Pesto Season

We have a summer tradition of eating pesto for dinner about once a week during the summer. I grow basil plants in pots and make pesto whenever the plants need to be cut back (which is usually about once a week during July and August). I've been doing this for many years -- since long before K & O were even a glimmer in our eye. Braydon and I love pesto in the summer. And now the boys love it too. It is always sad for us as the basil plants fizzle out in September. Then we wait all fall/winter/spring for Pesto Season to begin again. Right now we're at the height of our pesto eating craze (eating it at least every seven days) and we just can't get enough of it. For the boys, though, part of the love-of-pesto is actually -- at the root of it -- their love of parmesan cheese. If we'd let them, they'd eat fresh parmesan by the poundful. The sharper the better. The more aged the better. The more expensive the better (thus why we don't let them eat it by the poundful). They've been lovin' the parm since their first Pesto Season (summer of 2005, their first summer with us at home, when they were 1-year-olds toddling around with chunks of pungeant parmesan in their fists). Now the big deal for them is that we let them grate the fresh parm onto their pesto themselves. They grate it and grate it until their piles of parmesan are almost as big as their piles of pesto pasta beneath it. Meera, for now at least, just watches from her Bjorn chair perched atop the dinner table as the four of us eat. But a year from now we fully expect her to be loving Pesto Season just like the rest of us. (P.S. Just because you might just ask... the salad is another summer fav here: romaine, fresh peaches, and croutons tossed with Italian vinaigrette).