Roasted Asparagus & Almond Pesto

Here’s a neat idea: Make pesto with roasted asparagus in addition to, or instead of, basil or other fresh herbs. Just roast the asparagus at 400 degrees until browned, maybe 20 minutes or so. Chop the stalks, reserving the asparagus tips. Puree the stalks in the food processor with a few tablespoons of olive oil, as much Parmesan as you like, a handful of toasted almonds, salt and pepper. Really nice on pasta garnished with the asparagus tips, some roasted grape tomatoes and a sprinkling of almonds. I also tried the leftover pesto as a spread for a cheese sandwich, and it was pretty tasty.

Here’s what I know about toasting almonds and other nuts. You can either toast them in a dry skillet on the stovetop over medium heat or spread on a cookie sheet in the oven. As long as you watch the nuts and keep stirring them, they will not toast. But the second you turn your back and do something else, that’s when they’ll burn.

A Milder All-Purpose Pesto: Spinach-Walnut Pesto

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I actually made this pesto last fall with the last of the basil, but I froze it in ice cube trays and have found many uses for it since. Since this recipe replaces half the basil with spinach, it has a milder taste and can be used in greater quantities than classic pesto. Because the spinach flavor doesn’t overwhelm, this is a good recipe for sneaking a healthy vegetable in unexpectedly. I like this pesto best as a sauce for fresh tortellini or ravioli, but as we discovered last night, it makes a great pizza sauce, particularly if the pizza also features fresh spinach. (I also added crumbled bacon, fresh mozzarella and tomato to the pizza.)

Spinach-Walnut Pesto

Time to make: ~10 minutes
Yields: 2 cups

• 1 cup basil leaves
• 1 cup fresh spinach, stems removed
• ½ cup olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
• ¼ cup walnuts, toasted
• ½ cup Parmesan, grated

Combine everything in a food processor and process until pureed.

This pesto freezes very well. Freeze 1 tablespoon portions in ice cube trays. Once the pesto is frozen, transfer the cubes to a large freezer bag. Then you can just remove and defrost what you need for the dish.

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Emergency Dinner Guests? Pesto Vinaigrette!

Not too long ago, I blogged about the five things I always have in my fridge, freezer and pantry to ensure that I can put together a delicious meal anytime. I didn’t put pesto on that list, but I probably should have. I made a big batch of pesto last summer and froze it in ice cube trays. All throughout the winter I have been making use of that pesto whenever I need to make a quick dinner with a big flavor boost. It’s come in handy for pasta sauces, pizza, soups and risotto.

Now I’ve found another great use for pesto: the pesto vinaigrette.

Last night I unexpectedly had three guests for dinner. As it was the end of the week, I didn’t have a lot of groceries left, but fortunately I had sausage in the freezer and salad greens in the fridge (both on my “five things” list). I pan-fried and sliced the sausage, and tossed it with the greens and the pesto vinaigrette to make a hearty salad that was a big hit. For vegetables, I only had odds and ends: a couple of potatoes, a leek or two, an onion, a few carrots. I chopped them into large pieces, tossed them with olive oil, salt and pepper, and roasted them together at 400 degrees for 45 minutes or so. The roasted vegetables were also delicious drizzled with the pesto vinaigrette. I imagine it would also be tasty as a sauce for grilled chicken or a dressing for sliced tomatoes.

I do like to plan out my menus, but when I have unexpected guests drop in, it really stretches my creativity and leads me to discover new combinations I might not otherwise have tried.

Pesto Vinaigrette

Yields: 8 servings
Time to make: 5 minutes with prepared pesto

Whisk together:

• 4 tbsp. prepared pesto (any flavor)
• 2 tbsp. white wine vinegar
• Juice of 1 lemon
• ½ cup olive oil
• Salt and pepper to taste

Adapted from a recipe in Sara Foster’s Casual Cooking.

Adding Flavor to Quick Soups: Minestrone con Pesto

Minestrone con Pesto

As I said in a recent post, I have been experimenting with building flavor in long-cooking soups by making my own broths, sauteing components separately and then cooking them together for a long time to really marry the flavors. This worked really well when I made a Wild Mushroom Soup for Thanksgiving. But what if you don’t have enough time to do all that?

We eat soup at least once a week. Soup is a great meal for so many reasons. It’s filling, satisfying and comforting, but low in fat and calories. It’s also an easy way to sneak in lots of vegetables. I most often like to make a hearty, chunky soup because I can use up whatever is hanging around in my refrigerator and complement it with ingredients from my pantry. Here is my go-to recipe for hearty soup.

