Growing for the first time and basil pesto

I recently went to a huge car boot sale in Sussex with my lovely friend 'Miss Dobby' who drove us there, which was very lovely of her as I still can't drive and I'm nearing the age of 26 now so should really start learning! It was not the best boot sale I have been to but there was a lot of local people selling an array of vegetable and herb plants from there gardens and allotments and so I decided to buy two tomato plants, a basil plant and a little coriander plant to. I have been carefully looking after them ever since and if I do say so myself they are looking very good and are growing so fast that I am going to spend my day re-potting them all. The best thing of all is that my two tomato plants have actual real tomato's on them, there is only three that I can see between them and they are very tiny and green but they are definitely tomato's so I am very happy!



My basil plant seems to be producing more basil than I know what to do with so I made a batch of basil pesto which was very easy,and here is how to do it.

Basil Pesto

Ingredients

1 small garlic clove
A pinch of sea salt
25g pine nuts, very lightly toasted
50g fresh basil leaves (this is the amount of picked leaves you get from a large pot from the supermarket)
25g Parmesan, finely grated
Juice of ½ lemon
125ml extra-virgin olive oil

Put the garlic and a pinch of sea salt in a food processor and pulse, then add the pine nuts and pulse again until roughly chopped (be careful not to over-process). Add the basil and pulse carefully until it is well mixed but still very textured. Turn into a bowl and stir in the Parmesan and lemon juice. Pour in the olive oil, mixing to a juicy paste. Season to taste.
And do not worry if you don't have a food processor just use a pestle and mortar which is an equally great way to do this and it's a bit of exercise for your arm which can't be bad!
You can stir the pesto into tagliatelle with mushroom, onion, garlic and bacon with shavings of Parmesan over the top,or as an alternative to tomato paste on the base of a pizza with spinach,mozzarella and sun-dried tomato.
I how ever decided to have mine in a sandwich with tomato's and mozzarella for breakfast this morning along with a purple berry smoothie I made by mixing natural yogurt, oats, honey, half a frozen banana, frozen strawberries and blackberries to give it the lovely purple colour that I can't show you as I drank it, sorry!