Day 6: start with sweet potatoes, end with Southern Summer Pesto

Your cooking pays off early today. Warm up the sweet potatoes you baked last night or just eat them cold, topped with Cinnamon Yogurt Sauce.

For lunch, have bell pepper sticks and two pieces of Good Whisk Bread, perhaps in a sandwich. As a snack, have the walnuts and raisins you bagged up on Day 4.

Spend most of your cooking time today making a half batch my Southern Summer Pesto (nine servings). Boil high-protein pasta with green beans into bite-sized pieces, then mix in a cup of pesto. Freeze the rest of the pesto for next week.

Freeze the extra pesto in family-sized amounts. If you have the ingredients and a few extra minutes, make a whole batch of pesto and feed your freezer.  A "muffin" of pesto usually serves two. Cover with foil or plastic wrap and freeze solid. Then fill a rimmed cookie sheet with water and dip the bottom of the muffin tin into it to thaw the pesto just a bit. Quickly nudge pesto out of the tin, put in a labeled freezer bag, and put the bag in the freezer. We'll have one meal using frozen pesto next week.

Also bag up two servings each of carrot sticks. (A serving is half a large carrot.) Peel carrots to remove the slightly bitter skin when eating them raw if you like. A good scrub is all you really need, though.

Comments

[Heather]

Made a full batch of the pesto, but had to do it in halves as my food processor is only a mini. I'm not sure I've ever had homemade pesto before, and after tasting this I have discovered that I might as well say I'm not sure I've ever had real pesto before. It's *so* much more flavorful than anything I've had that was commercially produced.

I think I need to take a break from the Challenge for now. My fridge and freezer are already packed with food (I'm only cooking for 2), and this week is busy with other cooking and preparations for my son's 1st birthday party. Thanks again for the great work you've done and shared with us, Linda.