Pesto, Thoughts on Pantry-filling and The Art of Home-Keeping

Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook!

This week, I’m continuing my series on home-keeping vs. house-keeping. The first is all about the art of making a house into a home and the second is about keeping a house clean, hygienic and a healthy place in which to make home.

Home-keeping is such a comforting thought, but can become overwhelming when carried to extremes. We saw this in the ’90’s with my favorite home-keeper, Martha Stewart. I truly admire her and subscribed her magazine for decades. I used to leaf through the thick, glossy pages hoping that one day I would be able to home-keep the way Martha did. She made it all look so easy and so…glamorous! I longed for the time to make a dozen different kinds of cookies for the holidays using only the butter I had churned in my own 19th-century butter churner and the flour I had ground in my own mini flour milling machine I kept in barn in the backyard–you know–the little barn with the vintage lace curtains, handmade quilts on an antique quilt rack and the leather saddle I had polished earlier in the morning. And now I’ll invoke my inner Tim Walz–

Come on.

The truth is that Martha had, and still has, a cast of thousands to pull it all off. And more power to her! That having been said, there are ways of making home-keeping a whole lot more manageable for the rest of us. I’m certain that Martha is extremely well-organized and that she has the room to keep chaos at a minimum. Those two tools by themselves make home-keeping a lot easier.

For those of us riding solo on the home-keeping front, we have to rely on not only organization and elimination of chaos, but also on other tools–like preserving. The pioneers did it and so do I–certainly not to extent that Ma Ingalls did–but on a scale allowed by my tiny little 3-bedroom ranch in the Silicon Valley.

Mr. Stone Soup jokingly calls me a “prepper.” Obviously, this moniker carries with it a lot of baggage that I don’t own. So instead, I think of myself as a “pantry-filler.” By this, I mean that I prepare fresh ingredients and preserve them for future use.

For example, every year, I make several big batches of pesto sauce using the freshest sweet basil at the height of the season.

I then divide it into 12-14 individual containers (each about 8-oz) and freeze it for future use. Having pesto on-hand at all times is a great way to keep the home-keeping wolves at bay and to have a quick and elegant meal anytime.

Here are but a few quick and easy recipes using pesto:

Salmon with pesto and burst cherry tomatoes:

Zucchini Boats:

Tomato tart:

Pasta with pesto–just add a green vegetable (like sliced asparagus or zucchini) and shrimp (or ham or smoked chicken) for a complete, one-and-done dinner:

Or for Friday night pizza–use the pesto on either homemade or store bought crust (I love the cornmeal crusts from Vitolo). Spread the pesto on the crust, add mozzarella cheese, maybe some sliced asparagus or zucchini and pop it into the oven and–viola! Friday night dinner is done in a flash!