My brand-new vegetable and herb gardens are doing very well. Exquisite flowers are blossoming all over.

An abundance of vegetables will be ready for harvest in a few weeks. For now, I am making bok choy meals at least once a week, trying different recipes. But what could I do with overgrown basil?

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Let’s make pesto! We have never made it before, but basil pesto is so expensive at shops. Perhaps we could save money by making it ourselves. (This turned out to be wishful thinking. I would soon discover that it’s so expensive because the prices of other ingredients such as pine kernels, walnuts and pecorino cheese are exorbitant.)

So, of course, I have to create labels for my pesto!

I used Microsoft Word for this purpose. The brand name is Senkō Kōbō (閃光工房), the same as our martial arts weapon range. “Senkō” (閃光) means “a flash of light” while “kōbō” (工房) signifies “artist/artisan studio”.

The next step is to print them out, cut them out with scissors and stick them onto jars with decoupage glue…

… and fill the jars with the freshly-made pesto.

Voila! Dinner is ready.

This week, good friends from Italy are going to teach us how to make pasta from scratch. We have been warned that our friendship is hinged on the quality of the pesto. Touching wood…