Using up basil bonanza, one course at a time

Leaving a few flowering heads on some of the basil keeps the pollinators happy. This bumble bee was one of many that paid a visit to the basil, and then to my flowering vine crops nearby.

This year was a stellar basil year for us, both in the planters close to the house and the monster plant out in the raised beds that's among the largest basil plants I've ever seen in our northern climate. So obviously we've been enjoying our share of pesto and caprese salads. But given that prime basil season will soon fade during fall weather, I've been turning to recipes to use up copious quantities while it's in its full glory. Here are some basil-intensive recipes across a range of courses.

Creamy lemon basil pasta

From Food & Wine June 2026, adapted from "The Pasta Book" by Marc Vetri and David Joachim. Serves 4.

Ingredients
¾ cup butter, cut into chunks
1 pound fresh tonnarelli pasta (or dried bucatini or thick spaghetti)
1 cup fresh basil leaves, plus more for garnish
2½ tablespoons poppy seeds
2½-3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
¾ cup finely grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for garnish
8 thin prosciutto slices, torn (about 4 ounces)

Method

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.

In a deep large pot, melt butter over medium low. Add 2 cups of the hot salted water to the pot. Bring to a boil and cook until slightly reduced.

When the water in the pot boils, add pasta and cook until just tender. Drain, reserving liquid in case you need it. Transfer pasta to butter mixture in the pot and cook 2 to 3 minutes to coat pasta. Add basil, poppy seeds and 2½ tablespoons lemon juice. If needed to make a creamy sauce, add some of the reserved pasta water. Taste and adjust seasoning with lemon as needed. Stir in ¾ cup grated Parmesan. At this point, the original recipe called for plating the pasta in 4 bowls and then folding in the prosciutto to each serving, but that was annoying, so I recommend adding it to the main pasta pot and distributing it well. Garnish with grated Parmesan and more fresh basil leaves.

Rating: Hard to go wrong with those ingredients of lemon, butter, basil and prosciutto. Substantial, thanks to the bucatini we used, and well, that's a lot of butter. A fairly fast fix.

Gin basil smash

We enjoyed a trip to the Minnesota Beethoven Festival this year in Winona and had this perfect drink for a muggy hot day at Muddled Thyme, a craft cocktail and brick oven pizza joint downtown that I would haunt if I lived there. Highly recommend, both the restaurant and the drink. (Also, don't sleep on the Marine Art Museum while you're in town.) We found this recipe from Difford's Guide when we got home to try to re-create that cocktail.

Ingredients

12 basil leaves, divided
2 ounces gin
¾ ounce fresh lemon juice
⅓ ounce rich simple syrup (made with a 2-to-1 sugar to water ratio)
Seltzer water (optional)

Method

Set aside three basil leaves for garnish. Muddle remaining basil leaves in a cocktail shaker. Add gin, lemon juice and simple syrup and shake with ice. Strain into a Collins glass and top with seltzer if desired. (The recipe didn't call for it, but the restaurant's website lists it as an ingredient and it did seem to have a bit of fizz to it.) Garnish with basil leaves.

Rating: I'm not sure if it's exactly like the one we had, but it's close, and very refreshing.

Basil parsley garlic sea salt

From Healthy Eats by Elena on Instagram. There are other similar variations out there that use basil and no parsley, and some of which call for blanching the basil briefly to set its color.

Ingredients

1 cup basil leaves
1 cup parsley leaves
1 cup sea salt
3 cloves garlic, chopped

Method

Preheat oven to 225. Place ingredients in a food processor and pulse until fine. Spread on a parchment-lined rimmed baking sheet, Bake for 35-40 minutes until dried. Remove from oven and let cool completely. Transfer mixture to the food processor to process until smooth (the baked mixture sets up a bit into chunks so this restores it to salt consistency). Store at room temperature.

Drying the salt mixture in the oven extends its shelf life, but it makes it clump up, so it gets a second blending once it's cool.

Rating: It brings something more to the party than simple salt. Pack some into a small jar for presents, since it keeps for about a year at room temperature.

