On our visit earlier
this week I “pruned” my mom’s basil plants since they were
going on holiday the next day and all that sweet green was just too good to
waste. And then my own basil plants suddenly doubled in size this week. I think
I finally found the perfect spot for them with the right sun/shade combination.
Point is,
there was a lot of fresh basil to be had. I couldn’t find pine nuts yesterday (which
most basil recipes call for) so decided to experiment with other nuts.
Ingredients
2 cups of packed basil
leaves (packed meaning that the cup is stuffed with leaves not a cup of loose
leaves)
¼ cup parmesan cheese
¼ cup pine nuts (or
walnuts/hazelnuts as alternatives)
2 cloves of garlic
(chopped & crushed)
1 tsp salt
Lemon juice (half a
lemon’s should do)
½ cup extra virgin
olive oil
- Pick the leaves off the stems and
discard the stems and any flowers/seeds, make sure the leaves are clean and dry
- Roast the nuts in a dry pan and then
chop them finely. (I use a spare coffee grinder which has become my spice
grinder)
- Blend the chopped nuts, garlic and
lemon juice together in a blender/food processor and start adding the oil while
it blends (only half the oil at this stage)
- Blend handfuls of basil leaves into
the mixture until all the basil have been mixed in
- Now add the parmesan cheese and
blend again
- While the cheese is blendingin,
slowly add more oil to the pesto until the desired texture is achieved. It
might be more or less than the ½ cup specified above.
Making
pesto is more forgiving than say baking a cake as you can keep adding and changing until you’re satisfied - up to a point of course. I took samples of
the basic pesto and added salt/sugar/more oil/a drop of peri-peri sauce etc. to
the different samples and then compared the different tastes and adjusted my
recipe accordingly.
Crumble a
bit of feta cheese over the pesto when serving. I guess you can add it from the
start but the visual effect of the clean white feta on top of the green pesto
is stronger!
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