Ifferjenn Independent

Admittedly, I took the recipe from here, though with a slight tweak.

I have 8 basil plants in my garden this year, hence, I have a LOT of basil. One great way I’ve found to use it is in making pesto. It’s dead simple, and completely delicious.

Ingredients:

2 cups basil
3 garlic cloves
1/3 cup nuts (I chose peanuts)
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup grated cheese (I use a blend ’cause I can’t remember which my dad says I should use)
salt and pepper to taste

Assemble all the ingredients with your food processor, like so:

I went and sliced up the garlic a little. And, as you can see, 2 cups of basil is a heck of a lot of basil. In fact, it filled up my whole food processor bowl!

First, take the basil and peanuts and whir them together. They reduce surprisingly fast. Add the garlic and whir again. (I actually used 3.5 garlic cloves since I love garlic so much.) Once everything is mixed, keep the food processor going and add the oil in a continuous stream. Keep scraping the sides down while you work. I didn’t add all the oil at once, instead adding the cheese when I still had about 1/8th of a cup to go. Whir everything again until it’s mostly smooth, and looks like so:

I put it in a deli container, and it made over a cup of pesto. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but you don’t use a whole lot on your pasta, so this will certainly last us a while. Probably I will make another batch (or two) and freeze them for the winter. Also, this really doesn’t take long at all to make…I finished this batch before the water boiled for the gnocchi we had for dinner.

And here is some visual evidence of my acting! Obviously, I didn’t take the picture…John is awesome and has been working as our production photographer. You can check out all his pictures from the show here, and poke around the rest of his gallery too. He’s awesome.

From the Worcester city fireworks. I <3 long exposures.

Also a very good band.

This is another picture I took in the evening. I did have to do a lot of Photoshop work with it, as the massive shadows from the flash were really annoying me.

With this one, I want to go back at some point during the day to take pictures. It is quite a bit photoshopped, as I had to use a flash to get the flowers.

So while I think I could do this in Photoshop, I like getting pictures like this with just the camera! For this one, Ethan was running in front of me. I didn’t aim or anything, so that was luck. It was also dusk, with the sun having just gone behind the trees, so the exposure was a couple seconds.

A demo crew boat at Regatta Point on Lake Quinsigamond, Worcester, MA.

Taken on my cameraphone during a photowalk with John. Photoshopped just a little to get an artsy effect.

This past weekend, we strolled down to the New England Interscholastic Rowing Association Championships, which happened to be on Lake Quinsig. I didn’t know very many of the schools there, and no one who was actually racing, so I got a bunch of cool pictures of I-don’t-know-what. This one was taken from the judges’ island, which was the only place anyone noticed I was there taking pictures.