I learned a couple of things from James Peterson’s Essentials of Cooking about adding flavor to quick soups that I wanted to share with you. I tried these simple tips when making a hearty Minestrone con Pesto, and the results were spectacular, even with store-bought broth and canned pantry ingredients.

The first tip is to cook some finely chopped bacon or prosciutto in the pot in which you are making the soup. I chop a couple of pieces of bacon small and fry it in a little olive oil until crisp. This adds a  smoky, salty component to the soup, but the addition of a little decadent fat also deepens the overall flavor.

The second tip is to stir in some pesto at the end of cooking. This gives the soup a bright hit of fresh herbal flavor, plus some fat and some pungency from the raw garlic. If you made pesto during the summer and froze it, you can just drop in a cube or two and let the warmth of the soup melt it. I grow a lot of herbs, so I made several varieties of pesto (basil, parsley, etc.), which I can use throughout the winter to add zing to my soups.

I made this Minestrone with only ingredients that I had on hand. You can substitute freely with whatever’s in your crisper and pantry. Minestrone is one of those soups that can be whatever you want it to be. I think the only requirement is that it contain some kind of beans. The French version of this same soup is called Soupe au Pistou.

Minestrone con Pesto

Time to make: ~30 minutes
Yields: 2 servings (can be doubled)

What you need:

• 2 slices bacon, minced
• 1 tbsp. olive oil
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 carrots, sliced
• 3 cups chicken broth
• 1 14.5-oz. can diced tomatoes (do not drain)
• 1 can red beans, drained and rinsed
• ½ lb. green beans, trimmed and snapped in half
• 2 tbsp. pesto
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Parmesan for garnish

Feel free to substitute as you like for any of the ingredients listed here. For example, you can use white beans or even chickpeas and add any other vegetables you like in place of the carrots and green beans.

1. Heat the olive oil in a soup pot over medium-high.
2. Add the bacon, onion and carrots, and saute until the bacon is crisp and the vegetables are tender, about 10 minutes.
3. Add the broth, tomatoes, beans and vegetables, and season with salt and pepper.
4. Bring to a boil.
5. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer until the vegetables are tender, about 15 minutes.
6. Stir in the pesto.
7. To serve, garnish with Parmesan, if desired.

Leftovers reheat or freeze well.

Here’s another tip: When you finish a wedge of Parmesan cheese, put the rind in a ziploc bag in the freezer. Then when you make a big pot of minestrone, add the rind while the soup is simmering to add even more flavor. Just remove the rind before serving.

For Lunch, Snacks, Parties: Mozzarella-Tomato-Pesto Toasts

Mozzarella-Tomato Toasts, originally uploaded by shannon_turlington.

Don’t these mozzarella-tomato-pesto toasts look like tiny pizzas? They are delicious and dead simple to make, plus another good way to use up pesto. As long as you have the requisite ingredients on hand, you can whip these up in no time.

But if you don’t have these ingredients, substitute widely. I think this recipe would work with any number of combinations. Why not try chutney, brie and apple slices? Or eggplant spread, gruyere and roasted red pepper? Because these toasts can be made with whatever’s in the fridge, they are perfect for impulsive snacking or drop-in guests.

Cheese Toasts

Time to make: ~15 minutes with prepared pesto

1. Heat the broiler.
2. Thickly slice a baguette.
3. Brush both sides of each slice with olive oil.
4. Put the bread on a baking sheet and broil 1-2 minutes per side, until browned.
5. Spread each slice with pesto.
6. Top with a slice of mozzarella and 1-2 slices ripe tomato.
7. Season with salt and pepper.
8. Return under the broiler another 1-2 minutes, until the cheese is melted, taking care not to burn the bread.

A Pretty Good Tortellini Salad with Pesto

Tortellini Salad with Pesto, originally uploaded by shannon_turlington.

A couple of years ago (I think), Cook’s Illustrated published a recipe for a “better pasta salad with pesto.” I clipped the recipe, so I must have made it at one time. I pulled it out recently to see if it was worth making again, perhaps with a little simplification.

I ended up making a very simple version that was, in my opinion, just as delicious (and probably lower in calories). The Cook’s Illustrated version was made with mayonnaise, which I simply eliminated–it just didn’t seem necessary. Also, CI makes their pesto with half basil, half spinach. Again, I didn’t see why I couldn’t use a more traditional–and more flavorful–pesto recipe.

This salad hardly needs a recipe, but in case you want one, here it is.

Tortellini Salad with Pesto

Serves: as many as you like; scale up or down as needed
Time to make: ~15 minutes

What you need:

• packaged tortellini in whatever flavor you like (I used spinach tortellini stuffed with cheese)
• pesto made with your favorite recipe; here’s mine (I omitted the cheese for this salad)
• cherry tomatoes, halved
• grated Parmesan cheese for garnish, if you didn’t use it in the pesto (optional)

1. Cook the tortellini, reserving some of the cooking water.
2. Combine the pasta and cherry tomatoes.
3. Toss with the pesto, thinning with the reserved cooking water as needed.
4. Garnish with grated cheese, if desired.

