A Simple Recipe for Basil Butter

Two words: Basil Butter. But first, a short story with lots of fun photos!

Once upon a time there was a girl named Loriel who had aspirations to be an urban farmer…

She dreamed of having a huge garden and chickens to tend to. Chickens had to wait so her first step was to make a garden at her in-laws home and learn some of the ins and outs before she made her own garden at her place. Her and her father-in-law ripped out a nice piece of lawn and built a frugal and jerry-rigged but functional raised garden bed in a day.

Her fingers were stained with dirt and she was exhausted from doing the brunt of the labor. Nevertheless, she was satisfied.

She did some egg carton gardening with her toddler to start the seeds for the garden. Although it wasn’t rainbows and sunflowers like she saw on other posts that filled her Pinterest boards, it was a good learning lesson, for both toddler and mama.

They did really well in the egg cartons and she had to transfer them into the big girl garden. She was a little nervous because she had no idea if they would survive, but she tried anyway.

Weeks went by and the garden was beginning to fill out.

She lost many plants along the way including all her Japanese Bumpy cucumbers, Marketmore cucumbers, mini non-GMO corn, her beloved lemon cucumbers, bell peppers, beets, swiss chard, calabaza squash, scarlett beans, lettuce and eventually lost her butternut squash (it was doing so well and then all of a sudden died of a fungus). Did she have anything left?

While it was certainly a bit of defeat for the amount of work she put in and the amount she lost, she did have some success.

Her first harvest was of green beans. She was so excited! She tried to get her son to take a photo with the green beans but he wasn’t as excited as she was.

Next came her very first organic, heirloom tomatoes. Boy did those taste exactly like how she rememberd them from her childhood.

Her green beans, collards, some turnips, carrots, basil and amazingly, her tomatoes flourished (to say the least… check out the photo below of how they are taking over the garden). Boy did those surviving fruits of her labor taste good.

Oh, she even planted some sunflowers with the help of her little one and those did extremely well. She plans to harvest them for sunflower seeds and write a blog post about it (obvi.).

One day, she walked out to her garden and realized her basil plant needed to be taken care of. So, she started picking off the leaves, one by one.

Her father-in-law came over and told her to just pull the whole thing from the roots and take it inside. She sort of second guessed it but then decided to listen to him. Needless to say, she will never be doing that again! She soon learned her basil plant could have still flourished and continued growing.

But, what was done was done and she was left with a gigantic basil plant in her kitchen. She researched what she could do to preserve the beautiful plant. Don’t tell anyone that she has never really used basil in her home before this moment.

First thing that sparked her interest? Butter. Basil infused butter. Anything is better with butter, so she was sure basil was no rare exception.

She softened unsalted organic pastured butter, 1/2 cup to be exact. Washed, trimmed and dried 3 cups of fresh basil leaves. Then she placed the basil in her handy dandy and trusted food processor, gave it a few pulses to make the leaves really small.

Next, she poured the leaves into the softened butter and mixed it around to make sure the butter and basil melted into each other perfectly.

She rolled them into unbleached parchment paper. She had absolutely no idea what she was doing so she just went with the flow. She used a cut off piece of parchment paper to make the ends of her basil-butter logs clean. Then she placed them in the fridge so they could harden and then placed them in the freezer.

A few, um, weeks went by before she decided to do anything with the butter. Then, a light bulb lit up in her head. She knew exactly what would taste amazing cooked up in some basil butter: omelets.

(Stay tuned for omelet recipe. Should be on here in a couple days.)

For those who like a recipe to be “itemized” scroll below for the ingredients and directions to make a simple basil butter.