Maybe share your basil? Compound butter you can prepare and frig/freeze to use over time?
Never have the dilemma but maybe basil isn’t for you.
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Google a recipe for Asian or Vietnamese Steak/Beef salad assuming you consume meat. Versions abound with and without rice noodles, sliced beef, fresh herbs, lettuce, carrots, red onions, cukes, etc. Usually versions call for cilantro or thai basil or mint but I’ve used LOTS of regular basil when that is what needs using. Eagerly anticipating basil weather here in the DMV…
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That’s the downside to a CSA–no choice. From June to mid November I get a box every week of whatever the local farm I use has harvested the day before. We first eat the stuff that can’t be cooked (lettuces, etc.) and I cook and mostly freeze what can–I have 12 cu-ft of chest freezer space, and by the time the ended it was mostly full. It necessitates a lot of creativity, as you can get a lot of a particular thing over a week or three while it’s in season.
Two or three times the shares include a bunch of basil, and unless I want to just throw it in the trash, I need to find what to do with it.
(Example of one week’s share: watermelon, green OR yellow zucchini, basil, sungold cherry tomatoes, red tomatoes, arugula, red Swiss chard, sweet corn. It’s all from one farm, so the share varies with the growing season.)
I can appreciate that dilemma. I have tried two different approaches to community produce setups and neither worked for me. Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.
That was helpful. I do eat beef, though very infrequently. But it also brought me to a recipe for “Vietnamese Noodle Salad with Tangy Dressing” that uses “2-1/3 cups fresh herbs - basil, cilantro, mint, scallions - - packed tightly.” Presumably it would be better with a mix of herbs, but beggars and all that.
FWIW, I also get a bunch of parsley in the share a few times a year and didn’t know what to do with all that either until I found a NY Times recipe for “parsley hummus,” that not only uses the whole bunch but is also very tasty.
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A Thai prep like pad kra pow (eg https://thewoksoflife.com/pad-kra-pao/) will use a lot of it pretty quickly. You can use any kind of ground meat/crumbled tofu (but definitely increase the day if you’re using something leaner).
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Organization helped a great deal–it took me years to get it down right. I put up a whiteboard in my pantry (actually, a 14x16 glass picture frame with with just a white sheet facing out) and I wrote down the week’s share in blue marker. Doing it this way the veggies didn’t get “lost” in the fridge. If I don’t use up the share by the next week, what’s left got rewritten in red marker, with the new in blue.
I froze a lot of stuff–I have a 5.1 and 7.1 cu-ft chest freezer in the basement, which by season’s end were filled to the brim with prepared stuff. I kept track of it all via an app called NoteBook which I synced between my MacBook, an iMac, and an old Kindle Fire that I velcro’d up to the pantry wall; all of the frozen items labeled with painter’s tape with name and date made, with that noted down in the app.
All winter I’ve been bringing up the past season’s CSA, container by container. If not for making items to freeze there was no way I could have kept up with the share between two people.
I still have one container of pesto left.
Farm Fresh to You gives you about 3 days before delivery to customize your box from a list of substitutions.
Mine is a CSA with a local farm. Organic, and what you get is what they harvested <24 hours earlier from their own fields.
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David Lebovitz’s basil vinaigrette is delicious.
I like to use it to dress a composed salad of berlotti beans, tomatoes and whatever other vegetables I have on hand.
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I and everyone I’ve made it for is a fan of Ottolenghi’s Cauliflower Cake.
As there is so much Parmesan, it’s important to use the good stuff. I use two year aged Parmigiano Reggiano.
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Stir fried chicken and handfuls of lightly chopped basil. Serve over rice or noodles.
One of my favorite things.
Since the oil ratio is the same as Pesto doubt that will work for him either : /
I’m freezing the last of my basil with olive oil, as described here as a precursor to pesto.
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