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Rocket Pesto
Posted By Kerri
I wasn’t sure what to eat tonight, Stephen is out and usually when I cook something just for myself it turns out badly. I spent a while looking for easy pasta dishes but didn’t find anything that excited me so I decided on cheese on toast, my usual cooking-for-one standby. On the way home though I started thinking about how yesterday was our one year anniversary and cheese on toast was a bit lame for our one-year-and-one-day anniversary so I decided I’d make pesto.
Stephen and I attempted pesto once before but it was a huge pain without a food processor and the end result was inedible anyway, far too garlicky and completely over-powering. Now we have the new Magimix though I thought I’d give it another go. There was no basil in the shop so I bought rocket instead and resolved to use a lot less garlic than last time.
I got home, checked a few recipes online for quantities and decided on:
100g rocket
60g pine nuts
60g parmesan
100ml oil
1 garlic clove (the recipes I looked at ranged from none to three)
So I got out the Magimix and got to work. Except the Magimix didn’t seem to want to work. After twenty minutes of changing blades and pulsing and chopping I finally gave in, threw a few things around the kitchen and got out the trusty mortar and pestle. The whole thing ended up taking about half an hour (instead of the predicted five minutes) but it was worth it. The resulting pesto was creamy, not too finely chopped and had a peppery and not too garlicky flavour.
Now I just have to wash up all the pieces of the Magimix and the various bowls, spoons, spatulas and mortars and pestles I used trying to create this quick and easy supper.
Oct 1st, 2007
Oh, one more pesto to try out! I don’t think I’ve had rocket pesto. A few weeks ago I made this one, but especially adapted for Lundulph, i e with Philadelphia instead of real cheese and that went down rather well.
I was also planning on trying this one, but from your experience, I’m not so sure now. Whizzing with a blender did give it a certain metallic flavour.
And once again, your lovely photo has made me drool, once again after just having had dinner. Mmmmm!
I’ve always subscribed to the “there’s no such thing as too much garlic” school of thought but the first pesto we made was just so over-powering, you couldn’t taste anything but garlic. I found this with hummus too. I think roasting the garlic would be a good plan, it would give you a good garlicky flavour but would take off the raw edge – I was too hungry and impatient to do that tonight though! I did manage to track down some tahini today though so am going to try that with hummus soon.
I see from your post that you used a hand blender – was it just a stick blender like you would use for soup? I have one of those but didn’t think to use it tonight which is why I resorted to the mortar and pestle.
I love pesto made with Rocket! It is really such good stuff!
Welcome to The Foodie Blogroll!
Thanks Jen 🙂
Yes, I used my trusty handblender. I have a big smoothie maker type of blender too, but I only take it out when I make industrial quantities, hi, hi.
I think I’ll give that a go with the hummus this week then, the Magimix just isn’t cutting the mustard – thanks!
Rocket pesto, sounds gorgeous!
btw The lens is a sigma 50mm ex macro