This post is only sort of about pesto sauce.
Really, it’s about how much I love my food processor and how surprised I am that I used it. I don’t think I’d ever considered that it might be handy or necessary before I started cooking with an artist friend of mine from high school. After living in Vancouver for almost a year I found out, through her mother, that she was living, two exits over I-5 in a great north Portland house. I was invited and then luckily found myself there on a fairly regular basis.
With her help and sometimes her roommates and other friends we would occasionally create mulit-course feasts, usually Indian food, once Greek, and a few times chutney. One time, at my apartment, tamales. The food was always great but there was also something warm and inviting about being asked to someone’s house to prepare a meal, to cook. It was hanging out with a purpose and at the end we all got fed. So much better than going out, at the end we all ate what we had, together, prepared.
One time when four of us worked around her kitchen, prepping dinner. It was summer, but not too hot outside, but the smells of cooking onions, aromatic basmati rice, and spices like mustard seed, coriander, cumin and cardamom, being warmed in the oil filled the house. We drank gin and tonic while we shared counter space, passed ingredients and flipped back and forth in the pages of her recipe book. I was in charge of the food processor and made pastes of ginger and onions, minced cilantro, chopped onion and jalapeno. Her tall foreign roommate wandered down from into our mix and was awed by the movement and smells. He grabbed a beer and a place on the floor and became a stationary part of the movement.
I was awed too, I had come to her house seeking comfort, and the food and easy conversation gave that to me. I was mourning, again, a relationship that had never ever worked, no matter how many times I had prayed it would. I’d dropped him off safely, with his dogs and his love, and cried in traffic, all the way from Salem. I arrived early. The artist’s roommate had correctly appraised my mood and without asking too many questions stood beside me and washed and peeled onions from the garden as we made small talk and waited for her to get home. Unlike, the previous 36 hours, once I had crossed into their home, I was loved and accepted just as I was. They had never made me feel like I wasn’t enough, or that I was too much or that what I was, was somehow wrong.
Dinner was amazing. And we laughed and dragged it out and all ate more than we thought possible.
After that meal, I needed a food processor. If you could make evenings like that with one, then I wanted one, got one and use it all the time. Currently, it is making the picnic type food I eat all summer. Things that I can keep in the fridge and eat cold like chutney (that recipe for another day), pesto sauce and baba ganoush.
Three things are true about this batch of pesto sauce:
1. It is more expensive to make it than to buy it in bulk from Costco. I don’t care. I picked this basil from a farm where I bought fresh raspberries, I toasted and slightly burned the pine nuts and I like making it from scratch.
2. It is the best pesto sauce I’ve ever had.
3. I don’t have a recipe. For things like this, or salsa or baba ganoush I put in the ingredients in rough proportion and then adjust to taste.
Here is what goes into pesto. Throw it all in and modify to taste.
1. A large bunch of basil. Washed and picked from the stalks.
2. Approximately ½ cup of olive oil.
3. Approximately ¼ cup of pine nuts (toasted preferably).
4. About 3 cloves of garlic.
5. Approximately ¼ of shredded parmesan cheese.
6. Salt and pepper.
If only it weren’t too hot to boil ravioli.
