Categories
Sauces and Salsas The Book

131. Pesto p.889


The recipe

I’m so happy I made this pesto. I went up to the market, and paid a nice lady twelve dollars for an enormous bucket full of perfectly fresh and amazingly fragrant basil. I got my bounty home and I was ready to go into industrial pesto production mode. Unfortunately I’d forgotten that a bushel of basil was going to require a lot more pine nuts than I had on hand to turn into pesto. My neighborhood isn’t lacking for bulk food stores, but it would seem everyone else had the same weekend project as I did. There wasn’t a pine nut to be had, except at the mysteriously overpriced store-of-last-resort. My precious basil was wilting on the counter at home, so I sucked it up and paid saffron prices for my pine nuts.

I got home, and I was finally ready to start. But I discovered that my beloved food processor had died on me. I use an inherited Robot Coupe processor, that has to be at least 25 years old. It’s a little the worse for wear, but it’s always worked perfectly. I love its simplicity, only one blade, and a switch, controlling pulse and stay on modes, that’s it. It has a very solid motor, a decent sized bowl, and no superfluous gimmicks. I wasn’t ready to give up on my workhorse of a processor just yet, so I did a little jury rigging. After disabling the safety feature that prevents the blade from spinning without the top on with the eraser off the back of a pencil I was good to go. I’m convinced that I’ll lose a finger to the machine, and I’m mildly terrified of it, but I’m keeping it for now.

Thankfully I was able to get to the recipe without any further setbacks. The pesto is very straightforward, and much like every other food processor pesto recipe in the world. You add garlic to the running processor, then add pine nuts, Parmigiano-Reggiano, salt, pepper, and basil leaves, then chop it up and add olive oil in a slow stream with the motor running ’till it’s nearly smooth.

I planned on freezing most of my pesto so I omitted the cheese (as per the recipes recommendation), and froze the pesto in ice cube trays. I now have two big Ziplock bags full of pesto in the freezer. I’ve been making giant batches of pesto for the last few years and I absolutely love having it on hand. It’s an integral ingredient in my pizza sauces, and I think of it as a security blanket for uninspired nights when I need to cook quickly. I just toss pasta with a cube of pesto, and a bit of pasta water, top with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and black pepper and I’m eating within 20 minutes.

If you’re planning on making pesto ice cubes I’d recommend going to to dollar store and getting a separate set of ice cube trays for the purpose. I used our everyday trays, and despite a thorough wash is hot soapy water I could swear my G&T tasted of basil.

This is a very standard, solid pesto recipe, it goes a little heavy on the oil, but is otherwise great. It’s actually a bit hard to know if I followed the recipe properly. It calls for 3 cups of loosely packed fresh basil leaves, but what exactly does that mean? I know we North Americans like our recipes in cups and spoonfuls, but in this case a weight measurement for a dry ingredient wouldn’t kill them. I’ll happily convert ounces to decent metric units, but please give me a halfway precise estimate of how much basil this recipe calls for.

I’m very happy with the way this pesto turned out, it freezes wonderfully, and I’ve been enjoying it a little at a time. Right now it’s just a nice treat, but by mid-February having summer-fresh pesto on hand is going to be a critical weapon in the fight against the bleak winter dreariness. I’d highly recommend that everyone devote one day in late summer to making a giant batch of pesto, and enjoying the fruits of your labour all winter long.

Categories
Salads The Book

24. Green Bean Salad With Pumpkin Seed Dressing p.143


the recipe

I love cold green bean salads, they’re so quintessentially French countryside. When I’m eating them I can’t help but feel I’m sitting in the back garden of the old farmhouse, outside Lyons, I stayed at one summer as a teenager.

This dish wasn’t particularly French, or entirely what I expected it to be, but that’s all right. I think the word “salad” threw me off a bit here. I was expecting the dressing to turn out like a vinaigrette, but it’s actually more of a pesto; very thick and densely coating the green beans. The ingredients in the dressing are straight out of the classic vinaigrette textbook: oil, lemon juice, salt, garlic, olive oil. But there’s a detour via Mexico with pumpkin seeds, cumin, and cilantro. I found that the flavour was quite good, if a bit heavy on the cumin, but the texture was off. The dressing came out kind of lumpy and goopy. I didn’t think that it worked too well with the beans. There was also far too much dressing for the amount of beans they called for. If I were to make this again I’d toast the pumpkin seeds and scatter them over the beans without putting them through the blender. I’m sure the dressing would come together nicely without them.

The beans were nicely crisp-tender, and the flavour deserves high marks. I also appreciate the Franco-Mexican fusion concept going on here. It’s really the texture that prevents me from giving this the rating it might otherwise have earned.