Pesto and Blackberries

Today was another free Saturday for me.  Someone else wanted to do today’s power point and my theory is that if you create the power point, you should be able to run the power point during the service.  So the person creating the power point for today is going to run it so that means I don’t have to go to church.  I will go tomorrow morning and so I need to do a power point for each service but those are fairly easy ones and shouldn’t take me any time at all to complete them.

Since today is a free day for me, I decided that it is PESTO DAY!!!  Yeah!!!  As I have mentioned in a posting last summer, I love making pesto.  I love the smell of fresh basil, I love the mixing it up and I love the taste of it on everything from pasta to potatoes to eggs.  I used the last of my frozen pesto from last year about a week ago so now I need to stock up again.

I bought five bunches of basil this morning at the farmer’s market and two heads of garlic.  Then I went to the grocery store for parmesan cheese and pine nuts.  I already have a big tin of olive oil so I am all set with that ingredient.  The pine nuts are $19.99 a pound.  The guy checking me out looked at them and wanted to know what they were and why they were so expensive.  I explained to him that they are an essential ingredient in pesto and that the pound of pine nuts he was holding would last me at least a year if I keep them in the freezer.

This afternoon, after my nap (another joy of being home on a Saturday), I decided it was pesto-making time.  I doubled the recipe to three cups of basil (washed and spun dry), 10 cloves of garlic (one head), ½ cup of pine nuts, three cups of grated parmesan and two cups of oil.  It smelled so good spinning around in my food processor and the color was such a beautiful dark green.  Needless to say, that was supper.  Fresh pesto on angel hair pasta.  That, and the two ears of corn I also bought at the farmer’s market.  All in all, a perfect summertime meal.

As far as the blackberries are concerned…my boss found blackberry bushes growing on our property so he and a co-worker and I picked about three cups worth.  He wanted me to make the company a pie with them but I explained that I would need at least six cups worth for a pie.  He looked disappointed so I told him I could make a cheesecake and put the blackberries on top of that.  He seemed pleased with that suggestion.

Thus, in addition to the pesto making, I am making a cheesecake for work.  It’s been a while since I made a cheesecake so I had to call my sister, the family cheesecake expert, to ask her for a good recipe.  She found one for me and gave me advice on her technique for making a great cheesecake.

There was one piece of advice she gave me that I didn’t follow and it almost turned out disastrous.  I asked her about water baths.  Every other recipe I saw for cheesecake called for it to be baked in a water bath, which is feasible if you wrap the spring form pan in aluminum foil.  She said she never used a water bath and her cheesecakes always turn out perfect.  I should have listened to her.  I decided to try the water bath and carefully wrapped my pan in tin foil.  Well, when I lifted it out of the water bath at the end of the baking time, there seemed to be an excessive amount of water dripping from the foil.  When I unwrapped the pan, there was water inside the foil.  So I removed the sides of the spring form pan and the edges of the cheesecake were waterlogged.  EGHADS!!!  (Actually I used stronger language then that but let’s keep this rated G, shall we?).  I held up the cheesecake and studied it and very carefully started trimming away the waterlogged part of the crust.  After I trimmed it, I slid it off the bottom of the spring form pan and on to a plate.  When I carefully lifted it to inspect the bottom, it looked like I managed to remove the waterlogged portion and the rest looked fine.  Phew.  Disaster averted…or at least fixed.  So the moral of the cheesecake story is, if you call your sister for advice, you should probably follow said advice.

All in all, it was a great day cooking and baking wise.  I have the start of a freezer full of pesto and a lovely cheesecake for work on Monday.  The weather was beautiful all day, I was able to take a nap and relax and have fun on my free Saturday.  A truly blessed day all the way around!