Bucatini with Garlic Scape Pesto

Tuesday 12 June

Last fall, Sharon gave us some garlic that Archie Christopherson had grown, and we replanted twelve cloves of it in his memory.  Like that memory, the cloves sprouted green, and stayed green throughout the winter.

Just recently, they sent up garlic scapes, so along with the rest of the hardneck-garlic-growing world, we cut the best of the scapes off, teased the cat with them, and then made garlic scape pesto.

This website (with recipe) tells you the useful fact that you can use the bulbils and what's above them as well as the lower part of the scape for pesto as well.  But almost no one tells you that the lower part of the scape may be hard, and you don't want to eat cellulose.  So we trimmed the hard part off, which was most of it, but ground up the rest of the stalk, the bulbils, and all but the tips of their tufts for this pesto. 

We used 1/2 cup pecorino romano instead of parmesan, and a combination of pistachio and walnuts for the 1/3 cup of nuts.  The resultant pesto was light green, fragrant, and went beautifully with a simple pot of bucatini pasta.