Before today, I have never tasted pesto. This is perhaps unsurprising when you consider that I am allergic to cheese and nuts, both of which seem to feature prominently in most pesto recipes.
However, I do love basil, and for the last few weeks I have had a proudly blossoming basil plant growing larger and larger on my kitchen windowsill, looking at me accusingly every time I nip a single leaf from it to dress a salad or sprinkle on pasta.
With the plant threatening to block my view of the garden entirely, I knew these meagre attempts to use it up were never going to cut it. What do you make with copious amounts of basil? Well, pesto, of course.
A quick consultation of Google (yes, go-to-Google again, what else?!) indicated that it is, in fact, possible to make a vegan and nut free version of pesto. So I painstakingly stripped my poor little plant of all its leaves, which looked impressively copious on the chopping board. The plant, on the other hand, was left not a little bedraggled, but I comforted myself that everyone loves a refreshing haircut in this stifling heat…
Being inexperienced and rather green (ho, ho) in the world of pesto-creation, I hadn’t realised how all these basil leaves would go down to absolutely nothing! I had had visions of making lots of glorious green gloop and storing it in a jar in the fridge, ready to whip up an incredibly quick pasta dish whenever I fancied…oops. My mountains of basil, whizzed together in a food processor with olive oil, lemon juice and a smidge of garlic, produced barely four tablespoons of what I assume, not being all too familiar with it, is a pesto-like substance.
Never mind, we soldier on. Not least because trying to put four tablespoons of something in a jar would look more than a little pathetic, I decided it needed to feature in dinner.
So I mixed the ‘pesto’ with a couple of spoonfuls of breadcrumbs* to make a thicker paste consistency.
I plastered this on two fillets of lightly smoked salmon, which I then baked at around 200⁰C for about 25 minutes.
Served with a huge chopped salad, this meal quite happily satisfied both my need for something light on night-before-weigh-in-Thursday (yes, I am on a constant diet. This won’t feature much in the blog because quite frankly, it’s boring), and my husband’s demand for ‘low carb’.
Husband, who has tasted ‘real’ pesto, pronounced it very tasty, saying that it tasted less greasy (?) than the ‘real thing’, and that you could really taste the basil. I thought it was pretty yummy, and it worked perfectly with the salmon.
Yum!
Very rough guide to dairy free and nut free pesto
You need as much basil as you can lay your hands on (I stripped an entire large plant), leaves only, a good glug of extra virgin olive oil, the juice of half a lemon (or if you’re lazy, like me, a few squirts of bottled lemon juice), one garlic clove, peeled, and salt and pepper.
You need a food processor for this. Start by processing the basil and the garlic clove, until it is pretty much mush. Then add a ‘glug’ of olive oil; you need enough to loosen the green mush. Add lemon juice to taste (bearing in mind this will further liquefy your mixture)…and there you have it!
It is quite a pure, clean taste, and I can’t imagine how it would taste with cheese and nuts (not least because I have never tasted cheese and nuts!). It worked really well mixed with breadcrumbs as a crust to the salmon. I think it would also be nice as a dressing for a tomato salad.
As for the chopped salad, today mine contained wild rocket, lamb’s lettuce, cucumber, radish, carrot, spring onion, red and yellow peppers and sweetcorn. Absolutely delicious.
*shop bought, I’m afraid. I would love to be the girl who angelically dries out old crusts of bread, whizzes them to dust in the food processor and freezes them ready to be whipped out at a moment’s notice for all her breadcrumbing needs…….and maybe one day I will be. But that day is not today and my freezer remains embarrassingly free of homemade breadcrumbs.
emilypatricia 