Pearls' Garden Update, Basil Pesto & Another King Arthur Flour recipe Homerun

A quick garden update: there is the slightest of orange blush on a few of our Roma tomatoes! It can’t be far off now for sweet juicy tomatoes. We can hardly wait!

We harvested some of our basil yesterday, since it was beginning to flower. I’ve never made Pesto before, but found this terrific website & recipe complete with lovely photos for Basil Pesto at Spatulas, Corkscrews & Suitcases blog. It turned out perfectly. We hope to use some on a Pesto Pizza.

And we were planning on grilling cheeseburgers last night (a Pearls favorite!), so we tried out another recipe for homemade “Beautiful Burger buns”from King Arthur Flour’s website. They are super easy to make, especially if you have a bread machine. All you do is combine all the recipe ingredients in the order as called for by your machine and use the dough cycle. After the cycle is complete, remove the dough, punch down, form into 8 rounds, and allow to rise under a damp towel until you’re ready to bake them. Try these, you’ll never want to go back to the store-bought, loaded with preservatives variety buns! And a thank you to PJ Hamel, test baker from King Arthur Flour, for your kind comments on our blog and the wonderful responsiveness to customers that your company demonstrates.

We made these with half White Whole Wheat and half Bread Flour and also added the vital wheat gluten again. Father of Pearls declared these a resounding “excellent”! These were so good even the next day, steamed a bit, and used for sandwich buns.