Voila! Simple and delicious.

Notes: You can chill the tortellini and make the salad the next day, or make it with leftover pasta; in that case, use a little water or chicken stock to thin the pesto.

This is my entry this week for Presto Pasta Nights.

Garden Destruction and Pesto Making

It hurt, but we tore out the garden this weekend. It has been a strange growing season. Up until Tuesday of this week, we were still experiencing temperatures in the 90s and humidity that felt more like July. Despite being in “exceptional” drought for the last two months, the tomatoes must have thought we were having a second summer, because they all put out new flowers, and we even had tiny green tomatoes on some plants, too small to save.

Then, the temperature plummeted overnight 20 degrees to more fall-like weather, and nighttime lows fell into the 30s. We knew the baby tomatoes wouldn’t survive, but it was still painful to pull up all those plants in flower and toss them into the compost pile.

Still, I did manage to harvest quite a lot of basil from my three plants, despite letting them all go to flower for the past six weeks since it was so brutally hot that nothing would get me working outside. I made two batches of pesto: one regular-style for freezing, and one batch of arugula-basil pesto with ricotta and walnuts for eating this week (see recipe below).

Reading through my Cook’s Illustrated Italian Classics‘ section on pestos, I discovered two new tips for making pesto. The first recommendation was that before processing the pesto, put the basil or other herbs in a plastic bag and pound them with a rolling pin. This has the effect of bruising the leaves, producing a more authentic taste, a la Italian ladies pounding pesto with their mortar and pestles.

I decided not to adopt this technique, though, mainly because it seemed like too much trouble, and I wasn’t sure the gain in flavor would be worth it. If anyone else has tried it, I’d love to know what your results were. I just settled for treating the basil extra roughly when I pulled it off the stems and washed it.

The second recommendation was to toast the garlic cloves whole and unpeeled until spotty brown before processing with the rest of the ingredients. This, on the other hand, seemed like a great idea, and it was easy enough to toast the garlic in the same pan as I toasted the nuts. Since toasted garlic isn’t as strong as raw, I was able to use more, always a good thing, in my book.

Arugula-Basil Pesto with Ricotta and Walnuts

Process together until smooth in a food processor:

• 1 cup basil leaves
• 1 cup arugula leaves
• ¼ cup walnuts, toasted
• 3 whole garlic cloves, toasted until spotty brown and peeled
• 1/3 cup ricotta
• ¼ cup Parmesan
• 7 tbsp. olive oil
• salt to taste

Toss with hot, cooked pasta and serve.

Notes: Adapted from a recipe in Cook’s Illustrated’s Italian Classics. Pesto can be stored under a film of olive oil or with plastic wrap pressed against the surface in the refrigerator up to 3 days.

Pasta with Pesto-Cream Sauce

This is one of my favorite types of recipes: very simple and super-fast to make, but elegant and satisfying on the plate. It also takes well to variations, which I also like. Instead of using traditional basil pesto, you could substitute other herbs, or even use sun-dried tomatoes, roasted red peppers, reconstituted dried mushrooms or anything that packs a flavor punch to offset the silky smoothness of the cream. Also, you don’t have to just use this sauce on pasta. I think it would be equally good on polenta, vegetables, maybe even fish.

Pesto-Cream Sauce

Serves: 2
Time to make: ~15 minutes

What you need:

• ¾ cup half-and-half
• 1 cup chicken stock
• ½ tbsp. cornstarch
• ¼ cup pesto
• 1 tbsp. butter
• salt and pepper
• grated Parmesan
• fresh basil
• blender

1. In a blender, mix the half-and-half, stock, cornstarch and pesto
2. Melt the butter over medium
3. Stir in the half-and-half mixture
4. Simmer 2 minutes or so, until the sauce has thickened and warmed through
5. Season and garnish with Parmesan and fresh basil
6. Serve over cooked pasta

Note: Adapted from a recipe in The Best 30-Minute Recipe.

Week 2 of Being an Unproductive Member of Society

Week two of my self-inflicted, stress-induced leave from work went a lot better than week one. I think I needed that first week just to decompress and get all the garbage out. This week, I had a lot more energy and I got a lot more accomplished. For instance, I:

• planted approximately 150 bulbs
• went to the dentist
• finished The Lathe of Heaven, an excellent science-fiction classic by Ursula K. Le Guin
• watched approximately four very stupid movies on HBO
• got upset because The Office was a rerun, already!
• got job advice from my mom, which then made me break down into uncontrollable sobs
• got my mom all upset and worried about me and treating me nice
• updated this blog way too much

I also started coaching this week. Coaching is different from therapy, in that coaching focuses on what’s happening now and moving forward, while therapy tries to find a way to blame everything miserable in your life on your parents. As my dad says, if you’re over thirty, you’re too old to be blaming your parents for what’s going on in your life.

