The Slow Dance of Making Pesto

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There is a strange poetry in making your own food, and growing some of it. A musical balance between growing conditions, time, patience and everything that goes with the artistic way of life.

I pour myself a glass of wine, and I begin to bask in the all-drenching smell of crushed basil that coats my fingers.

Continually, I place my fingers at the base of my nose, smelling the basil on my skin, and then I take a sip of red wine.

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The wine is a delicate balance between overpowering flavours and tastes, and a subtle note of dancing metaphors on my tongue. The kitchen smells of basil and other herbs left drying close by the windows. The wine begins to tickle my artistic mind and I keep on picking leaves. Abundance is a strange idea, at once it seems like the utopia we all want. But it is also a strange chaos in which we do not know what to make with it all. At some stage, I just throw it away (into the compost) because I have given away all that I could, and used all that I could.

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Wine-induced thoughts, the music of the wind playing in the background, the olfactory explosion of basil, the green visual delight. The images playing in my mind of the olden days, when worries were none, except for the daily grind. Now, we are plagued by modern ailments, mostly of our own creation. We almost exclusively live in our minds (through out electronic devices).

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The first sip is all it takes to take me away, so far away. To distant lands that my own writing cannot describe. Just like the smells that coat my fingers, that envelope the kitchen, that intoxicate me, I cannot describe with words (or with photographs) what transpires in the moment of total sensory profusion.

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Taking considerable time to grow, the leaves provide an overload of sensory stimulation, from the smell, to the texture, to the taste. A somewhat bitter taste on its own, as soon as you touch the leaves the smell overpowers. I grow a couple of pots with basil at the kitchen door, and every morning when I water the plants, the kitchen smells of this herb for hours on end. With the wind blowing through its leaves, the smell intensifies.

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I am drenched in abundance, the smell, the actual herb, the food it produces. The flavour combination between the delicate but strong-smelling herb, pepper, olive oil, aged cheese, pine nuts, and garlic. The strange slow dance that creates this delicate pesto in the end, with which I can cook, with which I can drench my sense in.

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The slow dance creates a strange amalgamation of flavours and tastes. To the eye, it might look unappealing. It is pounded-crushed-bruised leaves, after all, mixed with oils and cheese and nuts. Whoever thought of adding all of this together and calling it a day?

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If enough wizardry happens, alchemic-magic, then something might emerge that looks half-decent. Cooking and gardening is after all a type of magic-science. Creatio-ex-nihilo. Creation from nothing. Not necessarily nothing in the sense of absolute absence, but cooking creates something from essentially nothing, and almost all gardening happens from the humble seed. I guess photography is the same. Cooking happens, gardening happens, life happens, and if the photographer happens to be at the right place at the right time, they might capture a fleeting moment not intended to be captured and made eternal.

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In the end, making pesto is a strange slow dance. It takes a while to grow the basil, and it takes a while to make. The mortar and pestle is a hand-held tool, the process cannot happen any quicker than the cook pounding leaves with the pestle. The addition of wine and the poetry of the wind slows down the process even more. Making pesto is a strange slow dance.

I hope that you enjoyed these photographs, and if you know the process of making pesto, that you might have smelled the images through your screen. Maybe you lifted your fingers in reminiscence to smell the basil.

For now, happy photographing and keep well.

All of the writing and musings are my own, albeit inspired by the slow dance of making pesto. The photographs are also my own, taken with my Nikon D300 and 50mm Nikkor lens.