Pound your Food

pesto [pes-toh]
— n
[Italian, shortened form of pestato, past participle of pestare to pound, crush]

What's with the literary enlightenment you ask?
I'm setting the record straight on an Italian classic. The poster child of delicious, simple & fresh Italian cooking got thrown in a food processor when it stepped off the boat, packed with additives and preservatives and bottled for your convenience.

Pesto is a generic term. It usually refers to a basil-based mash, but can take on many variations of crushed deliciousness.

I needed to use up almost a full bunch of parsley and cilantro, so the basil sat this one out.

The soon-to-be-one ingredients started out as:
- a bunch of flat leaved parsley
- a bunch of cilantro
- about a half cup of pine nuts
- about a half cup of Grana Padano (a less expensive alternative to Parmeggiano Reggiano)
- Olive oil
- 4 cloves of garlic
- Cracked Pepper

You will need a mortar and a pestle (see the resemblance between pestle & another key word in this recipe?). They can come fairly cheap, and will be mighty handy once you realize how much better things are when crushed with your hand. I don't mean to knock on food processors, they are mad useful, but not everybody owns one. If you look up Martha Stewart's pesto, she surely uses one. But what are you going to mash your pretty little basil leaves with in the cell block Martha? Case. In. Point.

Back to the Pesto:
First chop the parsley and cilantro real fine. Set them aside, separately as you will want to play with quantities later to achieve optimal deliciousness. Chop the garlic too. Grate the cheese as fine as you can.

Then, mix the garlic and pine nuts and mash them together in your M&P. Start incorporating the cheese. Get it as close to a paste as you can. add a bit of oil and keep pounding until you have something that looks almost like chunky peanut butter.


Incorporate about a third of the cilantro and the parsley and a bit more oil. POUND, POUND, POUND. MASH, MASH, MASH. Keep incorporating the ingredients and tasting as you go. Add some ground pepper. I left out some parsley as I wanted to preserve that strong taste of the Cilantro.


This won't keep for 3 months like the commercial stuff, but you'll be lucky not to eat it up the night you make it. Throw it on some pasta, or freeze it in ice cube trays for future use or even put it in a cute-ass little jar and give it to your lady friend's mother for a sure way to get a fully paid wedding. "Isn't he such a nice young man" they'll say...

Big props to my wonderful lady friend on this one for keeping a tab on the perfect quantities and tasting along the way. "And mashing shit up" (Shannon Harvey)

-Dave, stay dedicated my friends