Fresh Pesto

While our pepper plant still has only produced one useable pepper... the basil plant is doing quite well! I even had enough to snip off half the leaves to create fresh pesto. In the process, I learned that my "for decoration only" mortar and pestle works 10x better than the food processor. The mortar and pestle was a purchased from Ikea a few years ago when I had a love affair with the movie Julie and Julia. I suppose I was hoping it would be a good luck charm so my kitchen can be 1/100th as cool as Julia Child's.

Anyway...

Here is my delicious adventure in pesto, serves two:

First, pick and wash about 1/2 cup of fresh basil.

Place basil in a food processor and add 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of garlic, 

about 1 tablespoon of pine nuts,

and about 2 tablespoon of olive oil. 

Process until smooth or until you get frustrated that the blade glides right over the top of the ingredients...

Then move to the mortar and squish it up until smooth.

 As you can see below, the pestle did a much better job mushing the ingredients together than the food processer.

 

Add salt and pepper to taste and mix again. Add to your favorite dish and enjoy! Or as Julia Child says, Bon Appetit!

We mixed our pesto with alfredo and chicken and served over noodles with bread, oil and vinegar, and wine.

We will be making this again once the basil plant has recuperated from the plucking. Haha!

Well, I have learned that blogging takes a bit more of a commitment than originally thought. I have no problem creating blog-worthy meals and enjoy sharing the recipes, I just don't like uploading the pictures to the computer.  So far, some fun foods that were missed due to my lack of picture taking are: vanilla bean cupcakes with fresh raspberry buttercream, watermelon sorbet, honey mustard porkloin, garlic butter steak, homemade mac and cheese, stuffed peppers, sugar cookies, monkey bread, mini peach pies, homemade ravioli, and cinnamon roll waffles. I will get better at this, I promise!

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