If you can get your hands on a lot of fresh basil, this should be the first dish that you make. Nothing says summer quite like basil pesto, and if you freeze half of it, it will be easy to perk up fall and winter dishes. Pesto is wonderful on pasta, pizza, sandwiches, and in soups.

The most time consuming part of making pesto is cleaning and gathering the basil. One large bunch of basil from the farmer’s market yesterday, after cleaning and stemming, weighs in at 3 ounces. This is a little more than 3 cups of basil, gently packed. This recipe yields about a cup of basil pesto.

In our food processor, we put the garlic, actually just 1.5 cloves since the garlic is a bit old and we need to cut off a bit, the pine nuts, and the salt and grind up for about 10 seconds. Next, we add the basil and pulse about 10 times until the basil is chopped. Then we turn on the processor and stream in half the oil. We turn off the processor and scrape down the pesto. We drizzle in another 2 tablespoons of oil with the machine on and then we are ready. We put half of the pesto in a resealable plastic container and stir in the cheese. The remaining pesto we put in an ice cube tray for future use. We want to freeze it without any cheese, and then when we defrost the cubes we will need to add parmesan. We pour the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil over the pesto in the ice cube tray and the plastic container. We refrigerate the container to be used over the next week and freeze the ice cube tray. When the cubes are frozen (we only have the tray half-way filled), we place them into a freezer bag.

Send us feedback on this recipe

Search Google for other Basil Pesto recipes

Find cookbooks fromAmazon.com: Dinner, Italian, Side, Vegetarian