Pesto and Packing

I spent just under three hours yesterday evening trimming my basil bed, picking leaves off stems, processing the leaves with garlic, salt, and olive oil and packing the finished pesto into baby food jars to stick into the freezer. I ended up with eight additional jars of pesto in the freezer. This gives me a total of 15 jars in the freezer and completely exhausted my store of empty baby food jars. I figure I need about 28 jars to have pesto every week (1 jar per week) during the non-basil months (November – May). So, I should be in good shape to reach that goal and maybe even have pesto to share with friends and family.

I also froze three pints of pureed zucchini and three quarts of cubed zucchini. I have frozen pureed zucchini before and used it as a thickener in soup or for zucchini bread but I have not tried freezing it in any other form. I thought maybe the cubes would work in minestrone or ratatouille. I just knew that I had to do something with all of the zukes I harvested yesterday. One was a real ball bat that had escaped my notice and the Kid’s hiding under cover of the mammoth zucchini leaves. I held out three nice small zukes to take with me tomorrow and one large one to split, stuff and grill for my dinner this evening. I also scored two large baskets of peaches to take north with me at the farmer’s market yesterday morning. I got ones that were not quite ripe so I’m hoping they will keep the DP and me in awesome fresh fruit this coming week.

The other major thing I did yesterday was to peruse the local harvest page for all of Connecticut, gleaning information on farmstands and farm markets that will be operating in the area of the state where I will be wandering next week. It’s my probably optimistic plan that armed with this information, I can drop in on a stand or market near wherever we happen to be and scoop up fresh lunch or dinner items with serendipity. Will that actually happen? I don’t know. But I do know that without a source list it would be impossible.

Today I need to finish up some “paperwork” tasks that don’t actually require any paper but do depend on a steady, high-speed internet connection, wash the cover of the Dog’s thick, memory-foam bed, and pack up. Tomorrow is a traveling day!