PESTO IS A NOBLE USE OF FRESH BASIL, NO ARGUMENT HERE. But there are lots of other things basil does well. Here are seven recipes to use up the last of this season’s bounty in your garden.
Soupe au Pistou
At the heart of the robust vegetable soup pictured above is pistou, a Provençal sauce closer in garlicky flavor to chimichurri sauce than pesto. The soup, typically some mix of onions, carrots, beans, green beans, potatoes, summer squashes, tomatoes, pasta and perhaps some hard cheese, gets a big flavor boost—and its name—from no-cook pistou.
Spicy Chicken Salad with Hot Giardiniera
Perfect for sandwiches or on its own, this chicken salad packs heat and delicious tartness from hot giardiniera, and a nice fresh note from a handful of chopped basil. You can cook your own chicken ahead of time or use store-bought rotisserie chicken for an easy lunch or dinner.
Pork Chops with Basil and Garlic
A quick marinade of fresh basil, garlic and olive oil—we’re talking half an hour quick—gives these pan-grilled pork chops classic Italian flavor. You can also actually grill them for an added smoky touch.
Pasta alla Caprese
Sticking with Italian cuisine, we do a pasta take on the traditional caprese salad—tomato, basil, mozzarella, olive oil and maybe some vinegar. Quick and easy to make, it’s a great end-of-summer dish.
Peach Caprese Salad
We just love this fresh, surprising take on caprese salad. Juicy summer peaches stand in for the tomato slices and mixed greens make it more, well, salad-y.
Grilled Steaks with Sauce Vierge
Sauce vierge is another no-cook French sauce, made with tomato, basil, garlic, shallots, capers and Dijon mustard. You can use sauce vierge to liven up steaks—as we’ve done here—or fish, chops and more.
Mezcal Nectarine Campfire
Fresh basil plays nicely with spirits too. Here ripe nectarine (or peach), lime juice, basil and simple syrup combine with smoky mezcal to create a perfect summer cocktail.
And of course, you can and should make pesto.
Pesto is easy to make, no cooking involved except roasting some nuts ahead of time and making the pasta. The pasta warms the pesto and the pesto cools the pasta, making a a satisfying warm weather dinner without overheating the kitchen. Pesto also freezes beautifully to give you a taste of summer in the dead of winter. Here’s our go-to recipe, made with pecans instead of pine nuts.
I probably have enough basil in the garden to make one batch of pesto. So I should just do it, right? So I can make some of these terrific recipes!
John, even though Marion plants plenty of basil every year, I seem to somehow have let it go and now have very little to harvest. I start each spring with the best of intentions, but we know how those go.