Hurricane Pesto

When the hurricane threatens, and the torrential rain started a while ago, the cook gets busy harvesting herbs for pesto, before the patio gets drowned and blown about.

I ran out this morning and cut a lot of herbs from my containers, second harvest this year, to make pesto. I used to make basil pesto, then realized, duh, you can make pesto, which only means paste, after all, with any leafy herb. So my last batch now finished was sage/basil, and I have a nice harvest here to decide how to mix and match, or whether to throw them all into the one batch of pesto. I don't like pine nuts in pesto so much, and prefer crushed walnuts. And the usual garlic and olive oil and parmesan.

So here, reading left to right: oregano, basil, sage, thyme, rosemary. All pulled off the stems, the kitchen smells wonderful, and ready to be processed. I put the made pesto into ziplock bags, flatten the bags so that the contents are very thin, then freeze them on end like books. That way you can open the bag and just break off the amount you need at any time.

This is more productive for me at the moment than trying to organize paperwork ready for the next stage of business to do. The stress of the documents and being forced to think about it makes me forget where I put things, forget the name of what I'm looking for, completely forget where I put an entire file and so on. Better to just cook a bit for the moment.

Last evening HS came over to do a few bits of things for me, replacing high up light bulb type things, and eat my homemade pizza (I used Indian nan bread for the bases, made four individual pizzas, and oh, look at that, they're all gone), and then go through a stack of photographs to see what he would like to have of his father.

It was good to do, but the candid shots I had of HP, from the back, or reading on the sofa, or petting his cat, or out and about with his dog back when he was walking, about did me in. Hence the inability to process paperwork very well today. A song came into my head as I was driving yesterday, and I have now added to my repertoire of crying, which is crying while reading, crying while knitting, crying while watching a mystery movie, add now crying while driving. But it's okay, it has to happen, and it's a bit better later.