Pesto!

The first time I ate pesto I was in college.  A good friend, who'd led a wild childhood that included an informal foster family who took her to Europe (were the hell was MY informal foster family?!), introduced me to it at a dinner party she was hosting.  As I recall, it was one of three or four sauces she made that night representing different regions of Italy.

I think there were six of us girls, each with a hulking boyfriend in tow, and aside from the challenge she faced in making enough pasta to feed that crowd simultaneously, and serving it al dente (a term that was also new to me then), she spent much of the meal explaining, and then reiterating and repeating, that Italians do not smother their noodles in sauce like Americans are wont to do with their Ragu or whatever other Americanized version of spaghetti they were used to eating.

I was more than a little surprised when I saw the tablespoon dollop placed in the center of a mound of angel hair pasta the size of a pomelo (a fruit that I definitely didn't know existed 20+ years ago) and was told to stir it in until it lightly coated all the noodles. I was definitely one of those Americans who'd grown up eating my Mother's delicious and decidedly Americanized spaghetti with meat sauce:  two or three ladles full of sauce to a similar portion of pasta - enough so that you'd have sauce at the end to drag your garlic bread through.

Well, that meal was eye opening for me.  The only other sauce I'd ever had on spaghetti was clam sauce (not a favorite) and while I don't remember the other sauces from that evening, the pesto was incredible (if a little meager in quantity - I blame all those hulking boyfriends).  Bright and fresh with a garlicky bite.  Unlike anything else I'd ever tasted and something I couldn't wait to have again.  Of course, it would have been great to travel to the homeland of pesto, Genoa, but that was not to be.

Fast forward through the next 10 years or so.  I had pesto a few times - mostly in restaurants but occasionally homemade by my then husband, who did all of the cooking during our marriage.  I loved it but the process of making it remained a mystery to me until I was on my own and one summer another good friend and I came across a gross amount of basil at a farmer's market, priced insanely low compared to the grocery store.  It was gorgeous and the air surrounding the stall was perfumed by its scent.  We couldn't walk away without it (that kind of thing happens to me a lot at farmer's markets... and shoe stores... and make-up counters...).

We got home, pulled out the one cookbook I had that I knew contained a recipe for pesto, and got to work.  I don't know how many batches we made that afternoon.  It seemed to go on forever.  The reward?  I had pesto for months - deep into winter when the idea of a huge fresh bunch of basil was nothing more than a fantasy, I could pull a small container of pesto out of my freezer and taste summer at my whimsy.  Since that time I don't think a year has gone by in which I haven't made a huge batch of it, freezing some for later use.

Yesterday I was at Mecca again and they were selling bags of huge, gorgeous, robust basil for $4.89/lb.  Having just recently used the last of last year's pesto, I couldn't walk away without it.  What I just don't understand is how, and why, BB can offer such a deal while my local Safeway only manages to put out stingy little bunches like you see above for $2.49!  Seriously.  The 1.16 lbs of basil that I bought for $5.67 made six recipes of pesto (see below - that's a double recipe).

Of course, the frugality of this sauce was thrown off by the currently astronomical price of pinenuts: $27.99/lb.  I kid you not.  I remember when they were $11.99/lb and I thought that was outrageous.  No matter.  You don't really need that much.  If you're not making your own pesto at home, you're missing out on a treat - the taste of summer.  And when you make it in quantities like this, you can put as much as you want on your pasta.