newsrackblog.com

a citizen’s journal by Thomas Nephew

  • Recent Comments

    • insurance adjuster on “First of all, I know both those guys”
    • Thomas Nephew on Lessons of the Snowpocalypse
    • RobertNAtl on Lessons of the Snowpocalypse
    • RobertNAtl on Lessons of the Snowpocalypse
    • Thomas Nephew on “First of all, I know both those guys”
    • WorldWideWeber on “First of all, I know both those guys”
    • chris on "Their voice. Amplified." or Why I’m banning 151.200.70.* comments
    • Maddie on Aw, shoot
    • Maddie on The option - the option - the public wants options!
    • Maddie on The option - the option - the public wants options!
    • Thomas Nephew on “Law and the Long War,” by Benjamin Wittes - a blog discussion
    • Bill Day on “Law and the Long War,” by Benjamin Wittes - a blog discussion
  • Recent Trackbacks

    • Get FISA Right: Ideas for Change 2010: how you can help!
    • Threads: over the territory of Nagorno-Karabagh. Although some elements in the Armenian diaspora expressed...
    • Talk Islam: Aziz suggested I notify TI of a series o…
    • Energy 2.0: CAFE oh, yay?
    • Mick Arran: The Troy Davis Conundrum (Updated)
    • Mick Arran: The Troy Davis Conundrum
  • Real News

  • RSS my delicious

    • Last Chance for Health Reform (Starr, The American Prospect)
      Starr claims that "[n]either the progressive nor the anti-abortion House Democrats are making any sense in threatening to kill the Senate bill."
    • Palin Crossed Border For Canadian Health Care (Stein, HuffPo)
      "We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada," Palin said in her first Canadian appearance since stepping down as governor of Alaska. "And I think now, isn't that ironic?"
    • The Limits of Rahmism (Baker, NYTimes Mag)
      “I’ve been in a White House before when we lost both the House and the Senate in ’94,” he said, according to notes taken separately by two people in the room. “In about 12 hours, we’re all going to be stupid. Like Axe says, you’re never as smart as they say you are when you win, and you’re not as stupid as they say you are when you lose. We were smart before. Now we’ll be stupid.” Focus on the "I've been in the White House before when" part: Rahm was stupid then, he's stupid now, he's been stupid all along.
    • FPL Experiments With Solar Thermal at Gas-Fired Power Plant - NYTimes.com
      "When it is completed by the end of the year, this vast project will be the world’s second-largest solar plant. But that is not its real novelty. The solar array is being grafted onto the back of the nation’s largest fossil-fuel power plant, fired by natural gas. It is an experiment in whether conventional power generation can be married with renewable power in a way that lowers costs and spares the environment."
    • Cops vs. Kids in New York City Schools (Herbert, NYTimes)
      "These are all incidents that are familiar, or should be familiar, to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who went out of his way to demand control of the public schools, and Mr. Kelly, who is in charge of the police and the school safety officers. But we don’t hear much from them about the abuse of children in the public schools. They’ll crow at the drop of a hat about crime going down. But when the abuse of innocent children is up for discussion, their silence is something to behold."
    • Who Would Want Credit For Iraq? (Larison, The Am.Conservative)
      "It is bad enough that our government unleashed this hell on people who had never actually done America any harm, but it is unconscionable that any of us celebrate what has been done as if it were something good and worthwhile."
    • How Facebook Was Founded (Carlson, Business Insider)
      "But, naturally, the possibility that the hard drive contained additional evidence set inquiring minds wondering what those emails and IMs revealed. Specifically, it set inquiring minds wondering again whether Mark had, in fact, stolen the Winklevoss's idea, screwed them over, and then ridden off into the sunset with Facebook." (He settled for $65M, so what we're learning is the Winklevosses may have settled for less than they could have gotten.) But Zuckerberg also proved willing and able to hack people's accounts using facebook data -- 5 years ago, but still.
    • Courting Fear (Alexander - Slate review of Courting Disaster by Marc Thiessen)
      "But if you're not an expert on a subject, shouldn't you interview experts before expressing an opinion? Instead, Thiessen relies solely on the opinions of the CIA interrogators who used torture and abuse and are thus most vulnerable to prosecution for war crimes. That makes his book less a serious discussion of interrogation policy than a literary defense of war criminals."
    • Rove Protects the Rear (Corn, Mother Jones)
      "Mother Jones has produced a timeline that lists the false Bush administration assertions. And to remind Rove—and book reviewers—here's a limited sampling of notable whoppers, reported in my books and elsewhere."
    • The revision thing: A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies (Sam Smith, Harper's Magazine)
      "Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of civilization itself. September 11 signaled the arrival of an entirely different era. We faced perils we had never thought about, perils we had never seen before. For decades, terrorists had waged war against this country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America would wage war against them. It was a struggle between good and it was a struggle between evil."
  • Meta

  • Subscribe

Pesto

Posted by Thomas Nephew on August 18th, 2009

Basil is one of the few things that grows reliably in my back yard, so I grow a lot of it for pesto. Since I lose the recipe each year, I’m going to save one here.

