Pesto

Whoa, it's already day 2! I'm used to posting once every few weeks, not every day, so this is going to take some getting used to.

This spring, I convinced my mom to grow some basil for me. She does all the gardening in the house, so it didn’t seem like it would be a big deal for her to add that to her repertoire. Thankfully she went along with it. So this pot of basil has been growing on the back porch all summer, and I finally got around to using it. I plucked off about 3 cups of it to make some pesto. I kind of followed a few different recipes because I tend to not have everything in one particular recipe. I think it turned out pretty good, except afterwards I felt kind of sick. Then I felt better until I ate some more, and then I felt a little sick again. I think I either added too much olive oil, or I’m not good at digesting basil. I think I’m going to have to make it again sometime with less oil to see if that was the culprit or not.

-3 cups of basil
-1/2 cup or less of olive oil
-Handful of pine nuts plus some raw sunflower seeds (that’s just what I had). Probably about a half cup or so
-garlic! I have that jarred minced garlic, so I put in about three scoops
-course salt
- 1/3 to ½ cup nutritional yeast

So what I did was put the basil, nuts, garlic and salt in the food processor and mixed it up. Then I slowly added the olive oil. Then I added the nutritional yeast and mixed it all together. My food processor is awful though, so I kept having to stop it and scrape down the sides.

There are so many pesto recipes out there that you don’t really need to stick to one. I think next time I might try some arugula pesto to see how that is.

Basil straight from the garden.

All together in my crappy food processor.