Sour Note: I bought Parmesan from Sante at Pali Naka, Bandra, this time as well as the last time when I made pesto. Both times they gave the wax across two edges when they cut the cheese. That’s about 20 percent of very expensive cheese discarded. All I will say is that this never happened before the management change. Milinda where are you?
Sometime back I wrote about how I had slogged to make a pesto mix. The Pesto challenge at Master Chef Australia and earlier memories of Jamie Oliver making pesto on TV made me slip deeper and deeper into a bed of hubris. It seemed easy and I was ‘The Knife’ after all. Reading comments on the blog can really bloat one’s head. We bought a pestle and a mortar. I ground and I ground. Huffed and Puffed. Sat down. Flexed my muscles and ground and ground again. Forty five minutes later after a near slip disc, cardiac arrest and nervous breakdown I looked down at a few shredded leaves of basil, some battered but not out garlic and flattened cheese.
I had learnt my lesson. This time I took out the food processor. I was back to lazy cooking. So here’s how I made pan seared chicken tossed in pesto.
Pesto mix: Three bunches or a bowl-full of basil leaves, 2 tablespoons of peeled garlic, a tablespoon of pine buts and about 50 g of parmesan and two tablespoons of olive oil into a mixer grinder. A few switches of the button and you will get your pesto.
Recipe:
- Heat some pine nuts in olive oil in a non stick pan
- Then add and fry 500 g of cubed boneless chicken leg pieces. Wait for the chicken to turn from pink to white. Meghna Agro (26413712) at Pali Nakra, Bandra, will give you leg pieces of boneless chicken without batting an eyelid
- Once done, add the pesto mix, slather it over the chicken. Switch off the gas. Finito. About ten to fifteen minutes of cooking time
I served this as a main course along with fusilli in a creamy bacon sauce. You can also serve this as a starter. Or make a sandwich with it as I did for breakfast today.
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| With wisdom came the food processor |
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| The fragrance of fresh pesto wafting through the house is as heady as it gets |
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| Can’t stop gloating about this |
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| Pollo pesto |
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| And its passionate companion, bacon pasta |
This post has both the prawns in pesto and pasta in bacon cream sauce recipes
