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After a tiring day at work I came home with a ridiculous quantity of vegetables from our CSA. Yum. So I decided we needed to use much of it up, and I made a pasta sauce that was not too far off from Eggplant Sauce #2 in the Encyclopedia of Sauces for your Pasta. It was really tasty.
Ingredients:
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
about 1/2 pint cherry and grape tomatoes, cut at least in half
4 other tomatoes (various variety heirloom, Roma, etc.), chopped
1/4 C leftover tomato sauce
1 medium-sized eggplant, cubed
2 tofurkey Italian-style sausages
1 T oregano
2 T dried parsley
salt and pepper
olive oil

*note: as you cook this, keep the lid on the pan with the tomatoes as much as possible, to keep the steam in.

Fry onion in olive oil on medium heat until it softens. Add garlic and cook a little longer. Add all tomatoes to pan.
In another pan, fry eggplant in more olive oil until golden. Remove eggplant from pan and add to tomato mixture.
Chop up tofurkey sausages. Fry in oil leftover from eggplant until the sausage is browned. Keep aside.
Add oregano, parsley, salt, and pepper to sauce. If the sauce doesn't look tomatoey enough for your tastes, add some tomato paste, leftover tomato sauce, whatever. (If you use leftover tomato sauce, it shouldn't be a strongly flavored sauce, just something basic.) Simmer for at least 5 minutes, until tomatoes are very broken up and the sauce is, well, saucy.
Add cooked sausages to sauce, and simmer for a few more minutes.

Serve over pasta, maybe topped with a little Parmesan cheese.

Yum.

Now I want to head to bed, but I must solicit some ideas: I have a very large quantity of fresh basil, and an almost-as-large quantity of fresh mint. I can make more pesto and freeze it, but does anyone have other good basil ideas? and mint - I can make mojitos, or I can make tabouleh, but again, any other good ideas?

Mmm. Fresh herbs.

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Pesto freezes well, in my experience. We freeze it in an ice cube tray so that its nicely divided into servings.

A mint suggestion:
I make pasta dish with sliced/torn mint, thin/julienned sliced zucchini, lemon juice (with some of the zest if I've got a fresh one), garlic, and a good amount of pepper, and sometimes oregeno, fried up in olive oil and tossed with Parmesan/the pasta. (adding the mint towards the end of the quick saute helps keep its flavor, and not too much lemon juice- I think the zucchini grabs it up and runs with it somehow so its easy to add too much.)

If the big ol' patch of mint by my apartment wasn't dead due to drought I'd make that recipe this week, its good in hot weather.

For some reason I think eggplant sauces are always better with some crushed red pepper added.

Regarding the mint, there's a mint-and-walnut sauce that I really like in Encyclopedia of Sauces for your Pasta. Sorry, don't have my copy handy for a page reference.

Pesto. Did I mention pesto? If you load up on garlic, olive oil and pine nuts, I reccommend pesto.

I'm a big fan of moroccan tea, green tea, fresh mint, boiling water and more sugar than you think ought to go into a cup of tea.

Very tasty.

I actually freeze my mint and just pull it out of the freezer when I want to brew some in the winter. It doesn't take up much space and is tastier than tea from dry leaves.

Roast a bunch of small red potatoes, quartered.
Quickly par-boil a couple handfulls of chopped green beans
Chop up a bunch of that basil
Mix it all together with olive oil, feta cheese, salt & pepper.

Yum.

Or just make a ton of pasta sauce with the tomatoes you must be getting (we've been getting a ton from our CSA) and freeze it.

Also, I used a lot of basil in making eggplant parmesan tonight. Also good.

Ginger (the wife, not the spice) and I went to the Mai Village restaurant a few weeks ago and were supprised at how extensively mint is used in authentic Vietnamese cooking.

I was served a dish I can't remember the name of, but it was one of those assemble yourself productions. I had a stack of round tortilla-like discs, but they were the consistancy of pasta and made of rice.

You soaked a disc in a bowl of warm water until it became soft and pliable to wrap around the other ingredients. On the rice disc you piled chicken (or meat of your choice), pineapple, mint and some field greens.

The trick is to wrap the package so that it doesn't fall apart as you eat it. The dish is a wonderful combination of sweet and savory with the clear sharp note of mint penetrating.

Very tasty!

You can substitute a mixture of basil and mint for the Thai basil called for in Thai curries and stir-fries. Doesn't have quite the same licorice-y note as the real thing, but otherwise very tasty.

There is a great mint and walnut pasta sauce in The Encylopedia of Sauces for your Pasta. Not sure exactly how much it calls for. I like mint juleps. There is a non-alcoholic mint drink in Iran section of The Middle East Cookbook. I think we had it one new year's eve? A drop of green food coloring makes it look really special. You could root your mint and plant it. Good luck.

Our favorite thing to do with fresh basil is to add fresh heirloom tomatoes and make a Caprese salad. Add a light sprinkling of good salt to a plate of sliced tomatoes, a layer of fresh mozzarella (Italian buffalo milk is the best), then a layer of fresh basil. Drizzle with good olive oil and and add a drop or two of good sherry vinegar, and crack a bit of fresh pepper over the whole thing, and eat. Once our CSA tomatoes start coming in, we're eating this every night.

Mint is a good compliment to melon. Honey dew, musk melon, and all those varieties. We chop up melon, chop up mint. Mix the mint with Ponzu (Oriental citrus mix from United Noodle) -- probably lime juice works as a substitute -- add a few drops of our good sherry vinegar, or the herb-honey vinegar. We make just enough of the mix to lightly coat the melon, then chill the melon for a couple of hours to get it cold and let the flavours mix. Then eat. Very cool and refreshing on hot days.

Also, I second Vietnamese food. Both mint and basil go well on the rice noodle salads and the rice noodle soups. I'm sure that you can use tofu in place of the usual beef in these recipes. Also, minnehaha K's Hanoi Pancake recipe has similar flavour combinations.

There is a nice tomato and basil recipe in the uncooked sauces section of The Encylopedia of Sauces for Your Pasta. It's basically a pesto recipe, but uses a tomato base instead of an oil base. I don't think it calls for pine nuts, but *I* think they need to go in there.