Pesto alla Genovese

On Saturday morning my wife made us french toast for breakfast, over which we poured some of our precious stock of Cleary's maple syrup. Then we watched Scooby Doo on DVD. I don't recall reading many positive reviews of this movie, but I enjoyed it a lot. I liked it that it was kept sweetly innocent & dumb for the most part. I thought the actor who played Shaggy was particularly good.

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We ventured out in the afternoon, but only as far as Börje Olssons Skafferi, our local deli, from who we purchased five croissants, a bar of Valrhona chocolate, some packs of fancy flavoured pasta, a jar of capers, some cookies, some fresh basil and a few vanilla pods. We ate a few of the croissants, by far the best that can be found in this town, as soon as we got back home. I read some more of The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and took a long afternoon nap.

Hours later, prowling around the kitchen, wondering what I could make us to eat, I opened up our copy of The Conran Cookbook and scanned the pasta recipes. My eye stopped at a recipe for a Pesto alla Genovese that looked like it would be an excellent use for the basil we'd bought earlier that day. I took out our mortar, and dropped in several handfuls of chopped basil leaves, some chopped garlic, and some salt. I pestled and pestled until this somewhat resembled a smooth paste. Next I tried toasting three tablespoonfuls of pine-nuts in a cast-iron pan, as advised by the recipe, succeeding rather in scorching some of them on one side. Undeterred I added the nuts to the mortar along with two tablespoonfuls of grated parmesan, or grana padano to be more exact, which is what we had in the fridge. I ground some more before adding the first of a projected six tablespoonworths of olive oil. The whole grinding thing was rather more laborious than I had anticipated. In the end I didn't use quite all of the oil, as the pesto was beginning to look... satisfactory. Meanwhile a few handfuls of spagghetoni were boiling in a nearby pot. I was pleasantly surprised at how delicious the resulting mix tasted: much better than any ready-made pesto I've yet sampled. I'll certainly be making it again.

We ate well on Sunday too, as my wife made us a Greek salad for lunch, which was excellent as always. For supper my wife made a batch of gnocchi from scratch, which we ate with a simple tomato & herb sauce: buonissimo!

Posted by misteraitch at January 19, 2003 09:59 PM