My Turquoise Bag

“You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces—just good food from fresh ingredients.”

– Julia Child

Since posting about our spaghetti garden, our basil has truly flourished.

It grew so tall and lush that we had enough leaves to make one of summer’s greatest culinary treats: homemade pesto.

In my previous post, I wrote about the simple joys of handpicking herbs to garnish our meals.

This time, the garden became the meal.

With a fragrant bowl of harvested basil leaves, we followed the pesto recipe from Serious Eats, adapting it for a food processor since we don’t own a mortar and pestle (with apologies to all the Italian nonnas!).

Our finished product was a sensory delight. The pesto came out such a brilliant shade of green, tasted deliciously garlicky and nutty, and had the silkiest texture with little bites of crushed pine nuts.

Our basil, kissed by the sun on our balcony, had transformed into a simple garden-to-table weeknight meal.

Perhaps that’s why it tasted so much like summer.

Buon appetito 🪴 xo

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Ingredients

• 2 medium (10 g) cloves of garlic
• 2 tbsp (30 g) pine nuts
• 4 cups (85 g) fresh basil leaves, lightly packed, washed and still slightly damp
• ½ tsp coarse sea salt, to taste
• 3 tbsp (28 g) Parmigiano Reggiano
• 1½ tbsp (14 g) Pecorino Romano
• ¾ cup (175 ml) mild extra-virgin olive oil

Directions

1. Add the garlic, pine nuts and a pinch of sea salt to a food processor. Pulse until finely chopped.
2. Add the Parmigiano Reggiano and Pecorino cheese. Pulse a few times to combine.
3. Add the basil leaves and pulse until finely chopped, scraping down the sides as needed.
4. Transfer the pesto to a bowl and slowly stir in the olive oil by hand until smooth and creamy. Alternatively, you can drizzle the oil into the processor while pulsing briefly, but stirring by hand helps preserve the basil’s bright green colour.
5. Taste and adjust with additional salt if needed.

To serve

Toss with hot, freshly cooked pasta off the heat, adding a splash of reserved pasta water until the pesto coats the noodles smoothly.

To store

Transfer the pesto to a clean jar or airtight container. Pour a thin layer of olive oil over the surface to help preserve its colour, then refrigerate. It will keep for several days.

For more details, or for the mortar and pestle version, check out: https://www.seriouseats.com/best-pesto-recipe