Hey Pesto

Summer is here and the garden is in full bloom. In our case this means all the plants look like they are on steroids. The basil has to get at least a weekly haircut. If you look carefully the basil is hiding between the cucumber and tomoatoes.

The best pesto recipe in the world for 2 minute pesto.

4 loosely packed cups of California sunshine bathed basil leaves

4-6 cloves of garlic depending on how much you love garlic

1/3 cup of grated Parmesan cheese

1/3 cup of pine nuts half of which been lightly toasted

1+ cup of extra virgin olive oil

Throw all the dry ingredients in a food processor (30 seconds)
Pulse the dry ingredients a few times until they are roughly chopped up (20 seconds)

Pour in the olive oil while continuing to pulse the mixture until the olive oil is incorporated (30 seconds)
Season with fresh pepper and salt to taste (10 seconds)

Voila, fabulous pesto in under two minutes
PS: This recipe will taste awful with Greenport grown basil

The Coop

After several back breaking weekends and nights chicken coop is now complete. Thanks to the design input from the Eischens, this is a near perfect first coop attempt. Apart from some minor additions such as roof and egg box interior, the coop is totally habitable.

The stairway to heaven.
The next challenge was finding chickens. It was relatively easy to find day old chicks but we decided to speed up the "time to egging" by getting older chicks. We located a chicken farm in Menlo Park and adopted a Buff Orphington (called Ginger) and a White Plymouth Rock (called Blondie).

While the girls don't seem to mind the beautiful chicken run, they far prefer anywhere where we don't want them to go. They started out a little shy and mainly nested in the garden shrubs enjoying the evening sun.

Their first roosting spot was the deck-chairs outside my office window.
However not satisfied with being outdoor chickens, they went scratching for grubs in the carpet. After all it is green and could be mistaken for grass.
In an attempt to disguise the fact that they are indoors the chickens resort to the theory that if they can't see me then it is possible that I can't see them either.