Eating My Way Across The World: pesto

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Arugula Pesto

I had a whole container of fresh baby arugula leftover from a picnic a long time ago. Arugula is my favorite salad leaf. It has the same texture as baby spinach, with a nice mild bitter flavor that isn't unpleasing like dandelion leaves. The leaves weren't wilted but they were definitely not the freshest, so I thought perhaps I could make pesto, because pesto tends to use up a lot of leaves for a small volume. Pesto is typically made with basil, but I didn't have any at the time. The result is something that looks like pesto but tastes entirely novel, like nothing you've ever tasted before. It was pretty good.

Ingredients:
a ton of old arugula
some parmesean I found in the dairy drawer
pine nuts
olive oil
a drop of sesame oil
walnuts
a bit of green onion
one clove of garlic
salt and pepper (i also added white pepper. that stuff is awesome)

I like to fry the garlic and green onion to bring out the flavor before adding it to anything. All you have to do is blend everything together, and PRESTO, you have pesto!

My First Pizza

Due to an abundance of arugula pesto (see other post), I decided the only way to use a ton of it at one time was to make a pizza with pesto sauce.

I did what I usually do when I make things I've never made before (every time I cook), and looked up ingredients online. Since we don't have any yeast, I had to go with yeast-free dough, making the dough a bit tough. Kneading dough is so much fun! I think I had too much fun and produced too much gluten in the dough to add to the toughness. At one point, I was tossing the dough with one hand and talking to Fish online with the other.

It isn't bad if you bake it so that it's like a crispy thin-crust, which was what I was going for in the first place. Also, I mixed in a bit of dried oregano into the dough. It made for a very fragrant bake.

Toppings:
Sliced Roma Tomatoes