One of my favourite local pizza restaurants serves a bread basket with three dips: sundried tomato, tahini and pesto. While my sister and orangefoodie make sure to try every dip on the platter, I choose to fill myself up with the pita bread slices and pesto sauce. Sometimes I get so carried away nibbling on these that I end up eating barely a single slice of pizza!
Over the weekend, I tried making my own pesto for the first time. Dead easy! All you need to do is assemble all the ingredients and let the food processor do its job. Thanks to Deeba who mailed me basil seeds, I now have a couple of bountiful pots of basil. I can’t tell you how intensely fragrant home grown basil is compared to store bought. The heady aroma is almost intoxicating. Sometimes I find myself plucking a leaf just to rub it between my fingers and get hit by the sweet smell of basil. I hope you have access to fresh basil,and if you’d like, I’ll be happy to send you some seeds!
I used Ina Garten’s recipe as a base and I absolutely loved how it turned out. In fact, my family has been devouring the pesto as a condiment with every meal for the past few days. I also used part organic pine nut oil to accentuate the pine-nutty-ness of the pesto.
Adapted from: Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics
1/4th cup pine nuts
1/4th cup walnuts
6-9 cloves of garlic
1/2 – 1 tsp coarse sea salt
4 cups basil, washed and dried
1 cup Parmesan cheese, freshly grated
3/4th cup olive oil
3/4th cup pine nut oil (or olive oil, if you don’t have pine nut oil)
- In a food processor, grind the walnut, pinenuts and garlic to a paste. Add the salt.
- Add the basil leaves and maybe a tiny little bit of oil or water for it to come together.
- Add the parmesan cheese.
- Now through the feed tube, pour in the oils until evenly blended.
- Transfer to a jar and serve and use as you like!