I was wandering the Farmer's Market this morning with my friends Bianca and Dale, admiring and getting excited about all of the produce that is starting to come available here now that we are a few months past melting. There were lots of lovely new additions to tables - colourful golden and burgundy beets, crisp lettuces and other leaves, freshly picked shelling peas, new potatoes, all kinds of squash... Among the new additions were bundles of dill and other herbs on display at many of the stands. As we walked past one particular stand I noticed a couple of very large pots on the ground beside a table and observed that they were full of lovely, full bushes of basil, one of the few fresh herbs I use a lot of that I hadn't managed to grow myself so far this summer. I asked the gent tending the stall how much the plants were, and he said "Well, they've been growing for quite a while, so probably $35 each." I nodded and decided I didn't need one that badly, or at least not that one, as I had heard of smaller plants available at a supermarket for quite a bit less. He then piped up and said that he was selling his loose basil for a dollar a gram. Somehow in my head that seemed like a reasonable price, and I remembered that I had promised Amie (well, promised is the wrong word really, it was more like ceding to her demands ^_~ ) that I would make the pesto buns I had made for a previous gathering again for our next one which is coming up quite soon. I knew I needed 1.5 ounces of basil (about 2 cups loosely packed) to make the pesto for the buns. So not being smart enough to pull out my phone and check the conversion from ounces to grams, I told the gent that I needed the 1.5 ounces and he nodded and set to work snipping bright green leaves from the bushes and piling them into the bowl on his scale. In the end he gave me 1.9 ounces of basil, estimating a 0.4 ounce loss once I had removed all of the stems. Converting that to grams resulted in 56 (if I am remembering all of the numbers correctly, and I think I am)... which meant I now owed him $56.
Talk about sticker shock.
My first reaction was to refuse as I certainly hadn't been expecting that kind of pay out - and to top it off, I didn't even have cash on me and had been planning on paying back my friends for the purchase once I made it to a bank. Apparently I looked shocked, because the gent was suddenly watching me fairly closely. More thinking out loud than trying to be annoying I said "I certainly wasn't planning on spending $56 to make these buns", to which he nodded. I knew I was going to go through with the purchase regardless, because it was my own fault that I hadn't done more to ascertain the outcome myself and it seemed unfair to leave the picked leaves behind to wilt and therefore penalize him for my shortsightedness. As I stood there and thought for a moment, he leaned over the table and with a very conspiratorial look said "I'll give it to you for $40." Still a lot of money, but slightly lower on the scale of wow. I accepted, borrowed the money to pay for it and then left my friends sitting at a sunny bench while I ran to the bank. From that point on, we got up to some other shenanigans, which included a brief sojourn to a supermarket to track down the smaller basil plants I had not purchased earlier - two of them for $8. It's a slightly different variety, but hey, it works. I am pretty sure there are people buying similar quantities of weed for less money than I paid for the first bundle of basil, though...
It so happens that I am reading about the development of the modern economy for my research right now, and my experiences today illustrated a point I'd been learning about quite eloquently - it's usually better to own the means of production than to be reliant on buying the results. If I had bought the $35 plant at the beginning of the exchange I'd have saved money, had more than the required amount of basil for the recipe, and probably ended up with a hardier plant specimen than my later supermarket offerings. Live and learn. Now that I've had time to let it settle in my brain, it makes me laugh and is a good example of how my impulsiveness and good intentions get me into minor trouble now and again.
And now a quick set of photos to celebrate the pricey pesto:
The recipe for the pesto and the buns themselves can be found here.
Also - I now have a rasp grater. That thing is awesome.
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