Pesto Brainstorming

We brainstormed a number of uses for pesto and thought to share the list here. Some are obvious but some were nicely creative. I mean how can you go wrong with basil, parmesan, garlic, pine nuts and olive oil!

Have you any unusual uses for pesto? --Joy

Spread on hot corn-on-cob

stir into hot creamettes noodles with some cream cheese. Cream cheese melts as does parmesan in pesto and makes like a sauce or lovely coating.

stir into quiche lorraine before baking

wisk into homemade oil and vinegar salad dressings

top a baked potato, with or without sour cream

stir into eggs before scrambling

add to egg yolk mixture when making deviled eggs

spread on bread with mayo in a roast beef-and-tomato sammich

stir into hot linguine with a few teaspoons of half and half. Makes a nice little creamy alfredo-y coating that inspires the addition of all sorts of other ingredients.

spread on grilled, poached or baked salmon

Take a mixture of 3-4 parts pesto to one part ketchup and use it on french fries.

Put some pesto underneath the skin of chicken breasts before roasting.

Spread on flank steak as it's resting after cooking.

I really like fresh pesto stuffed into cherry tomatoes. You can pop them in your mouth and they are delicious. Don't bother to cook them or anything, just core the tomatoes and fill them with the pesto. mmm.

This is not non-obvious, but my highest and best use of pesto is on a non-mozzarella pizza--or should I call it a focaccia with grated cheese? (Antonious, help!) Pesto, fresh tomatoes, parmesan and romano cheeses.

It also brings vegetable soup to a new level.

Add to minestrone soup.

Mix into turkey burger meat.

Add to scrambled eggs.

Mixed with a goat cheese, spoon a teaspoon or two into puff pastry squares (about 1 1/2"), fold into triangles, seal with water or egg, brush with egg wash, bake until golden for pesto-goat cheese appetizers.

Add to chicken salad.

A tablespoon of pesto on a hot bowl of pasta with fresh tomato sauce (a few nuggets of butter spread around the sides and a sprinkling of parmesan) is paradiso.

A friend and I made pesto yesterday. I brought basil from my yard, pine nuts (a big big bag was $8 at Sam's Club) and garlic. She supplied her famous extra virgin olive oil and some very good cheeses: a pecorino romano and a lovely sharp parmesan. We found recipes in some Italian language cookbooks. (Antonius, ti piacerebbe questi libri!)

Basil trying to hide in plain sight in the middle of the container garden.



A real inspiration. The best crop ever. Must be the MiracleGro.



Basil next to some hardneck garlic from Jerry's.



Toasting the pinenuts. The tomato is the first of the season from my friend's garden.



The finished pesto, creamy and wonderfully green in a sunbeam.



Lunch: Pesto with egg noodles as per the Genoese recipe. Tomato with some sea salt. Homemade lemonade. Gosh was it all good!

Joy,
I'm looking forward to seeing the pictures but they're not coming through right now (at least for me).
A

Antonius (and perhaps others),
If you right click one of the graphics place markers, then click "View image," odds are it will open in other screen. Not quite the same thing as being there, but at least you'll see the pics.

Spread some of my sister's pesto atop a plain breaded chicken
breast today,(after crisping it up in my trusty toaster oven
first)- wow, delicious ! I'm now in the mood to make a few
batches of pesto myself, but not so lucky to have it growing in my
yard- can anyone recommend an ethnic grocery/produce mart
where I can pick up a large amount of fresh basil at a decent
price? Anything on Argyle St.? Thanks

I hope the pics are fixed.

When you upload images to blogger you can only use them on blogger pages, you can't embed them in any other sites.

Flickr, Imageshack, etc should all not have this limitation..

Thanks very much for this info, gleam! I think maybe that did the trick.
--Joy

Pesto looks good. For even more of a Genovese experience, pick up a bag of trofie at Bari, where they always have it on hand in my recent experience, use a sparing amount of pesto and toss the pasta with just-barely-done fresh green beans and new potatoes. Everything is in the markets right now.

JeffB,
Do you know at which markets/groceries I can get lots of basil reasonably? Thanks.

The farmers markets, of which the most convenient for me are in the Loop. Any of the groceries on or around Arglye will always have several varieties of good, cheap basil. This time of year, Bari has plenty also.

Poached egg on toast spread w/pesto (sometimes mixed w/finely chopped prosciutto) ... breakfast of the gods

At the Daley Plaza farmer's market today (Nichols farm and La Briola) I bought Genovese basil, fingerling potatoes, tiny green beans, a nice loaf of focaccia and zucchini blossoms to go with the trofie and other ingredients sitting at home. Liguria here I come. Thanks for the inspiration.

