My experiments with pesto started when an aunt from Italy came home and started to make her pesto. The first thing she asked my mom was to buy some fresh basil, which 15 years ago was completely unheard of in our islands apart from its dried counterpart. So she decided to create a different kind of pesto, pounding a large bunch of Italian parsley (kinchay) along with some garlic. There were no pine nuts easily available nor did we have Parmesan cheese back then. With piping hot pasta, she tossed her green mashed concoction and called it pesto. It was one of the best things I’ve ever tasted.

For years, I really didn’t give myself a shot in making a batch of pesto like my aunt did. But a really expensive bottle of pesto compelled me to find a cheaper and probably better alternative to the ones bought from the groceries.

My first pesto recipe was simple. It merely had fresh basil (a pack is never more than 30 pesos), garlic (a bulb is around 5 pesos), and olive oil (A bottle is around 100, but this has more use than just a pesto). Pine nuts were still unavailable so I settled for these three ingredients for a good while, mashing them together with my pestle and tossing it to the hot pasta with some salt and parmesan cheese (if I’m lucky to have some). When my mom noticed the hours I slaved away for just a cup’s worth of pesto, she taught me how to use the food processor and it was merely a matter of tossing these three ingredients in the blender then a button for the whizz.

For years this was what my recipe was like. Nothing really fancy about it apart from making the pesto with the freshest ingredients. Occasionally, I’d make batch of pesto base, keep it for one or two weeks and mix in other ingredients to have a change of flavor like tuna, chicken, mushroom, or even cream. The basic pesto base is as versatile as the Italian red sauce. There’s so much that you can mix it with it will have the sweetness of basil and the tartness of garlic. It’s simplicity and ease immediately made pesto as one of my favorite things to cook that whenever friends come over. You can never fail with pesto as long as you have a good pesto base.

The funny thing was when I recently went to Italy and I told my aunts my pesto recipe and they immediately expressed concern on why I was missing the ever important pine nut and why I had to even think about mixing pesto with cream. Having never tasted the difference a pine nut made, my aunts showed me why pine nuts were integral to pesto.

The thing that made pesto stick well to the pasta was not the olive oil but the pine nut. When pounded, the pine nut was like a paste that could absorb the oils and flavor of the basil making it stick to the pasta without putting too much oil in it. The result is a less oily pesto with a nice gritty texture. It was nice and creamier to the mouth.

Oh well, whatever you do with your pesto, I think as long as you have a great base, you can pretty much do whatever you want. Don’t be afraid to stray from the cardinal base. Take that pesto to the next level with your own pesto experiment!

Hey everyone! Happy New Year! I wish you all good food and health for the new year. I mean, we’ve got to live longer to eat the food that we like, right? The new year started with a swamp of things hence I wasn’t really able to devote time to this blog. My bad. I swear, I’ll be more diligent this time. I do have a lot of backlog. I have eaten in wonderful places this year and tried a lot of dishes so I’ll try to put in more content. ^^v

To start things off, I was hoping to give an update on my dear plants! My bokchoy / native pechay is growing wonders. It’s truly amazing. They’ve grown to such a size that I thought you can harvest them, but when I saw my uncle’s pechay, my pechay is still small. So I’ll have to wait ’til then.

What interests me though is my darling parsley, Seymour.

Yes, I’ve named my parsley…. ^^;; I can’t defend my decision on why naming it, more so giving it the name Seymour. It just so happened that one morning, I woke up, watered my plant, and instantaneously called it Seymour. I’m simple minded that way. ^^;;

Seymour was part of my parsley leftovers during Christmas. The trick is not to cut the parsley down to the root. Leave around 2 inches of allowance and then plant the root on healthy soil. The parsley should start growing after a few days. And just smack after a week, you’ll have buds growing, and a little longer, your parsley will flower. I suggest to keep on letting it grow until you have something of a parsley bush in your pot. Mine is still in its early stages so I’ll let it grow for a bit. Seymour would be stage 1 to my intended herb garden. I have parsley and oregano already on the works. I’ll just see if I can try basil again.

On other news… my tomatoes have started to grow! YAY!!

The last few weeks, our family was blessed with a relative who lived in the province. He was waiting for his papers back to Dubai and while he was waiting time in our house, he thought of doing a little gardening in our house. In fact, not just a little gardening but an entire vegetable garden plan.

For the past few months my uncle has been plotting a vegetable garden plan for his own backyard. Now he has mustard greens and bokchoy beaming with life. In our home, our house has failed in maintaining decorative garden plants but we have had our luck in having chili (sili) shrubs and calamansi tree. These were random growths after randomly sprinkling seeds in our garden. We’ve also grown some ampalaya because of this method. My uncle has been advising us to push our vegetable luck by growing a garden. My cousin, having heard the idea decided to help us start our vegetable garden. He has now created patches for mustasa, pechay. We’ve also started our seedlings for our pechay. We’re also plotting for eggplants, tomatoes, some basil, maybe rosemary, onions, tomatoes, and maybe even some coriander.

It’s quite exciting really. I honestly don’t have a green thumb, but it’s a great idea. I’ve been playing this game called Harvest Moon wherein you can get a shot at farming. It’s quite interesting. A little meticulous (the farming isn’t meticulous, but the part wherein I have to chase a girl to wed -_-;;) nonetheless, the farming part is quite interesting. And to take care of your own vegetables, grow it, and then eat it is just amazing! Especially if you put a lot of love into it.

At home, our bokchoy seedlings are starting to grow and it’s quite exciting. I hope we could maintain it. My cousin really did a great job starting it, pray my luck it would grow and we could maintain it! I’ll be posting here my own ‘tales of agriculture’ as we try to grow our vegetable garden. *sigh* In between work, anime watching, manga reading, doll collecting, and model crafting, I hope I can devote my time for my gardening.

On the side, look, I have a Jikan Ga Nai (trans. I have no time!) icon at the side. Yup. Time remains rather elusive.