Tomato basil butter

From Salt Coast Kitchen on instagram. The quantities weren't specified, so this is a guess based on the video.

Ingredients
1 pint cherry tomatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
A generous handful of fresh basil
2 garlic cloves
¾ cup butter, room temperature

Method
Heat oven to 375 degrees. Place cherry tomatoes in a small baking dish. Drizzle lightly with some of the olive oil and a sprinkling of coarse salt. Bake for 10 minutes. Let cool slightly.

Put roasted tomatoes, remaining olive oil, basil leaves, garlic and butter in a food processor or blender and blend well. Transfer to a dish, cover and chill until set. 

Rating: Tasty as a sandwich spread. Also works as a topping for grilled chicken or as a pasta sauce. The basil flavor comes through nicely.

Lemon basil dressing

From May.Eighty.Five on Instagram. 

Ingredients

3 tablespoons basil leaves
1 garlic clove, chopped
4 tablespoons Parmesan cheese
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
½ cup olive oil
4 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon honey or maple syrup
Salt and pepper to taste

Method

Combine all ingredients except salt and pepper in a food processor or blender. Blend until combined and emulsified. Season to taste with salt and pepper. 

Rating: Tasty, versatile. Stays blended while stored.

Basil quick bread

From Hello Canola, a Canadian site showcasing recipes involving canola oil. 

Ingredients
3 cups flour
3 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons dry mustard powder
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons chopped fresh basil leaves
3 large eggs
1½ cups milk
⅓ cup canola oil

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a bread pan.

In a large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, mustard and salt. Stir in basil leaves.

Combine eggs, milk and canola oil. Stir into dry ingredients just to combine. Pour into prepared pan and bake for 60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove from oven and let cool for 15 minutes before removing from pan to cool completely. 

Rating: An admirable, well-behaved loaf. Nice just with a smear of butter. Makes a reasonable toasted cheese sandwich base.

More options

That by no means exhausts your options for sneaking in some of the bounty of seasonal basil. I'm thinking basil blueberry muffins for breakfast and lemon basil poke cake for dessert. Or basil sugar pound cake or basil oil.

A rose by any other name

Nope, not one of mine. 

A few weeks we escaped our routine and played hooky. We got a takeout lunch, found a shady bench facing the Lake Harriet rose garden and strolled around the garden and fountains after our picnic. The roses have a pretty spread-out bloom time, so there's still plenty to see and smell.  Peak bloom times are said to be mid-June to early October.

The roses all seem to be Zone 5, so I'm not likely to try to plant any of them at home because I'm still sticking with at least Zone 4 hardiness ratings. I wish I could replicate the rose garden's terra cotta rope edging, but a brief search showed me a flat of terra cotta rope edging costs and weighs 400 £/pounds, so that's right out. They do sell molds to make your own tinted concrete versions, but since I have a hard enough time making myself weed along our crumbling edging, taking the time to make new edging seems most unlikely.

I've grown roses a time or two, but the only thing that's stayed bought for more than about five years is a miniature rose in a hanging pot, duking it out with tree seedlings in its clothes-line perch. It overwinters in the basement and comes back from twig form in late winter.

Lisianthus make fabulous, long-lasting cut flowers.

The closest thing I've got to looking like a rose planted in the ground this year are lisianthus, aka prairie gentian. I ordered 12 of them from Burpee this year, and waited and waited. (They are very slow growing, and hence, slow to ship.) They chose to ship them in early June when we were up north, so I had to ask a neighbor to intercept the package and tend to them. We hustled them into the ground on our return, and then we've waited and waited for them to bloom. Last week some of them finally did. Next year I might try growing them from seed, but it takes five to six months lead time for blooms so I better put it on my calendar for January.

While I won't say they are now thriving, they're doing better than the boulevard elm, which last week got tagged by the city for removal. I won't miss all the tree seedlings it drops throughout the garden, but we'll certainly miss that welcome shade. It's the second elm we've lost since moving in and the fourth big tree to go down on this end of the block.

Bye bye, elm. This is never a sign you want to see on your property.

