An Over-Abundance of Rocket

Long time between posts. It’s been a crazy few months at the Casa - we moved house, had no internet for 2 months, the Parentals visited from Oz for 5 weeks, and then we went to Ireland for a week for me to finally meet Hussybands extended family *phew*.

When we moved in, the garden had not been touched in over a year, it had the Laura Palmer thing going (she's dead - wrapped in plastic!), I spent the first 2 weekends pulling out vines, weeds, strange orange slugs, dandelions and my never-ending battle against the dual scourge of Charlton - blackberries and stinging nettles.

Then I started planting - lettuces, rocket, tomatoes, corn, peas, leeks, radishes and strawberries, plus some assorted herbs mint, thyme, and surprising coriander. Some things are doing better than others - the birds eat more strawberries than I do, and the radishes went a bit nuts after all the rain a month ago and split.

The rocket went nuts, we can’t eat it fast enough and I have been trimming off flower heads for weeks. We have had rocket pasta, salads, tarts...rocket coming out of our asses! I love rocket, dont get me wrong, but being continually innovative with it is starting to get difficult.

Last night I put into action a plan that has been building, a rocket pesto with cashews.

Grabbing my trusty sheers, I gave the garden a much needed haircut before retiring to the kitchen to strip the leaves, you don’t want any stems (or as few as possible) in this. 

Now here I get lazy, I know, pesto should be made slowly in a mortar and pestle with love and brute force. Me, I love my food processor too much to deny it the pleasure of going whirrrr and cutting up its own frustrations.

So, into the bowl of the food processor went a nice layer of cashews (you can use any sort - roasted, salted, or in tonites case sea salt and cracked pepper!), your rocket leaves, a couple of cloves of crushed garlic and a good shaving of parmesan. After a good blitz, I start drizzling in some good olive oil. I also like to add the juice of 2 lemons for kick at this stage. Just keep adding and blitzing until you get to your preferred consistency. I don’t measure, I just taste as I go. (If you really want some kick, at the first stage before you start blitzing - add a few sliced birds eye chillies....yum!)

I am on the start of (another) health kick, so will be off the booze and cooking/eating out healthy...it doesn’t seem the most exciting thing to blog (hence my silence the last few months)...but lets see what I can come up with eh? If Hussyband will eat it I can’t be doing too badly.

Oh yeah...we had this with some fresh spaghetti and crusty sourdough, and a glass of lemonade with raspberries....oh the Rockstar life I lead!