Meal Planning from the Summer Garden - With Recipes!

We love eating from our garden in the summer.  Here's how we make great use of summer produce.

We recently made a double batch of pesto that will be the "bones" of some of our meals this week.  By making it ahead of time, I'm left with true 30 minute meals (or even less!).

Here's a glimpse of this week's menu: 

Bowtie Pasta with Tomatoes, Fresh Mozzarella, and Basil:  The recipe calls for Orecchiette pasta, but good luck finding that in our town!  Trust me, I've looked.  Bowtie pasta is a great substitute.  You can add chicken to make it feel like more of a meal, but we don't bother. It's really fabulous as-is.

I've made this recipe for years.  It appeared in the magazine Cooking Light back in 2004, when I still subscribed to it, so I've been making this dish that long.  It's a hit anywhere we go and both my husband and kids love it.  It's also great for a ladies' luncheon sort of thing, especially since it boasts only 376 calories per serving, and their servings are pretty generous.  The pasta fed our family yesterday for Sunday lunch and we'll eat it again tonight for dinner...yet it's supposed to only have 4 servings.  We loved getting to have the pasta with fresh tomatoes and basil from the garden.

Pesto or "Pistou":  Pesto is a basil paste, generally made with pine nuts.  The French version, "Pistou," does not include pine nuts. Our household has to be nut free, since my son has a peanut allergy.  Most nuts are processed together and may include small pieces of peanuts with the pine nuts, walnuts, etc., so by default, we have no nut products at our home. 

We love pesto and didn't want to give it up, so we're thrilled that we can simply skip the pine nuts and have a yummy version of pesto.  Since toasted pine nuts add a ton of flavor to pesto, when I first made this, I decided to use only fresh, high quality ingredients.  Specifically, I used fresh-squeezed lemon instead of the pre-bottled lemon juice, high quality olive oil, and I minced the garlic myself using a garlic press rather than buying it pre-minced.  If you don't have a reason to be nut-free at your house, then definitely go for the pine nut version of this recipe. 

Pesto Pizza:   We tweak this recipe and leave out the veggies we don't want, like olives.  I like to use a combination of feta and mozzarella cheeses rather than feta only.  The kids love it, since they're in love with the garlic and basil flavors of pesto.

Pesto, Pasta, and Talapia:  This is our favorite pesto meal.  I cook the fish in olive oil, along with a little bit of garlic powder and Tony Chacheres' Creole seasoning.  To make the pesto coat the pasta even better, and add some extra yummy health benefits, I add a little bit of plain, organic Greek yogurt to the pesto.  Then we serve the fish over a bed of pasta with the pesto sauce and it makes for a wonderful dinner.   


All of these recipes are fairly pricey if you don't have your own basil bushes, tomatoes, and bell peppers growing in the back yard, but you can definitely still make them.  We've never had this big of a harvest with any of our plants, and typically I can only get a couple batches of basil from our bush.  This year, we relocated the garden, planted early, fertilized well, and planted extra basil.  We're so glad we did!