If it's not clear by now that I go down food rabbit holes, you haven't been picking up on trends. The strangest things can provoke a deep dive. In this case, I got into flavored or infused waters because when I was pondering how to style my coffee table before a gathering on a very hot, smoky summer night, it struck me that a carafe or two of flavored waters would both look well and potentially hit the spot.  You know, the kind of artfully infused waters that are proffered to you in the sort of salon I no longer frequent. And then you find yourself with four carafes clearly in need of regular use and it's off in search of ideas to fill them.

The good news was that it seemed the simplest recipes yielded the best results. Just slice, pour and wait a few hours.

Strawberry lemon basil water 

Adapted from a number of inspiration sites, including Culinary Hill and That Salad Lady. I tried a number of variations, but I'm focusing here on my two favorites of those I tried.

Simple flavored waters

Strawberry lemon basil water

Ingredients

1 lemon, sliced crosswise
5 fresh basil leaves
½ cup strawberry halves
Filtered water

Method

Place lemon, basil leaves and strawberries in a quart pitcher or one-liter carafe.  Pour over enough water to mostly fill, leaving room for some ice at the top if desired later. Refrigerate for at least a few hours or overnight for best flavor. Shake it up a bit to even out the pinkish tone from the berries.

Rating: This was among the prettier variations I tried so if you're looking for guest presentation, this might be the winner. Pretty pink liquid color in a glass, and the lemon and basil flavors are refreshing. The original recipe indicated not to leave the infusing ingredients in longer than 24 hours but I blithely ignored that. I will say that if you refill this to get a second use, the strawberries will start to look mushy by the second day or so, so you only get so many pours out of the ingredients.

Blueberry rosemary lemon water

Ingredients

1 lemon, sliced crosswise
4 sprigs fresh rosemary (tender stems are best for this purpose rather than woody)
½ cup blueberries
Filtered water

Method

Place lemon, rosemary and blueberries in a quart pitcher or one-liter carafe.  Pour over enough water to mostly fill, leaving room for some ice at the top if desired for serving later. Refrigerate for at least a few hours or overnight for best flavor. Shake up to spread out the blue color evenly through the water before serving.

Rating: This one hits the sweet spot for a combination of flavor, looks and comparative longevity. The blue color is a little more subtle than the pink of the strawberry version, but the flavors of rosemary and lemon really come through and are a nicely refreshing combo pack. Since the blueberries are left whole, this one can last a bit longer and get more refills out of it, although with each refill the ingredients will deliver slightly less potent flavor. 

A few others to try: 1 sliced orange, 4 thyme sprigs, halved red grapes; 1 sliced lime, ½ sliced cucumbers, lemon grass sprigs to taste (or lemon balm is also interesting). Those are nicely flavored, but don't seem to lend themselves to multiple refills.

Cucumber agua fresca

From "Put 'em Up" by Sherri Brooks Vinton.

Note: If you're looking to avoid adding sugar, you can leave it out. It's still refreshing, but if you're including it in the martini recipe option, the sugar helps.

Ingredients

4 cucumbers, peeled, seeded and chopped
1 cup water
2 tablespoons sugar
Juice of 1 lime

Method

Puree cucumber chunks in a food processor or blender. Drain well through a fine mesh strainer, pushing  to remove juice. Compost the solids.

Combine cucumber juice, water, sugar and lime juice in a pitcher and stir to dissolve the sugar. Serve over ice with a splash of seltzer if desired, or try in the cucumber martini, below.

Rating: If you've got a ton of cucumbers to figure out how to preserve, this can be useful, since you can freeze it. But if you're just looking to use up cucumbers in something refreshing, putting slices with limes in water is a lot faster and has a cleaner taste.

Cucumber martini

3 ounces cucumber agua fresca
1½ ounces vodka
Ice
Cucumber slice for garnish

Combine agua fresca, vodka and ice in a shaker. Shake to chill and strain into a martini glass. Garnish with cucumber slice.

Rating: I wouldn't go out of my way to make the aqua fresca just for this, but if you've got it on hand, this might be its highest use case; the vodka cuts through any off-putting texture.