Garlic Scape Pesto

I first ran into these beautiful, curly stems in a friend's CSA that I was picking up while she was on vacation. Another friend and I tried them raw, having no idea what they were, and came away smelling strongly of garlic. Garlic scapes, the stalk and seed of the garlic bulb, can be used just like garlic, although they have a fresher, greener taste, and as the temperature heats up they have made a big showing in my local farmers' markets. In fact, one farmer gave me a giant double handful for free, grabbed from a huge box of the curvy green stalks. And faced with a giant heap of the buggers, I decided that I needed to do something a little more drastic than throwing them in my eggs.
So I went to the internet, and found that others had had a similar dilemma, and most seemed to solve it by linking to this intense pesto recipe from Dorie Greenspan. A simple idea: instead of basil, use garlic scapes!

As I sat down with my heap of scapes, I realized that while the recipe called for about ten stems, the pile I was confronting had about fifty. So I upped the amounts a bit, and hoped the garlic wouldn't overwhelm the other flavors completely.

Half a pound of walnuts, toasted.

Half a pound of parmesan cheese and a whole lot of olive oil (I stopped pouring when the texture seemed right).

We went to Claudio's, the local Italian cheese wonderland, to get the parmesan (and a few other things, since I have no self restraint when it comes to cheeses), and when the cheese monger heard what we were making, we were treated to a story about the garlic-y Italian sisters he and his friend once dated.

I put a little too much in my mouth the first time I tried the pesto - it's pretty intense right out of the food processor. But not in a bad way.

And the color is lovely.

It was delicious. But, as the fellow at Claudio's said, not a first-date kind of meal.