I like my coach’s style because it meshes well with my personal philosophy:

Why are you so frustrated and angry and sad, Shannon? No, it’s not that you are a terrible misfit who cannot function in modern-day society. It’s simple–something in your life is clashing with your values and passions. Let’s start with what makes you feel happy and satisifed, centered and energized, and then figure out how to change your life–in small, manageable steps–to achieve that every moment of every day.

Finally, the solution is not that I have to fix myself. The solution is that I have to fix my world to suit myself. I can do that. I think.

Also, coaching is teaching me that I can only be responsible for myself, my own well being and happiness. I cannot be responsible for my boss, my supervisees, my co-workers or the nonprofit I work for–only myself. That is a very important thing for me to know. I should tattoo it on my forehead to remind me of it every morning when I am brushing my teeth.

I didn’t do a lot of interesting cooking this week, though. Marty was gone to California most of the week, so I stuck mostly to soups and salads.

OK Recipe of the Week

There really was no “best” recipe this week, but in an effort to use up the last of the dying basil plant, I did try a Pasta Salad with Pesto from the July 2006 issue of Cook’s Illustrated that I think is worth keeping because it is a) yet another handy way to use up pesto, and b) it would be a good offering for a picnic or potluck come summertime. Still, it didn’t knock my socks off or anything. But I learned a few important things from making this recipe:

• Adding a little lemon juice to pesto makes it taste fresher and brighter
• If you want pesto to stay green longer, substitute some baby spinach for part of the basil–I didn’t have baby spinach, so I substituted arugula and that worked fine
• It’s okay to mix pesto with mayonnaise if you’re making pasta salad because that makes the dressing cling to the pasta better, so don’t worry about upsetting any Italians

I just had to share this picture of my basil plant. I hacked that thing up in the dark, and in the cold light of day, it looked like a murder victim. Just look at all the leaves scattered about it like sad little mutilated body parts.

Recipe Failure of the Week

Actually, the Cream of Tomato Soup recipe in The New Best Recipe is really, really good–sweet, smooth, creamy and old-fashioned. But I will never make it again. For one thing, there are lot of steps to get to what is essentially, with a grilled cheese sandwich, a rainy-day lunch. Second, although I followed the directions to the letter, I ruined one of my nice Calphalon baking pans because when I roasted the whole, canned tomatoes, the juices oozed out like a lava flow and then hardened into this black, impossible-to-get-off crust that fused the aluminum foil–used for easier clean-up, ha ha–to the pan. When a recipe ruins a piece of cookware, that recipe is out of rotation. That may sound spiteful, but as my husband says, there’s no better reason to do anything than out of spite.

How to Make Pesto

I went to the dentist today and they didn’t find anything to get concerned about, so it was a red letter day around here. My whole goal for today was to get through my dentist appointment without feeling bad about myself, and I did it. When you set your goals to be real teeny, it is amazingly easy to accomplish them.

I am celebrating by making pesto. The basil plant out back still has tons of leaves on it, even though it is almost Halloween, and so pesto fest is upon us. Pesto is a great way to take care of all the fresh herbs at the end of the summer, if you don’t mind cleaning your food processor a bunch of times.

What can you do with pesto? Well, I’m glad you asked. I like to spread it on little toasts and eat it as a snack or toss it with some hot pasta and a little ricotta cheese. I also like to freeze it in ice cube trays. Each cube holds about 1 tbsp. of pesto (magic!). They keep in the freezer all winter, and you just throw a cube or two into some soup, rice or a stew when you want to add some potent fresh herb flavor.

Typically, pesto is made with basil and pine nuts, but with the power of substitution, you can make it with any herb-nut combination. You can also leave out the nuts altogether, and the cheese, and the garlic–and just have pure preserved herbs. The formula is simple — it’s all based on two’s:

• 2 cups basil (or any other herb or a combo of herbs)
• ½ cup olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 tbsp. pine nuts, toasted (or any other nut)
• ½ cup Parmesan, grated

Puree all together until smooth.

But why stop there? Pesto makes a great dip if you throw in some additions. My personal favorite is adding a handful of rehydrated sun-dried tomatoes, but you could also try roasted mushrooms or roasted red peppers. Or maybe mix it with some soft cheese.