Ingredients:

  • 8-10 cloves garlic
  • 1 1/2 cups pine nuts or walnuts
  • 12 cups basil
  • 1/3 cup olive oil
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt

To make pesto:

  1. Put olive oil, garlic, salt and nuts in food processor, make slurry.
  2. Add basil, 4 cups at a time, food processor on high until all leaves are processed.
  3. Transfer pesto to container, fill to near top, add a little olive oil to the top to prevent browning.

We add parmesan cheese later on, whenever we actually prepare the pesto; without the cheese we can freeze or refrigerate this “almost pesto” for weeks and even months.

11 Responses to “Pesto”

  1. Thomas Nephew Says:

    Dear Thomas Nephew,
    I’m afraid that you have plagerized from me. This “pesto business”–why, that’s just like what WE make at OUR home. And I’m afraid that that picture you took is of OUR kitchen and OUR basil harvest, so therefore, I’m suing you for 10000 million dollars.
    Yours Truly,
    A daughter who likes to have fun messing with her dad

  2. Maddie Says:

    By the way dad,
    Sorry it looked like I was in your account. I don’t know how that happened. Maybe you took my laptop and used it for putting something on, once, and never logged out? Anyways, you did plagerize,even if it WAS from yourself. (did i spell “plagerize” right?)
    Maddie :)

  3. RobertNAtl Says:

    plagiarize

    The Spelling Guru

  4. Nell Says:

    Freezing cheeseless pesto: brilliant! Thanks so much.

    Now where the h*ll are my ripe tomatoes? It’s late August, fer cryin’ out loud.

    Hey, did you see the positive development in the Troy Davis case? It was preceded by another Times article last Friday about the rise of lonely but impassioned dissents in lower courts on death penalty cases. The article credited the cumulative effect of a lot of DNA exonerations, and frustration with the rigidity of the 1996 federal law that made it harder for death row prisoners to appeal, but I think it’s also a sign that U.S. society is rejoining the rest of the world on the issue. Slowly.

    Of course, the SC decision also featured this lovely bit from two justices who should never have been confirmed:
    Justice Scalia, in a dissent joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, said the hearing would be “a fool’s errand,” because Mr. Davis’s factual claims were “a sure loser.”

    He went on to say that the federal courts would be powerless to assist Mr. Davis even if he could categorically establish his innocence.

    “This court has never held,” Justice Scalia wrote, “that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

    Gotta love the airquote around ‘actually’. And these guys have lifetime jobs… Think Quakerly thoughts, Nell. Go make some pesto.

  5. RobertNAtl Says:

    Just to note that the SC opinion explicitly places the burden of proof on Davis to prove his innocence, not on the state to prove him guilty. Not sure what the proposed standard is — beyond reasonable doubt or preponderance of the evidence.

  6. newsrackblog.com » Blog Archive » The horse sings Says:

    [...] Nell on Pesto [...]

  7. The Troy Davis Conundrum (Updated) « Mick Arran Says:

    [...] seems to me this is a more hopeful situation than either Mick Arran or Robert (in another comment at the prior post) suppose it to be.  While the framing of the question would [...]

  8. Maddie Says:

    Thank you, Uncle Robert. “The Spelling Guy.”
    Maddie (:

  9. Maddie Says:

    I meant :) And by the way, why is Troy Davis being kept? I mean, is it possible to convict him without too much proof? If it is, I’ve lost faith in the American Justice System. :)

  10. Thomas Nephew Says:

    He was convicted for the murder of a police officer in Savannah, GA, with what seemed to the jury at the time like enough proof. But there’s no physical evidence (like the gun that fired the bullet), and 7 of the 9 witnesses against him have recanted (taken back) their testimony, saying the police badgered them into claiming things that weren’t true. And one of the other 2 witnesses is a prime suspect himself.

    You can read more about it at various posts on Mick Arran’s blog, on my blog, or on a special Amnesty International web page. Like that page puts it, the law is putting finality (that is, the idea that once a verdict has been reached, and appeals about that trial are over, that’s that) over fairness: the idea that if later on overwhelming reasons to believe someone is innocent after all, that person should not be executed.

  11. Elizabeth Says:

    I usually don’t comment on blogs, but this recipe changed my opinion. I just write to say thank you!

Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>