Novel Eats

Make this Asian-inspired dish with peanut butter and some fresh vegetables like asparagus.

A few weeks ago I made a batch of orzo with basil pesto. The recipe had originally been inspired by a recipe in a food magazine that used dill instead of basil. The recipe continued to eat at me because I was terribly curious if dill pesto would be as tasty and satisfying as basil pesto.

One day at the grocery store I grabbed one bunch of dill and decided I’d find out, for better or worse, if dill pesto is all that magazine cracked it up to be. The recipe from a few weeks ago remains the same, just the dill is different.

For the last three years or so we have done container gardening. It isn’t quite the same as doing regular gardening where you have your own land, but it is a decent substitute. We usually grow about a million tomatoes (slight exaggeration), and a few other random items. This year we’re trying to grow artichokes, have successfully grown radishes and turnips (more on that in a future post), and strawberries.

Another thing we grow, but never manage to use all of, is basil. It is probably one of the absolute easiest things to grow, but we rarely take full advantage of it since there is so much of it.

Ah, summer. It seems that we’ve finally gotten there. With 100+ degree days in spring, it kind of makes wonder what to expect for the next few months. If it’s anything hotter than what we’ve had so far, I am not sure that I want to be turning on the stove – or at least for very long.