Make Strawberry-Basil granita for dessert.

And pesto freezes well, you can make a bunch now and have it in the winter!

I'm sorry, danf: there is simply no such thing as too much basil for pesto.

That stuff is green gold. It freezes beautifully. Make a ton of pesto and freeze it in small containers or ice cube trays - you'll have it all winter and you'll taste it and think happily of summer!

If you don't want to freeze it, though, have fun with things like basil lemonade, lime-basil sorbet, and of course, insalata Caprese.

One of the caterers at my job makes a nifty kind of Caprese-on-a-stick: A little skewer with a grape tomato, a kalamata olive, and a small mozzarella ball wrapped in a basil leaf. Cute and yum.

Seconding the Caprese. I HATE TOMATOES ... except for Caprese.

Italian Salsa - diced fresh tomatoes, tiny bit of olive oil, basil, oregano, pepper, drained. Serve with chips.

Or, add some black olives and a bit mroe olive oil, and use it to make bruchetta.

Incidentally, if pesto's not your thing but you still want to freeze some basil, you can do what I do: just process it briefly with a good glug of olive oil and freeze that, in cubes or muffin-tins pucks or just in a plastic tub. I love having non-pestofied basil in the freezer.

Definitely seconding the basil lemonade.

Some of my favorite quick basil-using dinners:

- plain old store-bought filled pasta (cheese ravioli, usually), drained and tossed with olive oil, pepper flakes, lemon zest & juice, plenty of basil, black pepper, and a ladleful of pasta-cooking water to make a simple sauce. Mmmm. (In the winter, we do the same dish with squash ravioli, sage, and almonds. Oh, my.)

- Last week, I brushed grilled vegetables with a lemon-oil-garlic mixture in which I had pounded a handful of basil leaves, to release the oils. When I pulled the veggies off the grill, I topped them with shredded basil, too.

- simple focaccia, taken hot from the oven (or the grill) and spread thinly with basil-oil-lemon zest mixture, topped with any or all of the following: small globs of goat cheese or feta, shaved red onion, chopped or sliced tomatoes (salted and well-drained), pinenuts. Put it under the broiler (or on the grill) just for a minute. Oh, god.

I am the one person in the world who doesn't much like Caprese. Which, happily, means you can have mine!

You can also roll basil into 'cigars,' wrap in saran wrap, and freeze it that way. Just cut a chunk off when you want to use it in a sauce or something.

mudpuppie, that. Is. so. Cool.

And it makes me think of a riff on a popular dish: what if... (yeah, I'm blueskyin' this here) what if you wrapped asparagus in basil leaves and then in prosciutto, then broiled or grilled them? What if, what if?

My oh my, that sounds good to me.

You're getting there, people. I am looking for the total kick-ass dish for this company on Thursday night. It's so close, I can feel it. . .keep the ideas coming (if you have them).

Cinnamon has a jar of basil syrup curing in the fridge, to add to lemonade and cocktails. Might try that.

what if you wrapped asparagus in basil leaves and then in prosciutto, then broiled or grilled them?

Oh ho ho ho. You can't lose.

ps - recently I decided that "OmNomNom.com" would be an awesome name for a food blog. Sadly, it's already taken.

Oh, there was a dish I used to make all the time for guests. I privately called it "Sunset chicken." Dumb name, great meal.

For each serving, take one boneless skinless (tasteless) chicken breast and lay between two layers of plastic wrap (or two ultra-thin flexible chopping boards, if you have em) and pound thin --- to roughly the size of a salad plate, or even thinner. I used a $1 rubber mallet for this; nothing ever worked better.

Rub upper side with olive oil & lemon juice, sprinkle with plenty of pepper and lemon zest, a little salt depending on the saltiness of your prosciutto. (Your what? Yeah, that's next.)

Lay down 2 or 3 paper-thin slices of prosciutto to cover the surface of the chicken. Now spread with pesto (or, for a cleaner taste, the basil-oil mixture I described)*, and in the middle, plop down one big fat enormous shrimp**, shelled and cleaned. Sprinkle with more lemon, but not more oil.

Roll the whole thing up, with chicken breast outside, as tightly as you can, pinning it shut with a toothpick at the seam if necessary, and lay in a lightly oiled dish. Brush with more oil, sprinkle with lemon juice and salt, and bake at, oh ~350F for (uh-oh... not sure how long)... until the chicken looks good & done. A little more lemon juice and it's ready to serve.

To serve, take a sharp knife and slice across the roll, revealing the beautiful layers of color: chicken, proscuitto, shrimp, basil... like a sunset, get it? Yeah, yeah, awful name. Great dinner.

It was especially nice for summer, because it was good cold. I could bake it before the kitchen heated up in the morning or even the night before. Chill it, then slice it and serve cold on a bed of dressed greens. Add a crusty bread, and you have a gorgeous summer meal with (literally) no sweat.

*Sometimes I made this with basil, sometimes I left it out. Good either way. Sometimes I put in roasted red peppers or olivada or who knows what. Always good.
**If you cannot provision big fat enormous shrimp, use two big fat not-enormous shrimp. You want an amount of shrimp the size of, oh, a large person's thumb.

Oh, pesto, you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind, hey pesto! Hey, hey, hey pesto!

there is simply no such thing as too much basil for pesto.

I came in here to say this.

Granita is definitely the way to go, fo sho.

OMG BUNNIES friggin' ate all my basil plants. No pesto for me. :(

I would eat pesto every day, and sometimes do. In summer, I make big yogurt containers full, and go through it in days. But I also dry some basil for use over winter, and I have made a basil tincture--basil soaked in vodka six weeks--which clears the head after a night of overindulgence.

That's funny, citrusfreak, my rabbit won't touch basil. When I put it in his bowl he flings it out violently.