oil, lemon juice, and salt/pepper and then add more to taste.  (You can always add more of each of these, but there’s very little you can do if you’ve overdone it besides adding more basil).  I don’t like mine with too much olive oil, but you can decide for yourself how you like your pesto.

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Last weekend, Anthony and I made a big batch of pesto.  Since then, we’ve had pesto and goat cheese bruschetta, pesto grilled cheese sandwiches, and pesto on our pizza:

However, once you’ve got a ton of basil on your hands like we do, you’re not going to be able to eat all that pesto before it goes bad. 

The solution? 

Freeze the pesto in small batches, either in small plastic bags or in ice cube tray-shaped blocks.