Heeeeeyyyyy PESTO!

Oh, hey, I started this post with a pun. That's not dorky at all......

So, obviously I made pesto. I bought a food processor a couple of weeks ago and thought pesto would be a simple thing to start with in my new appliance.

 It's a Kambrook, and I bought it for no other reason than it was under $100 in the recent Harris Scarfe sale. Man, that place has good sales. Sometimes I walk in there and I just want to buy stuff, just...whatever, simply because it's on sale.

Anyway, I went on to Taste.com.au to check out some pesto recipes and used this one as my basis, but I did add/change a few things.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups of fresh basil

1/4 cup of pine nuts

2 fresh garlic cloves

1/2 cup olive oil

1/3 cup grated parmesan cheese

A small handful of rocket

A small handful of cashew nuts

Total prep and cooking time: about 20 minutes.

Method

First I preheated the oven to about 130 degrees celsisus. Then I got my pine nuts and spread them over an oven pan.

Once the oven heated up, I popped the tray in and toasted them for about five minutes. Pine nuts can burn SO FAST, so it's important to keep a very close eye on them. I took them out when they were nice and brown and let them cool on the stove top for a few minutes.

Then I put the basil, parmesan, cashews, rocket and pine nuts into the food processor.

Note the lovely blue and white genuine Cornishware canisters - a gift from mum a few Christmases ago. I love the crisp blue and white pattern.Makes me feel like I'm living in the countryside where it's always sunny perfect, and I feed my imaginary family with lots of terribly fattening fresh butter and full cream milk that I serve in my Cornishwear dishes in a country farm-style kitchen while a dog sits in the corner wagging its tail.

Er, moving on.Then I put the lid on the processor and pulsed it quickly a few times.

So that it starts to look like the above picture. I had to take the lid off a few times to scrape the sides with a spatula to make sure everything was being pulped, but the pulsing took less than a minute.

Then I poured in the olive oil and pulsed it a few more times.

And again, I had to take the lid off and scrape the sides a couple of times to make sure the olive oil was distributing through the mix properly.

But then it was finished!

Et Voila!

Notes:

You could pulp the ingredients so that the pesto is quite liquidy (like mine is above) and use it in pasta, or, at the stage when I added the olive oil you could just stir it through without pulping it and end up with a nice pesto dip.

I would also use less garlic (a sentence I never thought I would say!), because I used two HUGE cloves and it was a really over powering flavour. Probably one of my large cloves would have been enough.

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