harvest: pea shoot pesto

you know it's been a cold/wet year when the pea plants are still growing in August. They finally started to fade, though, and I picked the overblown pods and laid them out to dry (I'll use those peas to grow next year's crop), picked the still-edible pods, and cut all the younger shoots from the plant.

The shoots went into the food processor with a couple of cloves of garlic, some olive oil, pine nuts, graded end of a bit of parmesan, salt and pepper. We ground it up to make a pea pesto, since even the young shoots are too fibrous at this point to really saute and eat on their own (which is how we eat them in the spring).

We dug up a couple of our onions (still young "spring onions") and sauteed them with the edible snap pea pods, and tossed it all together with some fresh pasta for a cheap dinner that used up leftover garden produce:

We have extra pesto which I am freezing in an ice cube tray, so that we can pop a cube or two of pesto out of the freezer whenever we need or want it in the next few months.