- You can make some tasty pesto-like dishes with other nuts. Walnut is nice with a little less cheese and more lemon. Pistachio is good too, and you can cut the parmesan with 50% extra-sharp white cheddar to reduce costs. None of those sorts of alternatives are the same, but they're good and can be used similarly.
- Basil is just another mint and works well with similar pairings. A basil-watermelon salad, or basil-cucumber infused water are nice summery treats.
- If you ever make cocktails for your friends, you can preserve an awful lot of basil in a homemade simple syrup. It pairs nicely with lemon, and an easy thing to get started with would be a lemon basil vodka martini.
- Pizza dough is much easier and cheaper to make than people give it credit for (and it's better as it ferments longer, just throw it in the fridge when you're done, and it'll be ready for 3-10 days when you need it, cutting down the latency between starting cooking and finishing dinner). Garlic powder and fresh herbs take it up a notch.
- You can cook up a ton of basil with some shallots, hot red peppers, and a few other things to make a thick, herby, sweet, spicy sauce to serve with rice (basil in this preparation will be whole leaves and is the star of the dish).
And so on. I think you'd struggle to use more than 10-20 leaves per day in a family of 2-4, so preservation techniques (canned sauces, frozen cubes of basil, ...) might still be important, but there are tons of options.
A nice grana padano is something like $0.45 for typical pesto servings (1/4 cup of grated cheese). The other ingredients are less. It's like $2 total, counting the pine nuts, for a full multi-person serving.
That's not nothing, but 2.5k calories of rice and beans is also O(dollars). Is adding the luxury of some pesto _really_ that expensive, especially if you only have it once every 2-3 days?
> squirrels eating them first
Most people are opposed to this, but squirrels are delicious (comment if you want recipes, downvote otherwise (or any other action that seems reasonable)), and when they start dying they don't like to lounge around your hazelnut tree anymore.
The "nothing on it" problem is hard to do anything about. Squirrels in my neck of the woods have 4-12oz of meat on them (1-3 daily servings of protein). Other parts of the world might have less, probably not much more. It's tightly wrapped around small bones though, so any presentation attempting to avoid waste should probably include the bones. It's commonly served either whole, split into halves, or thirds (hind-quarters, back, front-quarters). If you want to be fully satisfied on just meat, you'll probably need more than one per person. We usually cooked up 20 or so squirrels for every 6-8 people, along with a little cornbread.
Squirrel being tough and sinewy is easier to do something about. Kind of like flank steak, the point isn't to replace a wagyu ribeye or a filet of cod; it's a different texture. You still have to cook it some way that makes it tender enough to eat, but aside from that you have tons of options.
An easy (simplistic) solution for most wild game is marinating it in buttermilk, breading it, and deep-frying it. The buttermilk acts as a mild presevative, breaks down meat tissues, and tamps down certain "gamey" flavors like iron. It also helps the breading you'll add later stick to the meat and improves the thickness and flavor of that breading. The breading being damp lowers the temperature the meat cooks at, letting it cook fairly evenly and making it easier to pull out while it's still tender. It's hard to go wrong with crispy, browned, salty, fried food, and deep-fried squirrel is no exception.
Any other even, fast-cooking method suffices similarly. It won't be tender, but it'll be tasty and tender enough to eat. Broiling with rosemary and butter is fine, as is basting with a butter sage sauce. You just don't want to get too much protein mass too hot and toughen it excessively unless you're going to cook it for ages and break down the collagen. Treat it in one of the many ways you'd treat a steak, and you'll have a tougher, more flavorful steak.
Most other tough cuts you normally see in the kitchen involve some sort of mechanical softening (meat mallet, thin cross-grain slices, ....). Squirrel is less amenable to that because of how much prep work it is to remove from the bone ahead of time. Those recipes all work (you can make a killer squirrel taco for example), but I don't think it's usually worth the effort.
The other classic way to handle tougher cuts of meat is to cook them long enough to chemically break down those fibers. Something like 180F-200F for 6+ hours. That can be braised (red wine + stock like a coq au vin, white wine + dried beans in a sort of cassoulet variant, tomato + stock + orange + bay relicating kind of a beef stew, ...) as an example, but you could also go with smoked or BBQ or any other slow-cooked meat recipe. Squirrel typically has a stronger flavor than beef or bison, stronger than a new zealand lamb, and weaker (and different) from an argentenian lamb. It's all just red meat, but you might need more or less of some ingredients for everything to balance out nicely.
- Basil is just another mint and works well with similar pairings. A basil-watermelon salad, or basil-cucumber infused water are nice summery treats.
- If you ever make cocktails for your friends, you can preserve an awful lot of basil in a homemade simple syrup. It pairs nicely with lemon, and an easy thing to get started with would be a lemon basil vodka martini.
- Pizza dough is much easier and cheaper to make than people give it credit for (and it's better as it ferments longer, just throw it in the fridge when you're done, and it'll be ready for 3-10 days when you need it, cutting down the latency between starting cooking and finishing dinner). Garlic powder and fresh herbs take it up a notch.
- You can cook up a ton of basil with some shallots, hot red peppers, and a few other things to make a thick, herby, sweet, spicy sauce to serve with rice (basil in this preparation will be whole leaves and is the star of the dish).
And so on. I think you'd struggle to use more than 10-20 leaves per day in a family of 2-4, so preservation techniques (canned sauces, frozen cubes of basil, ...) might still be important, but there are tons of options.