Pesto

Happy Equinox! Hope you all had a great weekend. We had beautiful weather here.. so I didn't do the tomatoes yet.. but I knitted and read outside, went to the flea market, and Brian and I walked the dogs down a favorite trail of ours. I found a few neat things at the flea market, I'll share those tomorrow. :)

My mom spent most of last week making pesto. Now the freezer is stocked and we have enough to last us until next year.. probably longer! I've seen several recipes online for pesto but not the one she uses, so I figured I'd share it here.

-2 c. basil
-3 cloves garlic
-1/2 c. parmesan cheese
-3/4 c. olive oil
-1/2 c. pine nuts
-1 tsp. salt

She just blends it all up in a blender (we don't have a large enough food processor, but I'm sure it would work much better then the blender). She saves some of the 1/2 c. of pine nuts and mixes them in after everything else is blended, leaving them whole. This is optional, but very good!

And because she just puts the jars in the freezer, she saves old jars from stuff like salsa throughout the year and uses those. When we want some for pasta or whatever, we just scrape off what we need, put it in a mug and microwave it for about 10 seconds and it's ready to use.

We eat it on pasta mostly, but I LOVE making pizza with it. We use the pesto instead of pizza sauce, then add the cheese, pieces of chicken, cut up tomato, green peppers, whatever. It's SO good.