apparently last week’s canning event broke something in my brain, because today i spent my saturday making a triple-size batch of marathon cookies and a vat of pesto sufficient to see us through the long winter with garlic at nearly every meal.

the cookies were ostensibly for Ben and his dad, who are leaving tomorrow on a week-long backpacking trip, but since it’s kind of a time-intensive cookie i figured it made sense to make a huge batch to keep in the freezer*.

and then there was this bundle of basil on the counter that i had liberated from the CSA last week and had been keeping alive all week in a water glass. i figured that since i already had the food processor out and all, i really should turn the basil into pesto. but then, if i was going to dive into making pesto, no sense in messing up all those cooking utensils (praise be for the food processor), i should really be making it in quantity. which meant more basil. Berkeley Bowl had 1 lb bags of basil for $5, so the next thing i knew i was buying additional lemons, and pine nuts, and parmesan, and 2 hours later, i had a giant mixing bowl full of pesto. fortunately, it freezes beautifully, and all winter long we’ll be able to just scoop out a tablespoon of it as tho it were ice cream. (mmm…pesto icecream?)

still, did the canning loosen some deep, evolutionary need to hoard food for the coming winter?
a few years ago i briefly dated a guy who was a food hoarder. it was crazy. when you opened his freezer it was a solid wall of food, and after a few weeks i realized that the reason he would never let me go into the basement level of his apartment was that it was packed floor-to-ceiling with dry goods. not organized like a mormon pantry or anything, but we’re talking crazy-town, stuffed to the ceiling with flats of ramen and bags of rice and god knows what else. he worried constantly about mice getting into the basement and would periodically chuck his cat down there in hopes that it would eat the mice. he also spent a lot of time making vague references to post-apocalyptic survival plans, but that’s a story for another time.

wait, how did this become a post about my dating indiscretions? i was talking about pesto. pesto! and marathon cookies. for my wonderful boyfriend who is headed off into the woods for a week. invariably, despite the best of intentions, I will be staying up till 2am and ignoring the dishes. (it takes so little time on my own to revert to my feral state.)

* for the uninitiated, marathon cookies are this wonderful power-bar cookie creation from the lovely lady over at 101 cookbooks. in lieu of butter it uses white beans and olive oil for the fat component, plus wheat flour and oats, sugar, dates, sesame seeds, anise. they freeze beautifully, taste good straight from the freezer, travel well, and make a perfect pre-workout snack. not as good as an actual cookie, but far better than a cliff bar.