Nut Free Pesto

I mentioned that we had an abudance of basil and that I wanted to make some pesto. I've been seeing pesto recipes and pesto references all over blogland (here, here, and here to name a few). I also recently babysat my sister's basil plant while she was on vacation. This led to even more basil! So some pesto was definitely in order. A few people have asked me to document my pesto adventure so here we go!

I started with gathering and washing some lovely fresh basil leaves (approximately 3 cups).


I got out my old workhorse food processor (my grandmother's - as an aside does anyone else have a "vintage" small appliance that they just adore?).

Pesto of course, calls for pine nuts or walnuts. Well silly me forgot to buy them when at the grocery store. Then I thought about it and realized Chelsea wouldn't be able to try my dish if I used nuts anyway (we haven't introduced her to nuts as of yet). So to get some of the nutiness flavor I used a whole head of roasted garlic (Preheat oven to 400, cut the top off a head of garlic, rub exposed cloves with olive oil, wrap in foil, roast in oven for 30 minutes - yum!). To that I added olive oil and parmesan cheese.


Pureed it all up in the food processor and it was good to go! Can you believe I forgot to take a photo. Bad, bad me. Let me tell you though that it was excellent! We couldn't even tell there weren't any nuts in it. The best part was that Chelsea adored it! She couldn't get enough and neither could we. My hubby even requested that I go ahead and not use pine nuts in future pesto endeavors.

Mmm, wishing I had some pesto right about now.