Meal Planning (Vacation) – Making Pesto

This is the first time I’ve ever made pesto.  My objective was to find an easy stand-in for tomato sauce and hopefully open up my menu options a bit more.  My sister has had great luck freezing pesto so I should be able to prep and store it easily as well.

Pesto Ingredients:

• Basil (Surprise!  I thought it was parsley based.)
• Olive Oil
• Parmesan Cheese
• Pine Nuts
• Garlic (optional – I added)
• [apparently most people add salt – we didn’t and at least half of our diners salted their plate after]

Pasta and Protein:

• 5 cheese tortellini
• Rotisserie chicken

Side:

• Bread (French loaf)
• Olive Oil and Garlic

Kitchen requirements:

Maybe to your chagrin, I didn’t use a recipe.  Here’s a pesto recipe with the same ingredients that might help guide how much of each to add. I find recipes really hinder me but since I haven’t eaten pesto that much I had to borrow my sister’s tastebuds to evaluate if the mix was correct.

One thing I do feel I’ve mastered is sautéing garlic.  I hadn’t remembered that pesto had pine nuts at all so I asked my sister if they tasted woody to her and she said yes, so I guessed that they should also be sautéed. 

Preparation:

I had cut all the meat ahead of time and it was waiting in the fridge.  See the post on shopping for more detail about acquiring the ingredients. We started the noodles first knowing they would take longer than the instructions in the mountains.  It was about double but tortellini doesn’t cook long.

I should have cut up the garlic and maybe even the pine nuts but I didn’t.

Sautéing:

There are a couple of important keys to this.  When you cook the garlic or any type of nut in oil, you are trying to brown them but mostly the goal is to get them to change the taste.  It takes a little time but it’s easy for them to cook unevenly.

I heated a layer of oil on the stove.  The lighting in this kitchen was terrible so I never saw the sheen that you can usually detect hot oil with.  Instead, I used the water test and waiting for the water to dance on the oil.  The part I often forget is to turn down the heat at this point.  Most of the time dropping to med-high is ideal.

We tossed the pine nuts in whole and kept them moving.  We started with about half the package but ended up needing the whole thing, so I had to repeat the process.  Thankfully, my sister remembered to wipe the old oil out as we’d started to overcook the pine nuts.  The second batch was at the end of the meal prep.

Combining Ingredients:

We added the pine nuts, then basil, and parmesan cheese to a blender though we both suspected that it wasn’t going to be able to chop the pine nuts.  We weren’t making a lot, but this unit didn’t have a food processor or mortar and pestle.

We added oil and were able to get it to blend the basil but even the cheese was barely chopped.  I’m pretty good at chopping parmesan finely but I really thought the mixer could handle that.  Oops.  The end result looked like this…

Then I had my sister taste test it.  She thought it needed more pine nuts so this is where we reheated the skillet and cooked some more and added about a clove of garlic.  I diced the garlic so it cooked fast.  We cooked another batch for the garlic oil dip for the bread.

Timing Issues:

The timing of the meal was not quite right as things weren’t working out quite as expected.  The noodles finished first.  Then we warmed and held the meat while working on the bread and adding cheese.

Meanwhile, my sister was crushing the pine nuts with the backside of a spoon.  They were soft and this worked relatively well.  While the pesto didn’t have a fine consistency as expected, it was completely unnoticeable in the flavor.

Reviews:

Even the picky eaters seemed to enjoy the meal.  The flavor was great.  I overfilled my plate as cheese pasta is much more filling.  We suspect the pesto would have spread better if it had been able to be processed instead of crushed and mixed.  The rotisserie chicken went very well with the dish.

Personally, I think when I make this again I will try to thin the cheese noodles or use regular noodles.  It was plenty of cheese for my taste.  This pesto should work very well for the uses I’m thinking of.  I can imagine it on a pita or pizza.  The bigger risk might be not eating it too often so I keep my nut/seed consumption down.

I suspect that pesto is very tolerant in its mixing ratios considering I had never made it before and didn’t measure anything.  When shopping we’d actually purchased two little basil containers but wound up only using one.  So don’t hesitate to try it even without measurements.

I had been a little afraid that it would be too oily in the end but it seemed perfect that way.  Oh, and add salt!  I completely forgot to add salt.  It wasn’t bad without but it would have accentuated the flavors a bit better.  The cheese in the pasta may have altered how salty it tasted.