What do you do with a whole mess of basil?

We were headed to Mom’s for the weekend because Jenny was in town for a full weekend of cooking and eating and relaxing- so we cleared out our entire basil patch from the garden. There were rumors that there was going to be a snow shower this weekend and I was worried that the basil would freeze before we could use it all.  Turns out that it DID snow not far from our house this weekend.  The hell!

Before we headed up to  Cecil County, we went out in the ice cold rain and filled up an entire ice chest with basil plants.  On Saturday afternoon, we cleared out some space in the kitchen and started pulling leaves off the stalks.

Not very exciting work- but it made the kitchen smell great!

The leftover stalks got sent to the compost pile in the back yard.

We washed and spun out all the fresh leaves.  We used a few cups of leaves to make Basil Olive Oil, following this recipe from my brother in law’s blog, Thomas the Accidental Gourmet.

The finished product.  Fortunately, we had a bit of French bread left over and finished it off by dipping it in the basil olive oil.  So tasty.

With the remaining basil, we wanted to successfully freeze enough basil so we’d have basil all winter.  We’ve tried (unsuccessfully) freezing basil before in ice but this year I decided that we should make little basil ice cubes.  So we combined the basil and olive oil in the food processor…

and filled the ice cube trays.

Genius!  After an overnight in the freezer, we popped them out and stored them in a gallon bag in the freezer.  They held up pretty well and are ready for all kinds of creative cooking this winter!