Currently experimenting with a lot of oils and pesto variations and things like that. Made a chili/garlic oil recently, currently I have a sichuan pepper + bayleaf oil infusing, and might end up making a rosemary oil later on. As far as pesto, I made a lot of basil pesto from a mix of spiky globe basil and lemon basil (both much smaller leaves than the usual kind you get in supermarkets, and much more intense flavor), and most recently tried a fresh lemon thyme+oregano pesto that was a bit trickier to get the right consistency from (the oil separated out rather than emulsifying, though the herb paste left at the bottom was still nice). I'm going to try to scale up my plants by a factor of 10 or something for next year so I can make like a gallon of the stuff, since a single jar goes very fast when you use it for things like pizza sauce.

As far as cooking I've been playing with a grill of late now that I can actually have one - all vegetarian stuff, but getting really charred bell peppers for sauces or eggplant for baba ghanoush is nice. And in-husk corn cooked until the husk is just char, leaving sort of caramelized but still soft kernels on the cob is really nice. I've also been trying to smoke things like feta cheese and tofu with very mixed results. It's not really good for low temperature smoking, so I was having a lot of difficulty with the cheese sinking down into the grill and basically losing all of the flavored surface when I tried to scrape it free. Now I'm using a piece of fine iron mesh, so smoke can rise from below but the cheese even if it gets extremely soft can't really get through. The result was this really caramelized block of feta that had lost a lot of water and picked up only a little smoke flavor. Not exactly what I was aiming for, but it was pretty good. The tofu became almost like a deepfried tofu in that smoke environment, but picked up much more of the smoke flavor (not I think because tofu is more receptive than cheese, but because I turned the heat down for the cheese and also ended up getting less smoke as a result).