Week 1: Basil, Mint, and Lavender

It's herb week for Week 1 of Senior projects! We're using fresh basil, mint, and lavender from our gardens. 

For our senior project, Eva and I are learning how to garden and create meals using fresh ingredients from our backyards. I chose to pursue this project because my mom is an avid gardener, and every spring she plants vegetables and fruits that we use in our meals sometimes. I usually don't help out in the garden, but I really appreciate having a wide variety of plants in our backyard and knowing that the food we were eating came from our garden. This project was the perfect opportunity to participate in this gardening, and I wanted to learn how to care for a wide variety of plants that I could make meals with. 

To pull this project together and ensure that we'd have plants to use in our meals, Eva and I started our planting process in early April to give the plants time to grow. As we're finishing week 1, we were successfully able to grow basil, mint, and lavender to use in our meals. When we don't have ingredients from our gardens on hand to use, our plan is to visit local farms and farmers' markets and obtain fresh produce to use in our dishes instead. 

Our goals for this project are to make creative meals that we haven't made before using fresh ingredients, learn how to maintain flourishing gardens that we can sustain even after senior projects end, and support local farms and businesses for ingredients that we don't use from our own gardens.

The 2 recipes we made this week were Basil Mint Pesto Pasta and Sparkling Lavender Lemonade. The mint in the pesto really came through and the whole dish tasted super fresh. This was the first time I've made pesto using fresh mint and basil, and I will definitely be making this dish again! For the lemonade, we picked fresh lavender and steeped it, then mixed it with water, lemon juice, and honey. I really enjoyed comparing the final product with the plants that we grew ourselves. 

Recipes:

Basil Mint Pesto: https://www.meghantelpner.com/blog/10-amazing-things-you-can-do-with-mint/#tasty-recipes-50781-jump-target 

Lavender Lemonade: https://downshiftology.com/recipes/lavender-lemonade/