I recently looked at the nutritional information on a jar of pesto and nearly had a heart attack. I think from the Parmesan cheese, Olive oil, and pine nuts, the goodness of the leafy greens of basil was thrown out the window. Well, I'm sure all of the goodness is still there, but it's like when my boss dunks her Metamucil cookies in frosting. Or when a good kid hangs out with bad kids. You get the picture.
I love the flavor of pesto, though, and I want to make some pesto sandwiches to take on a picnic. We have enough basil to feed an army (of one - myself,) that my dear and darling fiance has grown for me on the deck, at a moment's reach. There are 5 plants in all - 4 little ones and a giant one. Check it out.
The above plant is actually on the roof, so picking is very precarious, as you can imagine. Pesto is dangerous business in this house.
So I plucked one stem from each of the little plants and 4 from the big plant. 8 stems in all. I washed them, dried them, and picked off the leaves, and shoved them into my food processor.
Then I toasted some walnuts in the oven. I read that the nutritional properties of walnuts are better than pine nuts. Toasting them probably leeches out all of the good qualities of them, though. They are just so much tastier toasted. Also, they were all I had on hand.
Here are all of the pesto leaves all snug in their beds.
Throw those toasty walnuts in.
Add a couple tablespoons of olive oil. Not nearly as much as a whole half a cup, which is what most recipes call for. Seriously. That would be a lot of olive oil.
Then blend into a paste. A tasty, tasty pasty.
Scrape down the sides of the bowl and blend some more.
It looks a little like super thick saag vindaloo. But doesn't taste like it. At all.
This recipe made about a cup of pesto. It's much thicker than store bought pesto, but half the calories and a fraction of the price. Even if you had to buy the basil because your super fiance doesn't grow it on your roof, it'd still be a bargain.
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