A great thing about growing your own food is all the edible extras of plants you don’t normally see in the grocery store. Beet leaves, zucchini flowers and garlic scapes are all growing in my garden right now and I get to do something with them. I wouldn’t even know about garlic scapes if it weren’t for the garlic festival, that I’ve mentioned before. They are the flowers of the garlic plant. They aren’t desirable on the plant because then it doesn’t focus its energy on the bulb. So about three weeks before the garlic comes out of the ground, they should be clipped off.

There are, apparently, lots of things you can do with them. And they have a great shelf life. I did what everyone does, though, and made pesto, adapted from this recipe by Dorie Greenspan. I used whole almonds and eyeballed the olive oil, so mine wasn’t runny. The flavour is amazing and strong. You ever had the displeasure of eating a whole raw garlic clove? It’s not like that.

It’s a mild onion-y garlic flavour, but still very strong. Too strong to be served on a piece of bread or with pasta, unlike the traditional basil-based pesto. Garlic and steak and butter are great friends so I came up with this.

This is a real treat, so get good meat. Go to a butcher. I chose Striploin, but you could use any flavourful cut. Rib Eye would go well with this too, I reckon.

• 1 tbsp Garlic Scape Pesto
• 1/4 cup butter, softened
• 2 striploin steaks, 8 – 10 oz
• Olive oil, salt and pepper

Mix the butter and pesto. Set aside.

Again: it’s a treat, so you’re going to want these bad boys to look good. Steak looks good with criss-cross grill marks. Prep your grill for high heat. Oil and season the steaks to taste. Place the steaks on a 45 degree angle to the grill. After two minutes, turn them 90 degrees. After two more minutes, flip them. Cook 2 – 4 minutes more, depending on how you like your steak.

Take them off the grill and rest for 5 minutes. When ready to serve, make quenelles out of the pesto butter mixture to make it look even better. You just need two spoons and keep pressing the butter back and forth between them until you get a football shape. Let them melt a bit on the steak before serving.

This should be the star of the show and it’s rich, so serve with a light salad… and maybe another veggie.