Garlic Scape Pesto

We are eating from the garden just about every day now. Being a zone 3 gardener, the harvest comes late. Last night we had a stir fry with baby bok choy, zucchini, early onions, garlic scapes, and pea pods. Oh..that first meal from the garden is just so wonderful! It is also a reminder that the race is on. We work very hard to plant, maintain, nurture, harvest, eat, and preserve the produce from our garden. I won't be buying any more limp lettuce at the grocery store for a few months and I'm anxious to bite into the first tomato. Tonight we tried two things with the garlic scapes. Scapes are like the flower of the garlic. It's a curly stalk that grows up from the center of the plant. You have to remove the scapes in order for the garlic to form a nice bulb. Scapes have a very mild green garlic flavor. We tried grilling some, but unfortunately Mike left them on the grill too long and they were charcoal scapes! I didn't like them! The rest of the scapes were chopped and put into the food processor. I added olive oil, grated parmigiano cheese, kosher salt and pine nuts.









I simply processed it for a few minutes and it made a wonderful pesto!



I think this will be great on a roasted veggie sandwich, in a pasta sauce, on pasta, on fish, on a cracker, etc! I had some on my corn on the cob, and tried it on a burger...very good. It has a very fresh green flavor to it, with a good garlic finish. Yum! I used about 24 scapes, 1 cup of good olive oil, most of a small jar of pine nuts, two teaspoons of salt and about half a wedge of parmigiano reggiano cheese. Very very easy. I will freeze most of this in small containers for future use.