The basil in the garden is growing like crazy. Combined with the rain and the heat everything exploded over the past week. Finally I could make some pesto.
I generally don’t measure anything when I am making it but I’ll assign some easy measurements as a guideline. Usually it’s more like I harvest as much basil that is ready and go from there.
I tend to serve the pesto with fresh bread as an appetizer. Even the kids love it. Once our spinach is in, we can switch out the basil for spinach to encourage more healthy green eating.
Ingredients
- 2 cups basil leaves packed. remove any hard stems
- 1/2 cup walnuts or pine nuts, which I never have on hand
- 1/2 cup shredded parmesan cheese not the Kraft powdery stuff
- 1/2 cup olive oil
- 3 tablespoons of chopped garlic
- 2 garlic scapes chopped
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- Pulse the walnuts in the food processor first to a finely chopped consistency.
- Add basil, cheese, garlic and scapes to processor and blend well.
- While machine is running, pour olive oil in slowly.
- Add salt and pepper to taste and pulse well after each addition.
The garlic scape was a new addition this week. They come in lots of different varieties and the spiciness varies greatly. Adjust the amount of garlic you add to the pesto if you have very spicy garlic scapes. I used the Keith garlic scape this week and it wasn’t super spicy so I still used about 3 tablespoons of garlic.
Enjoy!
It WAS delicious…and even my kids ate some. Great pesto, Em!