Homemade Pesto!

When we were in Australia for a month last summer, I got on a HUGE pesto kick. It's not Aussie, really, but maybe their food was so terrible that I sought out the known comforts of other countries :). I must say, I had a bad pesto experience in the past, in a pizza place on M street in DC. (If you are ever there, don't order the pesto/potato pizza.) However, pesto has redeemed itself and more since then. Below are the ingredients I used, though I would have preferred block cheese.

I made Matt buy me a mortar and pestle and he agreed, because he knows I'm pesto-obsessed. You can use a food processer to make it, but food processors go too far above and beyond the abuse that the basil needs in order to transform into a tasty sauce. Afterall, the etymology of the word "pesto" originates in the action of pounding or crushing, not of slicing and dicing. So I mortared and pestled and muscled through it.

Next I added some pignola nuts (pine nuts) which I chose not to roast, but rather added them fresh. I crushed those up too, then added the EVOO, (thanks, Rach), the parmesan cheese, a dash of pepper, and a bit of kosher salt (it's a little more airy than table salt).

A little bit of pesto goes a long way on pasta, (and I can't wait to throw some on my newly acquired bucatini! Which isn't necessarily the best pasta for pesto because there's not much for it to absorb, but I just love it!), so I made pesto ice cubes out of most of the sauce before refrigerating a bit to toss with some pasta at a near future time. In the distant future, I can unfreeze one cube at a time to throw into a meal and still get that homemade pesto taste! It's amazing how much better fresh pesto tastes than jarred pesto sauce... it's worth the few minutes! Buon Appetito!