The Website of Kyle Thomas (KyleWith)
Yeah I have an addiction to growing basil, making pesto and eating it.
I made some fresh pesto this evening to go on top of my pasta and then I decided to mix some cream cheese with the pesto to make some amazing creamy sause. Plus I BBQ’d a herb lemon chicken breast.
Often times we don’t have time for making a big meal or rather we don’t have the ambition. That is when I resort this quick snack. It is dead simple and doesn’t take much.
Needed:
I don’t mix the Pesto with the Cream Cheese, but you could. I simply just spread them each individually on slices of the baguette. It taste so good and is good for a quick snack or a party appy.
There are times when even a not-so-good camera photo should be used to capture food. Like this evening; I’m having a chicken, pesto, mozzarella grilled sandwich that shouldn’t be forgotten.
It was perfect.
Don’t have a food processor, well that is alright by me, because I didn’t need one. After finding a recipe online for an Italian Grilled Cheese, which consisted of making your own pesto, I was determined to do just that. Over the week I slowly gathered the ingredients the blog post told me to get.
This is what I got:
Finally I decided I am going to make this pesto and it is going to be good, then I hit the speed bump. Recipe calls for putting all this stuff in the food processor and blending it. That was it, only problem being, I didn’t have a food processor and I didn’t want to go by one. Come to think of it though, there are other things i could use one for, but I digress. I wasn’t going to give up though, I Googled around to see if anyone had written about making pesto without a processor, sure enough I found someone who had. It isn’t overly complicated to figure out how to do, but I wanted to confirm.
What I had to do was chop everything, finely. As finely as I possible could and as I did that mix it as much as I could in a bowl. I rotated through ingredients to make sure the pesto was being mixed properly, or it gave me the reinsurance it was. While mixing in the ingredients I was also adding in parts of the olive oil to moisten up the mix. Finally once all the ingredients were in the small bowl I once again beat the living crap out of it to make sure it was mixed and also crushed up enough.
At this point I proceeded to taste test it. It actually turned out pretty good. I did find though that it was rather garlicy, as well as salty. I would cut back on both of those next time.
I wasn’t done yet though. I smeared the pesto on a slice of bread with thick sliced of mozzarella cheese and baby tomatoes and threw it all in a frying pan to grill. By the way, if you also happen to have a Jamie Oliver fry pan like I do, be warned when you heat them up, they retain heat very well. I nearly burnt one side of my sandwich.
Of course then the only other thing to do is enjoy it… or clean up the mess you made.