That's right, Food Friday is back. I didn't forget! This week I made some pesto with my own basil. It was really cool to make something using ingredients that I grew myself. Ok, I only grew one ingredient, but it is the main one. :) Here's the before picture of all the leaves I harvested from my two "Pesto Perpetuo" plants. I didn't take all the leaves because, well, that would be wrong, right? But I got a cup of leaves.
And here is the after!
I looked up a few recipes online and just played with ingredients. This is approximately what I used. All the recipes said that you need to mess around with ingredients and figure out what works for you! I used too much garlic and the pesto was pretty powerful, so I would suggest no more than what is in the recipe below.
Basil Pesto
Ingredients:
1 clove of garlic
2 tbsp pine nuts
1/4-1/2 cup olive oil
1 cup fresh basil leaves (stems removed, washed and patted dry)
1/2 tbsp lemon juice
3 tbsp cup grated parmesan cheese
Directions:
Stick the garlic, pine nuts and olive oil in a food processor until they are finely chopped. Add the basil leaves and lemon juice and keep chopping. I used a magic bullet which didn't work well AT ALL so I did a lot of this by hand. I chopped the basil a bit in the blender then dumped it all on a plate and chop, chop, chopped with a knife! When it is as chopped as you like, add your cheese in and pulse a couple times until it is mixed in. If you plan on freezing the pesto (which you should do if you aren't going to use it up in a couple days), one recipe suggested leaving out the cheese until you are going to use it because the cheese doesn't freeze well.
Pesto is great with just about anything. For supper tonight I went all out with the pesto. It was on the chicken, tossed in with the roasted peppers, and in the tomato sauce that topped it all. We also mixing pesto and mayo for sandwiches! There are so many more possibilities too. Yum!
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