Basil Pesto

For several years running my mom and now I grow basil in the garden. It's a pleasant plant which doesn't take over, yet grows nice and bushy when the weather is right. I love the smell when you pick it, take it in, wash it, and start to cut it up. And there's plenty of ways you can cook with it. My favorite thing to do is to make a pesto and serve it over fresh angel-hair pasta. Or maybe on crackers.

I don't actually know where my mom got the original recipe on which this one below is based. I doubt she made it up. But it may be an amalgamation of a few recipes, and I've modified it further by removing the dairy and substituting what nuts I have on hand. One time when there wasn't enough basil, I found that Swiss chard makes a good pesto filler. Just tweak the amount of oil for the desired texture and this is another forgiving recipe.

Ingredients

• 3 cups basil leaves
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1 cup pine nuts (or pecans, or almonds, or walnuts, or a mix)
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• pepper and salt

Directions

1. Clean and separate the leaves of your basil from the stems. With large-leaf basil, just pull them off in clumps or individually. With small-leaf basil, you can often grab one end of a stalk, and slide your other fingers down to remove them quickly.
2. Put the basil in a food processor, and pulse, just so things have room to mix better.
   
3. Add the olive oil (optionally reserving some to have some room for fixing the texture later), peeled garlic, nuts, Parmesan cheese, pepper and salt.
   
4. Process until smooth. If too thick, add a little more olive oil; if too thin, add more basil, cheese, Swiss chard, or other filler. Taste it. Ideally you should be able to make out the flavors of each ingredient, with none overriding the others (take it easy on the salt).
5. Serve your fresh basil pesto in a bowl.
6. Optionally prepare angel-hair pasta per package directions, or find some crackers, and serve under your pesto.
   
7. Cover any leftover pesto with plastic wrap, and keep in the fridge, or freeze for enjoyment in later seasons. If you press plastic wrap to the surface, it will keep quite well.

He said

In my garden I like to plant two types of basil, including a more common large-leaf Italian basil, and a small-leaf one as well. They each seem to prefer different weather, so having both types helps even out the amount I can expect to harvest.

Last year I really enjoyed spreading pesto over one slice of bread, laying a slice of muenster cheese on it, some deli-style turkey slices, and a slice of fresh tomato before the other slice of bread. Scrumptious! If you're having trouble using up your leftover pesto, maybe this mini-recipe would be up your alley.

Note that if you include the Parmesan cheese, measure the grated amount instead of the pre-grated amount. I highly recommend using a microplane grater for the airiest Parmesan cheese you've ever had.

She said

In case you hadn't noticed, we love garlic. When we say 3 cloves of garlic in a recipe for you, that typically means at least 5 for us.

If you've never prepared and tasted pesto made with fresh-from-the-garden basil before, you have to give this a try. Store-bought may be yummy, but you are so missing out on the homemade stuff. The whole experience—from the harvest part (where you start to catch whiffs of the freshly picked stalks and leaves) through the last processor pulses (where you see the final swirls of pretty greens mixing with garlic goodness, oil, and nuts)—is treat for your senses.

One of these days, I want to try this with a dairy-free Parmesan alternative. I occasionally buy a dairy-free fake Parmesan usually made with soy, and it substitutes very well (at least from my persepective, which probably doesn't count for much, since it's been such a long time since I've had the real stuff).