PS, a business lunch at Rivers, of all places, yielded a really very good dish of pan seared grouper (not the New Zealand mini-grouper) sitting on a bed of vegetables -- baby spinach, tiny green beans, fingerlings, dime-sized fresh shitakes -- that I think clearly came from the same place or similar. Here's a situation where the kitchen rises to a challenge. The other more pedestrian stuff at the table looked at best ok.

http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=41428#41428

Joy,

Thanks for the handsome pics and post. The traditional combination JeffB mentioned is something worth trying if you haven't yet had it, especially now when delicate green beans and potatoes and basil are available. What I especially love about it is the contrast of textures. But just plain noodles or some other pasta with freshly made pesto is a real treat.

*

JeffB,

Bon pro!

Antonius

I take little Boboli's, brush both sides with olive oil and then I put on pesto, diced sun-dried tomatoes, chopped artichokes, a little more chopped up basil and fresh bocconcini (sp), a grate of fresh parmesan and grill them until the cheese melts. MMMMMMM good!

Put it in potato salad

On leftover grilled pork + parmesan


BTW, I frequently use toasted salted sunflower seeds instead of pine nuts; makes for a nice change.

Geo

The strangest use of pesto was suggested by the friend the I made that batch with. She says her husband liked it on plain oatmeal for breakfast! I can't quite get my head around that.

Antonius, thanks for reminding me of that great post of yours and the thread. And I think I meant to say "Ti piacerebbero questi libri." The conditional + piacere = I am out of my league!

--Joy

baroness of beef wrote:JeffB,
Do you know at which markets/groceries I can get lots of basil reasonably? Thanks.

stanley's produce, the corner of elston and north, usually has big bags of basil that you can take from. i believe it costs $6/pound. it's in the refrigerator on the south side of the building. btw, i gave up using expensive pine nuts years ago. walnuts (toasted if you have time) work just fine. i freeze pesto without the cheese and add parmesan when i thaw it. just joan

I tried a recipe from Marcia Adams' "Cooking from Quilt Country" that used pesto in dinner rolls, and it was really good. The recipe is just a sweet yeast bread, which you roll out (after rising once), spread with either butter or pesto, slice into rolls, then let rise again. The pesto rolls were toasty and had a great pesto flavor.

I made this recipe from Uncommon Ground
[url=http://www.wttw.com/main.taf?erube_fh=wttw&wttw.submit.CPRecipieDetail=1&wttw.RecipieID=169]Baked Artichoke, Goat Cheese & Pesto Dip

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I cut it in half, but it was a great "clean out the fridge" dip with frozen artichoke hearts from TJ's and Costco pesto.

Joy wrote:The strangest use of pesto was suggested by the friend the I made that batch with. She says her husband liked it on plain oatmeal for breakfast! I can't quite get my head around that.

I agree that from one perspective that sounds very strange indeed but from another perspective much less so. In my family, in addition to corn meal mush -- 'polenta' -- we ate other kinds of mush with condiments that one also uses on pasta, esp. farina and cooked semolina (and also bread mush). These are all forms of polenta in the broader sense, which is to my mind just cereal grain mush. So, if you think of it as 'oatmeal polenta', it sounds less odd.

At some point, I tried to get more oatmeal in my diet and tried various combinations with savoury condiments (I'm not keen on sweet meals, including in the morning). All'aglio e olio e peperoncino is the one I remember best and it was pretty good, but all in all, oatmeal didn't stay in the regimen...

Antonius, thanks for reminding me of that great post of yours and the thread. And I think I meant to say "Ti piacerebbero questi libri." The conditional + piacere = I am out of my league!

A small mistake, self-corrected. Your Italian is great... And Italian is certainly one of the admissable languages on LTH, vero?

Antonius

P.S. I love the visual contrast of the noodles with pesto and the simple tomato salad you all had with it. Very appealing to the eye (as well as to the pancia!)

Baked Artichoke, Goat Cheese & Pesto Dip

kafein, did you notice there was NO GARLIC in this pesto recipe? i dont think its pesto without garlic! justjoan

We just made a nice batch of pesto, the first in several years, using basil from our CSA box from East Slope Farm. We were trying to remember all the uses for pesto from this thread and I thought to bump this post up since we seem to be in the height of pesto season.

Anyone have any new ideas?

We used walnuts because the pine nuts that were supposed to be in one of the freezers are hiding from me -- or they escaped. I had a bag of Georgia pecans from the Legendary Peach Truck but I thought they might be too sweet for pesto. What do you think?

I don't know that I'd characterize pecans as sweeter. Perhaps less bitter and astringent.
With the price of pecans, though, I don't think I'd use them for pesto.
However... a sage, cheddar and pecan pesto could be great on grits -- just don't call it polenta.

Hi- I make lots of pesto every fall and freeze it. I have not used pine nuts in at least four years. The cheapest pine nuts you can get are $20 a pound, and at that price all you get are pine nuts from China. I pass on those. I just use walnuts now. You can get those for $8 a pound or less. Hope this helps, Nancy