Fusilli estivi con pesto

This is a sort of take-off on caprese - the classic Italian salad of mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil. Here the basil comes in the form of pesto, which is very useful if you have too much basil to make a normal caprese!


Though I had my own basil plant last summer, this summer I've been moving around/on vacation too much to deal with having plants, so I've just been buying basil at the farmer's markets each week. The only problem with this is that you can't buy basil in quantities smaller than a gigantic bunch, and of course basil only lasts for a few days, so you have to eat it quick!

Since I really can't eat that much basil on my own, I've just been using as much as I need and then turning the rest into pesto. This has led to a bevy of interesting pesto creations for dinner, and so far, this pasta is my favorite.

Ingredients:
75 g. fusilli per person
A handful of cherry tomatoes
Ciliegini di mozzarella (the little cherry tomato-sized balls of mozzarella)
Kalamata olives (I added them to jazz things up, but if you want to keep it simple, they can easily be omitted)
Pesto
A few basil leaves for garnish

Bring a large pot of water to a boil, salt it, and add the fusilli. Wash the basil, cherry tomatoes, and olives, and chop the cherry tomatoes into halves. Pit the olives, and chop them into halves.

When the pasta is done cooking, drain it, and run cold water over it to cool it. Drain again, and combine with the pesto, mixing well. Add the cherry tomatoes, mozzarella, and olives, and mix again.

Serve, adding the basil leaves on top.

Trofie alla genovese

Trofie are a type of pasta typical to the Liguria region of Italy, and in this dish, which you can find throughout the region, they are served with pesto, potato, and green beans.


Lately, basil has been all over the marketplace and I simply cannot resist a fresh bunch of basil. Unfortunately, you generally can't buy it in very small bunches, and even though I'll eat some pretty much every day, I inevitably end up with extra. So of course, the solution is to make some pesto!

I made a bunch of pesto last week to go with some potato gnocchi, and I still had a bit left over. I was planning to just put it on spaghetti or something, but then at the market today I saw a lovely bunch of green beans and was reminded of the genovese style of serving pasta with pesto. Though I had never made the dish myself before, the preparation turned out to be quite simple, and the end result was very rewarding! The only difficult part was actually finding trofie, which are not very common here in the U.S. I suppose I could have used some other type of pasta, but I wanted to be really authentic and so ended up shelling out $8 for the bag at my local Italian foods store. Ridiculous, I know, but it was just this once, and the trofie actually are really good - dense but small, so the balance of pastaness ends up being just right.


Ingredients (given per person):
75 g. trofie
1 small potato or 1/2 a medium potato per person
75 g. green beans per person
Pesto - you can get it from stores, but it's usually much better if you make your own, as described here

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Peel the potato and chop it into smallish cubes. When the water is boiling, add salt and then the potato. Let the potato cook about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

While the potato is cooking, wash the green beans and chop off the very ends. Chop them in half. After the potato has cooked 10 minutes, add the green beans and the trofie. Let cook another 15 minutes or so, stirring from time to time and testing to make sure not to overcook anything. When done, the trofie and green beans should be tender but still have some bite to them.

Drain the pasta, potatoes, and green beans, reserving a couple spoonfuls of the pasta water. Dilute the pesto with the pasta water to make it easier to spread over the pasta, and then mix everything together. Serve immediately.

Pesto alla Genovese

During my time in Italy I actually ate surprisingly little pesto. Though most supermarkets carried several decent varieties, I almost always preferred to cook with produce from the open markets (I would go to the Papiniano market which is one of the absolute best markets in Milan and makes my local California farmer's market look like a paltry roadside fruit stand - and an overpriced one at that).


I do love pesto however; I mean, anything that contains this much basil pretty much has to be good. But making it fresh, grinding up the basil just minutes before you eat it, increases its goodness by at least a factor of six. If you have never made your own pesto, you have to try it - your tastebuds will thank you for weeks!

The process is simple - basically grind, grind, grind (the word pesto comes from the verb pestare which literally means 'to grind'), but some of the recipes I read were very emphatic that you had to grind things in a certain order. The order I ended up going with seemed to work wonderfully so I'm posting that method below, and if you want to try other ways, I'm pretty sure they will be equally delicious (again, lots and lots of basil - you really can't go wrong).

So, you will need:
A large bunch of nice fresh basil.
A couple cloves of garlic
Good extra-virgin olive oil
Freshly grated parmesan (and when I say freshly grated, I mean really freshly grated - stale parmesan is one of my culinary pet peeves, and in this dish especially you want the full flavor)
Freshly grated pecorino (see above)
Pine nuts
Ground-up walnuts
Sea salt

First you'll need to toast your pine nuts, either in the oven (or better yet, a toaster oven) or in a dry pan on the stove. Watch your pine nuts very carefully to be sure they don't burn! Mine burned a bit here, but luckily not enough to ruin the taste, although I had to throw a few of the really bad ones out. So be careful with your pine nuts! Remove them from the heat as soon as you think they even might be done! Then begins the grinding.

While I don't currently own a mortar and pestle (it's on my list), I used a metal bowl and a wood spoon for the grinding, and it worked just fine. Probably a little more work than if I had the marble, but for good pesto, I don't mind a little extra work at all!


Anyways, begin with the garlic. Not every recipe does this, but I think it worked wonderfully well here so I highly recommend it. Grind till the cloves are good and broken-up and then add the (well-washed and dried) basil leaves. Grind grind grind your basil leaves and savor the incredible aromas that come floating up while you're grinding. One of the best parts of making your own pesto is that it's almost as delicious to make it as it is to eat it!

About halfway through the grinding, add in a bit of olive oil and then continue grind, grind, grinding. When you're almost done, add in the parmesan, the pecorino, the walnuts, the pine nuts, the salt, and as much olive oil as you deem appropriate. While I like the olive oil, I would advise not using too much, as the basil provides a good bit of juice on its own and you want all the flavors to come through.

And that's it! Serve over pasta (or even just bread if you want!) and enjoy very verrrrry much!