basil-cleaned and ready to be made into pesto

Three basil plants needed trimming to keep them bushy. Here is the recipe and some pictures for making basil pesto.

Elodie’s Basil Pesto

About 6-8 cups packed of fresh, clean basil
good quality olive oil
garlic crushed
Parmesan cheese
shelled pinon nuts-1/2 cup

Clean, wash and cut off stems from basil. Crush garlic and add to blender.

add oil to basil

Put about 1/3 of the basil into a blender and start to pour olive oil into the blender (maybe 1/2 cup or a little more). Start to blend on low and add more basil and/or oil as needed to make the mixture  thick (like thick spaghetti sauce) but still pourable.

add Parmesan cheese to basil

Add Parmesan cheese to taste and a little salt if needed but taste it before adding salt as the cheese has lots of salt in it. You can add pinion nuts if you have them but we didn’t here. Put in plastic freezable ziploc baggies and flatten the baggie as pictured. The mixture should be no more than 1/2 inch thick when bag is flattened. Put in freezer and break off chunks as needed. Don’t heat the pesto or the basil will turn dark (it’s ok to eat but not as pretty).

final pesto

Just break off a chunk from your baggy of pesto and put it on your drained but still hot pasta and it will ‘melt’ into the pasta as you mix it up. This amount made about 2 cups of pesto.