Meally Mom: Pesto Sauce

This recipe was certainly an adventure for me! I'll walk you through my trial-and-error experience, but in the long run, the sauce came out a success! It all started when I was trying to hunt down jarred pesto sauce in the grocery store and it was surprisingly difficult to find, so I thought, "Why not make my own?"

Ingredients
1 cup fresh basil leaves
1 cup walnuts/almonds
4 cloves garlic, peeled
3/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup parmesan cheese
salt and pepper to taste

First of all, it's really hard to find this much basil, so I actually ended up buying an entire plant haha. The leaves weren't even a third of what the original recipe called for, but the sauce was still pretty strong so I think 1 cup was plenty. And if the plant thrives, then awesome! More pesto sauce. If not, well, then, I would've spent $5 on basil leaves if they'd been available anyway, so no harm done.

Second of all, the original recipe called strictly for walnuts, but finding only walnuts at the store is also a difficult task. I found other recipes that suggested other nuts, so I figured it wasn't a big deal if I bought a bag of almonds mixed with walnuts. It still turned out great!

Since I reduced the amount of basil leaves, I also mildly reduced the other ingredient amounts as well. Original recipe calls for 1 1/2 cup nuts and 1 cup olive oil. I actually used 1 whole cup of olive oil when I made this, and it was too much! So 3/4 cup should be perfect.

1. Chop/Grind/Blend
Easier said than done!

First, I threw all of the ingredients into my mini food chopper.

It chopped and mixed it pretty well, but there were still solid chunks of nut in there, and I knew that wouldn't do.

Next, I tried the crude method I use for crushing Oreos for my Oreo truffle recipe: place ingredients in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag and mash with something heavy. I would not recommend this.

While it did successfully mash the nuts up a bit more, it was still very solid and chunky. Plus, I had to throw out my poor, demolished can of ravioli because you have to slam that thing down hard to crush nuts. Again, would not recommend.

The golden, successful method: using the blender! Please note that for this recipe you will need a durable food processor or a blender. It's very hard to do it without either of these appliances.

Thank goodness for the olive oil. Without a liquid base, it would've been impossible to use a blender. And we just happened to have a small blender handy from when we used to make baby food.

Grind up those ingredients until smooth! I had to remind myself this was not a green smoothie, which I'm accustomed to seeing in the blender. It certainly smells different - but in a good way!