This week at the Oak Ridge Farmers' Market there were several vendors with deep green bunches of basil that caught my nose. Although early season and so a bit overpriced, I picked up a bunch and resolved to make pesto. I've always made pesto with a food processor before, but this time I'd have no such electrical assistance; this would be made all by hand. And I mean "by hand": since the townhouse has a glass cutting board and dirt-cheap knives, I don't even have a reasonably sharp blade to work with.
So I toasted up some pine nuts I had left over from a salad, chopped the basil as much as I could without destroying it, and crushed some garlic. Lacking even a cheese grater I had to buy pre-shredded parmiggiano, but at least it wasn't in a green can.
Without a reasonable pot, the wrong way to cook pasta had to suffice:
Cooking the pasta in far too little water had two effects: as expected, it was unevenly cooked, and some bites were definitely much more toothsome than others; but secondly, the salt was more concentrated, so the pasta was very flavorful, and carried the pesto very well. This sort of light pesto doesn't carry a ton of flavor on its own, so the extra saltiness of the pasta helped it along.
I tossed the raw pesto ingredients with a generous drizzle of the old extra virgin and the hot pasta, barely steaming the garlic. The end result was really splendid:
This was a pesto far more reminiscent of the wonderful pasta olio e aglio I had in Italy, and less reminiscent of the heavy, oily gloop that comes out of the food processor. It still wasn't nearly as creamy or cheesy as the real pesto genovese, but it was definitely fine summer fare. Once I get sharp knives and reasonable cutting boards back, I'll certainly be trying this again -- and may even be cured of my food processor pesto habit forever.
Mmmm pesto. How about you make me some when I come visit in your NEW kitchen? And then we'll go to that friendly sounding BBQ place.
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